Dreaming of a Treehouse: Frei Otto’s Ecological Housing Project in Berlin 2011
Distributed by Icarus Films, 32 Court St., 21st Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201; 800-876-1710
Produced by Gerald Lindner and Beate Lendt
Directed by Beate Lendt
DVD, color, 85 min., German with English subtitles
Sr. High - General Adult
Architecture
Date Entered: 03/27/2013
Reviewed by Melanie Clark, Texas Tech UniversityThe Ökohaus, or Eco-housing, is a community housing project that architect Frei Otto planned in the 1980s for the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Berlin. Dreaming of a Treehouse looks at the conception, design process, and collaboration that went into this little known project. The purpose of the project was to create affordable housing, while combining building and nature in an optimal way.
Otto achieved this by planning a reinforced concrete infrastructure for the three buildings, while several architects, as well as the owners themselves, created their own designs for the eighteen individual units. This individual input gave the houses a “patchwork” quality within the supporting frame, allowing for a unified but diverse community. The houses were integrated with the site’s existing trees and other plants.
Almost the entirety of Dreaming of a Treehouse is a collection of interviews with the architects, including Otto, and the residents. We see models of the dwellings and gain a sense of the collaborative energy that went into their development, as well as footage of what the community is like today. The perspectives of all the interviewees give a full picture of the planning process, but it makes for a slow moving film which, because of the sometimes abstruse English subtitles, requires the viewer’s careful attention. Nevertheless, Dreaming of a Treehouse illuminates a fascinating project and successful example of environmentally sustainable architecture that should be more known worldwide.