Mitchell Joachim Will Save the World With Treehouses and Meathouses

Mitchell Joachim is an architect, but his tools are anything but bricks and mortar. Joachim’s mission is to develop methods of building homes and other structures that are not just environmentally friendly, but literally part of the environment. In his TED talk, which you can watch at the bottom of this post, he outlines two different kinds of homes which his research organization Terreform are currently working on. First comes treehouses, but not the kind you had in your backyard. This kind:

These homes aren’t just in trees, they are trees. The bioengineers at Terreform are grafting vegetation in a way such that they are actually training the plants to form scaffolding, and thus, form structures. And as Joachim points out, these are great for the environments, as they suck up carbon and provide us with much needed oxygen.

But there’s another, yet stranger kind of home that the people at Terreform are working on: meathouses. But don’t worry, they’re all about growing homes instead of building them, so this isn’t the work of some well-intentioned yet misguided slaughterhouse. This meat is actually grown from pig fat cells without any animals being harmed in the process. Here is an image of just what a segment of a meathouse might look like:

Kind of gross, but resourceful and technically edible, though I don’t know that I’d recommend it. Below is an artist’s rendition of what a full-scale meathouse could look like if it were standing alone in the desert at sunset:

But no description of the potential of this science or the actual scientific process will be a good as the one Joachim delivers himself. So take the time to watch this short, 3-minute clip of him at TED, complete with some of the pictures you’ve seen above along with more details regarding the science, the reasons, and the progress that’s been made.

(Via Inhabitat)