COUNTERFORCE LAB’S BIOPHILIA TREEHOUSE
2019 - 2022, public art, community-based design project
Photo credit: Counterforce Lab
In my role as Associate Director of UCLA’s Counterforce Lab, I acted as co-Lead on the ongoing Biophilia Treehouse project from 2020-22. The above photograph shows the Biophilia Treehouse prototype, where it is installed at the site of Counterforce’s partners, the Sisters of Social Service, in Encino, CA.
Learn more at counterforcelab.org/biophilia-treehouse.
From the website:
Counterforce Lab’s Biophilia Treehouse is a public arts initiative to create and grow a series of living sculptures using native trees and plants that together constitute a complete ecosystem for some of L.A.’s most threatened birds. When built in sequence, a series of Biophilia Treehouses form a wildlife corridor for these birds that reconnect fractured habitat, especially in dense urban parts of our city where environmental inequities abound.
In collaboration with our community partners, we co-create artistic insignia onto the structure that tells the story of the community’s relationship to the land. The ground floor of each Biophilia Treehouse sculpture is used by our education-based community partners as an outdoor classroom for arts + science instruction to primary school students. The Biophilia Treehouse is about the co-creation of art and storytelling with communities, arts and science education, biodiversity and the reconnection of bird habitats, and responding to inequities in access to park space.