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 about the BIOPHILIA TREEHOUSE by visiting the project website
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.