Yellow Pages® treehouse sculpture

 

Case study .

How do you figure out the structural capacity of a living Redwood pine tree?

The Yellow Pages® marketing team were left with this dilemma during their “Treehouse” marketing campaign. Their fingers did some walking and ended up at the number for Holmes Solutions.

We get plenty of left-field calls for help, but this one still makes our Top 10.

The Yellow Pages® marketing team wanted to put a corporate events centre in a Redwood pine tree. They had the design – a striking pod-shaped treehouse. They had the tree – 40m tall and a 1.6m wide trunk. Now they needed to know if the tree was strong enough and safe to occupy. After a bit of head scratching, our team came up with a clever way to test the tree’s ability to support the load, and not fall down in a gale. They went to site and put the tree through its paces, pulling and tugging it sideways in a variety of ways. Mother Nature proved up to the task and the tree passed the tests with flying colours.

Although only ever planned as a temporary structure, people heading north of Auckland, New Zealand can still catch a glimpse of the treehouse as they approach the town of Warkworth.

For more information, have a look at Yellow Treehouse video.

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