Deploying FloaTree: computational design-to-construction workflow of a low-tech tensegrity system

Abstract

Large old trees provide essential habitats for birds and many other species, yet they are rapidly disappearing from many landscapes. While artificial habitat structures have been trialled, their design rarely captures the morphological complexity of natural habitats. This limitation stems from both challenges in extracting relevant features from natural forms and the difficulty of developing cost-effective systems that can be reproduced at scale. This paper addresses this gap by presenting FloaTree, an experimental example of a human–machine design workflow to generate, optimise, and construct tensegrity structures derived from AI-generated visual abstractions of large trees. We developed a ..