Rarely is high design an experimental attempt at anonymity. The boastful form, an often lofty dismissal of convention, seeks to teach by stepping above or outside boundaries, suggesting progress is solely a movement toward the future. What, then, if one revisits the past? Treehotel, a collection of modern structures in the unvisited woods of northern Sweden, posed the question when architectural firm Tham & Videgård Arkitekter unveiled its design several years ago: a mirrored glass cube suspended from a tree outside the village of Harads, sixty kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. To stumble upon the cube in its boreal surroundings is to experience Philip Johnson’s Glass House turned inside-out: eye-to-eye with yourself in the expanse, you are suddenly aware of solidarity in an environment not your own. But cross the connected rope bridge, hands clasped on a railing ten feet in the air, and you’re made an invisible viewer of that same stretch. The structure, celebrated and praised, is the product of that never-ending dialectic between industrialists and environmentalists, out of which we have finally learned that man’s expansion can be a collaborative process.
