Modernistic Tree
Mondrian would have appreciated square trees. Furthermore, they would enable wood industry to lose less material, to cut easier with machines and to store more efficiently. Hence square trees would be more sustainable than round trees.
Created by Draw me a sheep. See also: Modernistic Watermelon, Cubic Fruit, Modernistic Vaginas, Human DNA trees, Phone Trees, Cellphone Treemasts, Harddisk Tree, Windmill trees.
Very good example of next nature, this ‘Quercus Kubus’. In case you wonder about its acorns… they are triangular.
Looks like a delicious wooden snickers bar. Are these photoshopped, or real like the watermelons?
Duncan wrote:
I thought of you guys when I saw this:
http://weblog.bezembinder.nl/1201-1215/vincent-kohler-1.jpg
I couldn’t see a contact email so sorry for posting this here.
Ya know… I’d thought of this during a genetics course at my university, inspired by the square stems of the mint family. Could you splice genes???? Anyway, I was talking about it to a friend that was an engineer and he popped my bubble…… He immediately stated that the trees would catch the wind and snap off due to shear forces. Round is stronger and allows the wind to go around….. bummer. Mother nature knows best eh?
Oh yeah… and the minty-fresh smell !
they have standards on how to cut logs to maximize usable material… so basically this wouldn’t improve anything. if you study lumber in school or on your own you’ll learn that they way logs are cut in a circle is actually beneficial because depending on where the board came from in the log it warps differently and you use their different warps for different projects. the warp counteracts the pressure induced by nailing it down. so if it wasn’t initially warped that certain way which would happen if you cut lumber into a grid, then your floor would be warped when you lay it down.
Anyway. most of the scrap pieces of wood are used to make different kinds of composite wood (mostly plywood) these woods are stronger than natural wood!
Veneers are made using a shaver and rotating a log around its axis. you would have to remove the edges before you could get an even veneer from a square tree.
Basically this is cool looking and an interesting concept… but an unfeasible and detrimental idea.
The only possible use for square logs would be for solid beam construction which is used for open interior columns. The edges are sanded and polished which makes them resist fire better than even steel!! However, no one really works this way any more except maybe Iwao Nakijima (sp?). oh and even this is not that practical because imperfections in the wood would waste material near the edge of the section and ruin the plane to use it… thats why they cut into the circle to hone in on the piece that is perfect and surround the core with a little room for exterior damage etc.
lastly how would the tree grow branches that it needs to survive???