Arthur Wiechula

Who was Arthur Wiechula?

Arthur Wiechula was a German landscape engineer. His marriage to Lydia Lindnau, produced three children, Margarethe, Max and Ernst.

He received the German Royal State Inventor's Honor Cross. In 1926, he published Wachsende Häuser aus lebenden Bäumen entstehend in German, describing simple building techniques involving guided grafting together of live branches; including a system of v-shaped lateral cuts used to bend and curve individual trunks and branches in the direction of a design, with reaction wood soon closing the wounds to hold the curve.

He envisioned growing trees so that it constituted walls during growth, thereby enabling the use of young trees for building. He never built a living home, but he grew a 394-foot wall of Canadian poplars to help keep the snow off of a section of train tracks. His illustrated ideas have inspired many other artists to attempt to grow living homes out of trees.