Architects Ifat Finkelman and Deborah Warschawski have built a slatted wooden construction all around an old pine tree to update a courtyard room at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (+ slideshow).
Situated at the entrance of the Israel Museum’s Youth Wing for Artwork Education, the IMJ Tree House provides a gathering point for both adult and children site visitors.
“As a tribute to the childhood collective memory of a treehouse, we positioned a small roofed construction where kids can hide and overlook at higher up a tilted trunk raised above the meticulous surroundings of the museum,” said the architects.
The treehouse is produced up of two-centimetre-thick hardwood boards fixed onto a steel skeleton – contrasting with its concrete and stone architectural surroundings.
Relevant story: Assemble’s Brutalist Playground is a climbable landscape of ice-cream-coloured shapes
A decked platform produces a seating region around the outdoors of the playground before ramping up to offer access to the treehouse. Young children can also enter and exit the structure by means of a metal pole with foot pegs.
A hole in the treehouse floor accommodates the pine trunk, and provides another surface to clamber up.
An undulating ground topography surrounds the building. It is covered with a soft EPDM rubber surface – the exact same materials employed by Simon Conder Associates to cover a beach house on the English coast.
“The rubber surface hides the underground infrastructure configuration, as nicely as a widespread root program from the pine tree,” said the architects.
At night, the treehouse is the only spot of the playground to be illuminated.
Other unusual treehouse designs includes a pair of woodland hideaways inspired by snakes, and a stilted holiday property overlooking the Sri Lankan jungle.
Photography is by Amit Geron.
Idea diagram one particular – click for more substantial picture 
Concept diagram two – click for more substantial image
