I. M. Pei’s clunky glass pyramidal entrance to the Louvre Museum (his Pyramide du Louvre (1989), gives a bad name to glass pyramids everywhere. Its scale is wrong, and its siting deplorable. How irritating that his Pei pyramid thrusts upwards—a passage of architectural duplicity—just while the thronging crowds trying to enter the venerable museum spiral downward, perforce, into the chthonic, mall-like depths of the institution’s banalized underside).
A tree is a wondrous thing, an aged tree more wondrous still. A house is a splendid artefact (not Le Corbusier’s “machine for living”), a fundamental, ur-house, its proportions right, its scale echoing your body, its light breathing with you—“Adam’s Hut in Paradise.”
A treehouse is a splendid, wondrous thing, a dwelling, lodged and solid in a tree, its views the vistas of the superego, all passion spent. If the treehouse is made of glass, so much the better, so much more fervid its spell. If the glass treehouse, furthermore, is a pyramid, then that stabilizing shape, having now finally attained an honourable arborial locus in this thin, pretentious, crowd-crabbed world, then the result will inevitably be (bless these happy contingencies) a poem.
