Tree Castles Complex – Austin Bunton Designs

One of the first things newcomers see when they look right after entering our city’s perimeter wall and reaching its welcoming square… are three gigantic stone cylinders off in the low rolling hills of the meadows miles out there.

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Table of Contents:

Introduction
Airborne Rivers
Novels Excerpt
Location (Images Begin)
Layout & Capacity
Structural Concepts
Interior Concepts
WoW Concepts
Additional Inspiration
2023 Update: 2022 Scale-model in Minecraft

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Introduction:

You’ve heard of tree-houses. Well, we have tree-castles. Most trees of Earth are far too delicate to support the weight of anything large enough to be called a castle, so we did the next best thing, since we don’t have any World Tree like the Night Elves did; we built some of our castles in the shape of trees somewhere between the size of the World Tree and the standard trees you are more familiar with.

Not to be confused with the Luxury Tree Houses, or the luxurious constructs built into the biomechanically-grown Baobab Pass tree, the three main Tree Castles of Inisfree are named for their distinctive turret appendages which protrude from largest to smallest like a tree from trunk to branches.

Inspired in part by Ko-ro-ba, city of cylinders, rebuilt on the planet named Gor, this ‘hood of Inisfree is similar in form and layout to the White Pail Towers Complex utilized by the Inisfreean military, though those upside-down-pail-shaped buildings are much smaller than these which are between 1/6 and 1/4 of a mile in diameter at their bases, and these much larger buildings have other pail-shaped protrusions from them at all levels and angles.

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Airborne Rivers:

Bodies of water between the size of a stream and a river float through the air along fixed, linear routes in the middles of the hollow, pail-shaped modules which make up the whole of this bunch of constructs collectively called ‘the Tree Castles’. The water is suspended and manipulated in this way by the Inisfreean technologies, and used as a further demonstration of both their technological prowess and their focus on the unprecedented aesthetic.

Each one has a stationary ‘hover stream’ through its hollow interior.

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Novels Excerpt:

Back up on a highway section just above ground level with the surrounding terrain, the city’s perimeter wall was a quarter-mile off to their left, and now three quarter-mile-wide cylindrical buildings in a group half a mile off to their right. The hologram zoomed in from the city map to that area, showing some details about the cluster of structures, and their Inisfreean co-driver recited their description from the webpage about them on their city’s private Internet. They were now passing the Tree-castles Area, which they’d have time to enter and explore on foot in the days ahead.

The three towers looked like the form made when wet sand is packed into a pail and then set in place upside-down. Each of the three was more than a thousand feet wide at the base, however, and more than 130 stories tall. Smaller cylindrical-prism-like ‘wings’ were connected high up, extending out at branch-like angles from their curving outside walls. They looked to be the same color of medieval stone castles, but were clearly of another of the stronger modern materials their city had been made possible by.

Many groups of people, visible as dots from their convoy’s distance on the adjacent highway, could be seen mingling near the base of each of the three massive tree-like buildings. Some seemed to be hovering in mid-air, others actually flying, and they didn’t seem to have any jet-packs or other technology assisting them. The co-driver explained through the limo’s interior window that the people over there included members of races other than humanity; some were Angels, some Kryptonians, and several others now calling Inisfree their home-away-from-home.

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Location:

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Layout & Capacity:

This image shows how there is a thick outer wall which is divided into house-sized dwellings on all levels, then a vast hollow core going nearly all the way to the top, and two or three mansion-sized ‘arms’ extending out like the branches of a petrified/stone-based tree. Together, these three mega-structures can house ~100,000 of Inisfree’s residents, and up to ~1,000,000 during gatherings (when most are just standing or otherwise mingling, not attempting to move in all their things). If you add tents and other livable spaces to the grassy ground-level exterior, peppering this whole area, you can increase that by another million or so.

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Structural Concepts:

Imagine these turrets arranged like tree branches extending diagonally up and out of the three very-wide central structures of this complex. This makes them like a cluster of nuraghes, rather than the standalone ones common across Italy.

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Interior Concepts: