There's a Lapham's Quarterly piece tracing the tree house back through history — not as a kid's toy but as a recurring human dream of going up and away. People have been building platforms in trees for shelter, ritual, refuge, and play for thousands of years, long before suburban dads with cordless drills got involved.
What I like about the essay is how it reframes the tree house as a small act of architecture against the ground floor of normal life. Up in the branches you escape parents, landlords, surveillance, the rules of the house. The kid hammering plywood into an oak is doing the same thing a hermit on a platform did centuries ago.
It also made me think about how little of our adult software lets us build like this anymore. Everything is a SaaS rental with someone else's rules. A tree house is the opposite — janky, personal, a little dangerous, and entirely yours. That's the appeal.
If you have a weekend and a tree, build the dumb thing. The instinct is older than you think.
