Even if you haven’t visited them yourself, you’ve probably heard of the famous jing kieng jri or living-root bridges of Meghalaya. Standing for centuries, they’ve been sculpted bit by bit by the Khasi and Jaintia tribes using just the aerial tree roots of the giant, hardy Indian Rubber Fig tree. Over decades, the roots of a single tree are intertwined and woven into tight knots to cultivate each bridge, which gets stronger as the roots grow to cover larger areas.
Some bridges can span 250 feet, but most are smaller, used by locals to cross streams. Over the last few decades, as peace in the North-Eastern states has boosted tourism, they’ve been attracting tourists, becoming a symbol for the state around the world. More recently, they’ve also become a source for researchers and architects across the globe to learn more about structures that can be climate change resilient and sustainable.
Ferdinand Ludwig, professor for green technologies in landscape architecture at the Technical University of Munich is also the founder of a research group called Baubotanik. The team has been studying novel design tools and approaches for involving plants in urban construction in Germany. They’ve examined more than 70 bridges, ladders, pathways and other living architecture around Meghalaya since 2017 and have been publishing their findings in the journal Scientific Reports. The most recent study was shared in January.
“What is so impressive about the living root bridges is that we can speak about the co-evolution of humans and trees,” says Ludwig. “Without the bridges, some villages in Meghalaya would not be accessible in the rainy seasons. At the same time the bridges are also important elements that connect the populations of different species.”
Conceptual aspects of the root-bridge-building approach were also applied in the making of the Baubotanik Kitchen, a roof for a summer kitchen designed using a pavilion of trees in southern Germany in February 2021, led by two members of Ludwig’s team, Wilfrid Middleton and Qiguan Shu. “From the bridges we learnt to use photo surveys to make 3D digital models, which were the basis for the kitchen’s design,” says Wilfrid Middleton, the main researcher in Ludwig’s team. They added a space-truss roof, a skeletal framework, so the branches of the trees can grow through and reinforce it over the years.
In the winter semester of 2021, students from Ludwig’s department also designed a pavilion for a city park in Shillong, Meghalaya. Ludwig is now working on a research project called Tree Facades, in which they integrate living tree structures into the architecture of a social housing project in Bavaria. In two other projects the living tree structures will be used to try to improve the microclimate in public areas.
While Meghalaya’s bridges are inspirational, researchers say that replicating them in modern cities won’t work. Cities have different climate conditions, use requirements, and scales. But the core idea of tree manipulation (knotting branches or roots and guiding their growth) can help create multi-functional living architectures in cities. “Ficus trees grow well in the Khasi Hills, and each bridge’s form is dictated by the river it crosses and the people that build it. In Hong Kong, ficus trees grow on vertical walls and cool the streets below. This is perfect for Hong Kong’s extremely dense and hilly landscape,” says Middleton.
And cities tend to need quick solutions. Meghalaya’s root bridges take decades and are worked on by generations of locals. Often, the results are not seen by the people who first planted the tree. So the need for future communities to take the practice forward is fundamental to their design. This why 26-year-old Morningstar Khongthaw, a native from Meghalaya’s Rangthylliang village, established the Living Bridge Foundation in 2016, to preserve, protect, and create new living root bridges in his state. “These bridges were ingeniously built by my ancestors to stay connected to the rest of the world,” Khongthaw says. “Tourists damage them with their hard-soled trekking shoes as they climb the bridges for selfies; some even try to knot dry roots together during winter, resulting in breakage. I realised I needed to spread more awareness about preserving this unique living architecture.” He is also compiling a book on repairing and maintaining living root bridges, with inputs from village elders. Much of Khasi culture has been passed down as oral histories because their language didn’t have a script until the 19th century.
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