With funding secured, Griffin Collier, a Yale University architecture major, is set to build a treehouse sanctuary in the middle of the woods in Eastford, Conn. After a year and a half of planning and finagling his blueprints through bureaucratic hoops—"I've never seen a treehouse so thoroughly interrogated," says one of his advisors—the team, headed by Collier, has just torpedoed past its $5,000 Kickstarter goal, meaning come summer, Yale may have it's very own canopy-bound observatory/super-fly clubhouse. The snag: the forest is about 70 miles from the New Haven campus, so access may be functionally limited to forestry students and the scant few who have cars. Still, Collier's project—one that operates on the premise that seeing the forest for the sake of absolutely nothing is a mission worth pursuing—is pleasantly idyllic, not mention a building worth adding to the list of spaces for the modern-day Thoreau. Collier's treehouse, a collection of 80-foot-by-80-foot prefab squares, has potential to catapult his career—and, well, studying at Yale sure doesn't hurt, either. So what's next on the docket for him? How about a treehouse that's totally outrageous, something to rival the world's retreats? Oh! Or a sprawling treehouse community?

· The Treehouse at Yale [Kickstarter via Notcot]

· All Treehouse coverage [Curbed National]