The structure teeters over fields of knee-high grass, looking like a cross between a camping tent and a giant wedding cake. Eleven stories of dark red wooden rooms, diminishing in size as they ascend, balance atop one another, seemingly held together by only the thicket of cords that stretches from the peak to the ground.

Inside feels no less precarious. The ceilings are propped up with repurposed utility poles. Power strips and wires dangle from low-hanging beams. Giant buckets of rainwater help support the weight of the structure. The homemade ladders that connect the floors perch at steep angles, often without handrails at the side.

Chen Tianming — the tower’s 43-year-old designer, builder and resident — does not need them anyway. He climbed lightly up the ladders, past the fifth-floor reading nook and the sixth-floor open-air tearoom.

From the ninth floor, he surveyed the sturdy, standardized apartment buildings in the distance where his neighbors live.

“They say the house is shabby, that it could be blown down by wind at any time,” he said — an observation that did not seem altogether far-fetched when I visited him last month.