Transparent trees

Since the third-semester successfully ended, I now got some extra time to try fiddling with various stuff. One of them is transparent trees.

Foliage on the architectural plans, elevations and renderings is important. On the other hand, it should only reflect the reality of the site. Recently, I have seen so many renderings of skyscrapers, which were covered in greenery. Looks wonderful and ambitious, however, everyone who knows few things about greenery should know that it is not easy to maintain such lush vertical gardens. And when the keys are handed, sadly, it never looks like the initial renderings.

Therefore, trees should be visible only when they are really on site, or planned to be planted. In that case, it is crucial to have them. All the drawings should have the complete context of the site. The relationship between the site and the building is one of the cores of architecture.

At the same time, we do not want the trees to steal the attention from the building. Trees and building should complement each other. Because of that, trees are often stylized. I went through my library and studied how different architecture offices depict trees and I have found many different examples and tried to replicate them or come up with my own.

Some of them were made purely digitally, some of them started as sketches by hand and were digitalized in later stages.

First one is a little sketchy tree. Might be an aspen, judged by the shape.

Then we have an oak here. Older and majestic.

This one is my favourite. You cannot really guess what this tree might represent, that is fine. We do not want our tree to steal the show. Subtle colours and vague shape without an outline is, in my opinion, a great way to represent trees on a drawing.

I miss the mountains. Here in Denmark, the highest one is around 170 meters above sea level. That is no real mountain, more like a small hill. But maybe one day I will have the opportunity to design a building in a mountain landscape.  And I will be prepared for that because now I have my mountain background for elevations.

This one is too brilliant. Really nice. But it would catch too much attention. The solution here would be to make it subtle grey instead of black.

Or make our mountain range very abstract. Just the silhouette is enough to convey the message.

And I am making more of these and you can soon download them if you like. I just need to find a way how to put them all on the website.

Cheers