A federal facility in Denver sought something to put on their newly landscaped lot to welcome people as they approached their building. I was brought into this project by the artist Ivan Depena early in the design process, after a few concept iterations have already been explored.

   Going off a rough sketch of how each “Tree” structure would look, I developed a parametric algorithm that can quickly generate endless randomized structures adhering to established rule-sets. We were going through different iterations when, by accident, I set all the angles to 0 degrees, and everything became orthogonal. This was easily reversible, of course, but we liked the result of this accident, and decided to go with it.

   We spent the next few months picking out “Trees” that we liked and tweaking them, making sure the heights, rotation, placement, and colors were just right from various view angles. I modeled everything on the computer, making renderings, plans, details, helping select colors, and updating them whenever a change was made. We even made full scale drawings to stand next to, and held up colored glass samples against many types of lighting conditions, to make sure it’ll look “right”.

   The contractor placed every single one of the sculptures in the wrong location. We scrambled to get the most important ones re-located, but the concrete piles had already been poured. In the end, we only managed to re-locate one of the sculptures. Despite this, the project still conveyed the feelings we intended, and is considered a success.