How Not to Be Seen

Another couple of windy nights and the leaves will be gone.

With them goes a surprising amount of the visual mitigation on a surprising number of schemes. The planting that sits comfortably between a building and the houses opposite in July is a row of sticks in December. Same trees, same distance, completely different proposition.

Which seems a good moment to say something out loud about how we ask large buildings to behave.

The Odd Bit

An elevation gets an enormous amount of attention. Materials are chosen and rejected… and chosen again. The cladding module is resolved. Somebody spends a genuinely long time on the relationship between the panel joints and the window heads. They are right to. That is the job.

And then a bund goes in front of it, with a belt of trees on top.

On plenty of schemes the landscape ends up doing more work than the elevation ever will. The building is designed to be looked at, and then designed not to be seen, often by the same team in the same month.

Put like that it sounds faintly absurd.

Except It Isn't

In a sensitive setting, invisibility is the brief. Nobody wants a distribution shed announcing itself across a valley, and a screening strategy that genuinely works is an achievement in its own right, not a failure of nerve.

The system rewards it, too. Mitigation is the language planning understands. If a scheme can demonstrate that it settles quietly into a view, that is often the difference between consent and a committee.

So this isn't a complaint about architects, or about planners, or about the people writing landscape strategies. It's an observation about what we have collectively decided large buildings should do, which is to be good, and then to be quiet about it.

Nobody Expects the Houses to Hide

The uneven bit is what gets me.

A large shed is expected to vanish into its setting: bunds, belts, long views carefully stopped up, a landscape strategy running to dozens of pages. Meanwhile, a few miles down the road, four hundred houses go up in red brick with pitched slate roofs and a solar panel each, in open view, and nobody really expects them to disappear at all.

I'll declare my own taste here. I find a good many of those estates harder to look at than most of the sheds I've spent thirty years drawing. That isn't a criticism of the people building them, who are delivering what the system asks for at a price people can just about pay.

It's the obligation that sits oddly. We screen the building somebody spent months detailing, and leave in full view the thing that will define what a place looks like for the next century.

What That Actually Rests On

It does have a consequence, and it's one worth being clear-eyed about.

If the mitigation is planting, then the planting is load-bearing. The acceptability of the scheme rests on it, in the same way it might otherwise rest on a massing decision or a change of material.

And planting is the part of a scheme that can never be pinned down with quite the same certainty.

A building can be pinned down. If the cladding module is 1,200 wide, that's what it is, and anyone can check. Landscape doesn't behave like that. The planting schedule may change. The contractor may substitute. The ground will have opinions. Some of what goes in will not survive its first few years. That isn't pessimism. Any landscape architect will tell you the same, which is why schedules allow for replacement.

So the building is a specification, and the landscape is an impression. Both are doing real work. Only one of them can be checked with a tape measure.

Which is why the planting in these images isn't atmosphere. On some schemes it's evidence. It's making a claim about screening, seasons, maturity and impact, and if the trees are carrying that much weight they deserve the same scrutiny as the building behind them.

The Seven-Month Screen

There's a timing problem sitting inside this as well.

A screening strategy built largely on deciduous planting does most of its work for seven or eight months of the year. For the other five it is doing considerably less, which is exactly why bare-tree views get asked for. They aren't there to make a scheme look bad. They are a test of the thing that's carrying the argument.

And a screen takes years to arrive. The version that makes the scheme work is often the ten or fifteen-year version, which is really a promise about the middle of the next decade. The version the neighbours get on day one is thinner, and nobody is being dishonest about that as long as everyone knows which one they are looking at.

The Quiet Irony

There's a technical joke buried in all this that I enjoy more than I should.

Trees are often the heaviest thing in the 3D model. A single mature specimen can carry more geometry than the building beside it.

Under the hood, that shows up in where the hours go. On a landscape-heavy scheme we'll routinely spend seventy or eighty per cent of our time on the planting. The building, which is the thing everybody thinks they're commissioning, is comparatively quick.

So the most computationally expensive object in the scene is routinely the thing whose whole purpose is to stop you looking at the second most expensive one.

Before the Leaves Go

None of this argues for less screening. Most of the time the planting is the right answer, and a scheme that disappears into its setting has usually done something right.

It's just worth remembering, as the branches come bare over the next few weeks, that a good deal of what makes large buildings acceptable in this country is alive, seasonal, and will take fifteen years to turn up.

We can tell you what it should look like by then.

Nobody can tell you which of it will still be there.

Until next week.

Rich

PS: The title is stolen from Monty Python, who got there in 1970 and did it better.