heARTbeat: ‘Temporary Trees’ Gets Us Thinking About the Real Thing

Column A new series explores how development and industry effect trees.

Designers Raw Color and Studio Maarten Kolk Guus Kusters (MKGK) have created a new series called Temporary Trees. As written by Kahlil Gibran:

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.

For the last eleven years I have been living among oak, eucalyptus and bay, trees that reach heights of up to 150 feet. When you live with trees like that, it is possible to respect and admire their strength, beauty and complexity. A few years ago, Sudden Oak Death swept through our swath of Northern California. We lost a couple of very big trees. It was a humbling experience.


“Temporary trees‚ Poplar & Oak”

When I saw the Temporary Trees project, it struck a chord of fragility and pathos with its intent:

The project is a social commentary on how plant-life, once cherished, is now forgotten in favor of development and industry. Trees are often regarded as objects and are removed according to the landscape plan ruthlessly. In the Netherlands trees typically reach only one tenth of the age that they could make.

For Raw Color and Studio Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters trees are anything but static. They are ever changing life forms that determine how we experience light, shade, wind and changes of the seasons. This observation is translated to illusions‚ of trees in different materials, that represent the life, dynamics and transformation of trees.


“Temporary trees‚ Weeping Willow & Plantan”

The project, part of Make a Forest, an international platform, will be presented at Object Rotterdam 2012.

“Temporary trees‚ Pollard Willow”

May Temporary Trees and the Make a Forest project continue to inspire tribute to the diversity of our forests, encouraging us to embrace what we’ve got, before it’s gone.

Check out the video of the making of Temporary Trees.

Leaves – Temporary Trees from Raw Color on Vimeo.

Inspired by a post on designboom



Eco, trends, art, creativity and how they tumble through social media to shape culture fascinate EcoSalon columnist Dominique Pacheco. Her trends blog, mixingreality, speaks to these topics daily, and here at EcoSalon, she takes a weekly look at the intersection of eco and art. We call it heARTbeat.

Dominique Pacheco

Dominique Pacheco is the author of EcoSalon's weekly heARTbeat column.