GROUND TREES

Project

Haikou Duty Free Shopping City

Client

China Duty Free Group

Creative 

Wētā Workshop 

Build 

Dafeng Industry

Location 

Haikou, Hainan, China

Opened

October, 2022

Role on the project

Lead Design & Art Direction 

The Ground Tree  sculptures are a graceful blend of parametricism and hand-crafted design. Shimmering metallic branches create an intricate root system that graft upwards 7-9 meters to support large, pink canopies.

Sunlight casts a rosy glow from these canopies, and interactive light orbs embedded within the roots respond to visitor proximity and touch, producing musical tones and vibrant hues that dance between the orbs and up the trunk.

Together, these finely crafted elements become an interactive and  immersive playground for visitors. 

DESIGN PROCESS

The graceful, flowing shapes of the Ground Trees are a harmonious blend of precision and organic beauty, as if a forest had sprung forth from a machine. Though they appear to be generated by algorithms, most of the sculpture is actually the result of digital sculpting. The challenge was to maintain a sense of geometric perfection while also allowing for the control and manipulation necessary to achieve the desired tree forms. 

To create these fluid forms, the sculptures were treated as interconnected systems of muscles, with each branch in tension with the others. 3D models were manipulated at various levels of detail, with primary forms defined by low-polygon models and secondary and tertiary forms adding further definition and seamless transitions between branches. The result is a striking and harmonious blend of technology and nature.

Algorithms were used to design the shape of the Voronoi canopy and then carefully grafted into the trunk. The resulting three trees are unique, just like a natural forest in which no two leaves are identical. The tree trunks are made of cast aluminium, coated with a lustrous iridescent metallic paint, while their canopies are fitted with hundreds of polycarbonate cells painted a gradient of pink tones, allowing sunlight to pass through and cast beautiful shadows below. 

The translation of concept models into the final fabrication models required a highly critical design eye, ensuring that all the unique curves of the design are perfectly preserved in the final molds.