Roadside gree nery as a work of art

In 2004, the young Munich 
architect Jakob Bader was 
commissioned to renovate 

and upgrade  this five-storey  
residential property. 
The starting point 
for Bader’s design was the 

glaring lack of roadside greenery.


Trees, an avenue, he surmised, would
provide shade, reduce traffic noise and give the whole 
street area a more attractive character. Since it was not
possible to simply plant trees by the pavement, Bader
commissioned the photographic artist Kathrin Schäfer
to create chestnut greenery images.
These avenue and beer garden trees that are so popular 
in Munich were to be printed as images on glass displays
and thus give the residents at least the feeling of living 
“in a green area” Decorators painted the building in a 
fresh green tone and a fitter mounted some 120 running 
metres of steel rails, like railway tracks in front of the facade. 
These provide the runners for the 56 printed-glass sliding 
shutters: a moveable avenue,vibrant and lush and casting wildly
romantic leaf shadows towards the inside that are, at first 
glance, indistinguishable from the original