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Comment by hannasanarion | Hacker News Reader

The finished building will look nothing like the renders. The "crack" that's shown in all the renders as filled with lush greenery faces north. It will be in permanent shade. If they actually do plant all those trees, they'll be dead within months.

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Maybe the builders are capable of doing a 10 second web search to discover trees that grow in shade: https://www.thespruce.com/twelve-trees-for-full-shade-326967...?

But how will they deal with snow?

Denver averages 60 inches per year (~150 cm).

There are plenty of trees in Denver - and even more trees up in the mountains nearby where they can get 2x-4x that much snow in a year.

Snow doesn't last 24 hours in Denver.

All good, they'll just put one of these across the street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_Fenchurch_Street

If you hike in temperate, mountainous areas, you'll find the greenest areas are on the north slopes (in the northern hemisphere—in other words, the shady side). Maybe not with the plants in the renders, but making it green shouldn't be a problem.

In dry areas like Colorado, that's because snow on the north facing slopes melt much later and provides water later in the season. So while the soil on the other sides are already dry when the sunlight is the strongest, the north slope soil still has water left.

It's also ferns and moss that can't grow in direct sunlight and high temperatures (120+F ground under sunlight). You'll see this phenomenon even in areas where there's little or no snowpack, e.g. the Diablo range in California.

There are plenty of tree and plant choices that don't need direct sunlight. Denver is a sunny city, with the right choices it will be green and thrive.

It looks like to the south of the building is the river. They probably optimized that side for residential units to increase profits.

That being said, they could always use massive lights to keep the trees alive...

Nah, the river is on the other side of the traintracks further to the north. To the south is the Cole and Five Points neighborhoods, which are in early stages of redevelopment

This can be said for nearly every architectural rendering. They aren’t used by architects to build/design, they are used by sales to sell.

Shade is more constant than sun, so effectively this makes the end result much more predictable and less maintenance intensive.

Plenty of plants can grow in shade. And if you look at the render of the facade, it's not completely opaque...

They can always get plastic plants from IKEA.

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