London is filled with grafted facades, nearly two-dimensional artifacts held in place while updated buildings are constructed behind them; many seem to haphazardly half-disguise the boring new structures on which they are grafted. While other cities have done similar, the sheer volume of them in this East End neighborhood is astonishing.

The writer behind Spitalfields Life, a web publication, does not mince words in reacting to this partial approach to preservation, which “threatens to turn the city into the back lot of an abandoned movie studio …. As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture.”

In further criticisms, The Gentle Author bemoans the results as a compromise between “cowed planning authorities” and “architects … humiliated into creating passive-aggressive structures.” Perhaps this gives insufficient credit to architects, some of whom also fall guilty to facadism at times, and have been known to prioritize the exterior over the plan, skin over skeleton, form over function.

It is dangerous to suppose that preservation is necessarily binary. Compromises are almost inevitably made over time to keep architectural functional, through essential electrical and plumbing retrofits to more debatable code-related upgrades and updates. There is also a case to be made that the streets are a public room of which buildings are the walls, so preserving facades (properly, at least) can maintain the public’s experience of a place.

Nonetheless, whether you approve of the general approach or cannot see the apologist’s point of view, it is hard to argue against the examples: the executions documented by The Gentle Author range from mediocre to outright terrible. In short: there may be a right way to approach preserving facades as part of new structures, but many architects are doing it wrong.

Seven years into his experiments, the living artworks of Sam Van Aken are bearing far more than just fruit, each new variant of the Tree of 40 Fruit building on experiences learned from the last. And while simply grafting forty fruits of different kinds to a single tree is impressive, his work continues to branch out. The trees have to grow for three years before he can start to reshape them, and even then only so many grafts can be added each year.

Van Aken’s Frankensteinian creations are an endeavor forever in progress. With increasingly refined sets of controls and directions, he has been able to go beyond simply grafting dozens of types on a single tree. Carefully diagrammed, his planned plants can be designed to bloom and bear fruit year-round and in choreographed sequences, almost like a slow-motion fireworks display or performance piece.

His individual trees are displayed around the country, reflecting the climate as well as local varieties of the different regions in which they can be found. Each provides seasonal moments of surprise to passers by, producing almonds during one month then perhaps peaches or plums (or both) in the next.

From National Geographic: “Sam Van Aken, an artist and professor at Syracuse University, uses ‘chip grafting’ to create trees that each bear 40 different varieties of stone fruits, or fruits with pits. The grafting process involves slicing a bit of a branch with a bud from a tree of one of the varieties and inserting it into a slit in a branch on the ‘working tree,’ then wrapping the wound with tape until it heals and the bud starts to grow into a new branch. Over several years he adds slices of branches from other varieties to the working tree.”

“In the spring the ‘Tree of 40 Fruit’ has blossoms in many hues of pink and purple, and in the summer it begins to bear the fruits in sequence—Van Aken says it’s both a work of art and a time line of the varieties’ blossoming and fruiting. He’s created more than a dozen of the trees that have been planted at sites such as museums around the U.S., which he sees as a way to spread diversity on a small scale.”