At the end of the 1950s architect Vjenceslav Richter built a two-story home in the northern hills above the city of Zagreb, Croatia. Its wooden walls stemmed from a bungalow construction kit Richter had purchased in Bosnia. He reconfigured the pieces and raised them above a concrete ground floor that would become his office, with subsequent additions stepping up and down the sloping terrain. The site originally included a pine tree that was kept as a part of the home with tiles and ceiling accommodating its irregular shape. Today the more than 60-year old resident remains though it is currently threatened by an upcoming remodel.

Trees were also denizens in Richter’s utopian, all-encompassing reorganization of society, Sinturbanism. Large-scale ziggurats would create their own indoor landscapes and cater to all daily necessities. Their position in the open countryside was meant to assure everyone’s proximity to the great outdoors—a city in one building. This time, trees would have to relocate inside the mound and become part of its permanent domesticated nature.

In a series of annual shows at the Richter house called SintArt Nika Radić recently took such domesticated trees back to the streets by visualizing how an increase in inner-city forests would reorganize Zagreb. In “1/3” she proposed a way of challenging the city’s traditional layout by converting a third of all roads to be rewilded as wooded areas. Her show takes Richter’s resident tree as a starting point. The installation opens the door to even more perennials that populate the former office as hanging curtains of full-scale trunks. Maps of the city bring in the woods not just to reimagine life on such a domestic scale but to allow for a vision in which the forest overtakes the man-made environment one tree at a time; a vision that subtly alters Richter’s view from up on top of the hill, high above the city.

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