The Linden

A linden grows in the back courtyard of the Jakab Toffler Palace. It has no plaque, no recorded date, and appears on no register of remarkable trees. It is simply the tree the communal tables are set under, the one films are projected beneath, the one that holds shade over everything that happens in the garden.

In the inhabited courtyards of Fabric, trees are not decoration. Someone planted them once; someone else lives in their shade today.

In 2022, as part of the Făcute în Fabric programme, the linden in the courtyard was scanned in three dimensions, in an intervention called "Tei 3D". The programme was funded by Centrul de Proiecte Timișoara through "Impuls în Comunitate" and co-organised with Minitremu.

The scan has gone unpublished until now. The model below is that measurement exactly: every point is a surface the laser actually touched — bark, branch, leaf.

The model published here holds 9.3 million points at an average spacing of 5 mm, derived from a source scan of 16.3 million points.

Measured directly in the point cloud:

• Height — 16.5 m
• Trunk girth, at approx. 1.4 m above the base — 2.13 m (diameter ≈ 0.68 m)
• Crown spread — approx. 13 m
• Crown projection on the ground — approx. 133 m²

These figures are computed from the scan data, not measured on site. Height is counted from the lowest scanned point, not from a surveyed ground level.

How to navigate: drag with the left mouse button to orbit, scroll to zoom, drag with the right button to pan. The model streams in progressively — the longer you dwell on a detail, the sharper it gets.

In 2024, the research residency The Trees and Their People, with Studio Peisaj (Raluca Rusu and Alexandru Ciobotă), began from exactly this relationship: "trees are remnants of gestures made by past generations — and, at the same time, beings of the district in the present". The micro-research is part of the landscape study for the PUZ CP Fabric.

The linden stands at the centre of a courtyard that, through the Social Fabric programme, moved from private ground to space open to the neighbourhood. Scanning it is, in its own way, another form of taking it seriously.

There is, as yet, no published source online about this particular linden. What follows are references about the garden it grows in and about the city's trees:

• Casa Jakab Toffler Association — Timișoara 2023, European Capital of Culture
• Jakab Toffler House — location — Timișoara 2023
• Social Fabric: Atelier Adhoc Comunitate — public presentation — the programme through which the garden became public space
• With Open Doors — open-courtyard days
• Timișoara Local Register of Green Spaces and the city green map — the municipal tree inventory
• Remarkable Trees of Romania — the national inventory platform
• 16 remarkable trees in Timișoara proposed for special protection — Știri de Timișoara