Cellphone Towers Disguised as Trees Are a Puzzling Attempt at Aesthetics

I agree that the tower looks funny in that setting. The fake tree works well, however, in an area that's already populated by trees of a similar height and type. (Better than a metal pole sticking up out of the woods, anyway.)

that is probably the best looking example I've seen so far.

That was a good example...... or is that an artist rendering?

On my way to Lacrose, Wisconsin on HWY 21, they had a cell tower disguise as a tree...... and thats what it looked like...... a cell tower disguised as a tree.

And now its a land mark... for directions, "you go past the cell tower disguised as a tree."

I used to live near a church that agreed to have a cell tower put on on the edge of its property - on the condition that they were allowed to attach a large christian cross to the top of it, which hid most of the antenna cluster.

--Regarding the tower / tree in the originally posted photo - does that cell tower need to be that high? Wouldn't it have almost as effective a range at half that height?

The next attempt for camo will probally be wind turbine generators........

Looks like we just need to hop across the uncanny valley.

It's good to see mast designers branching out in new directions and turning over a new leaf....

Personally, I would rather see the cell tower. Trying to disguise it as a tree is like putting "lipstick on a pig" - it is still a pig. I have no problem with pigs being pigs, and cell towers being cell towers; both serve a function. But take the lipstick off of them, and let them be what they are, without the ugly falsehood.

Government Bureaucrat: Making the cell tower look like a pig with lipstick......... uhhmmm!

Great idea Kilowatt0, I'll form an action committee and get this thing pushed through!

Our cell towers look like dead Palm trees so they blend nicely with all the other dead Palms around here.

The fact that Palm trees are exotic and prolific means there are thousands of them growing places where they should never have been in the first place.

Reminds me of Kudzu in the south and pythons in the Everglades.

Looks like those fake Christmas tree branches, must be the same guy makin' them....

Amen brother...

OK, as long as I can climb to the top and check the view....

Now I like this concept(maybe not this dark).....A sculpture....Might we consign artists to make creative sculptures for this purpose....I like it....beautification

The cell phone companies are getting creative, that's for sure. In our community, they proposed a cell tower disguised as a rustic barn and silo. The residents took offense to this, because the implication is that the community is full of old broken down things.

At one of the local meetings, a resident asked about the safety of the cell tower (being 50 feet from their home). The response was that the cell towers are safe and that the FCC regulates them. The resident asked how the rest of the people at the meeting feel. Many voiced their concern about the safety, including myself. The logic follows that if there are people in the public who perceive health risks in having a cell tower so close to their home, then the outcome will be a lower property value, due to less potential buyers. The response from the cell phone company is that if the cell tower is disguised well enough, the buyer may not know about it until after the sale is completed, therefore there is no reduction in property value.

There are two things I don't like about their response. One is that our state requires that a cell tower nearby must be disclosed to the buyer during the sale of the house. The second is that they're telling us to be dishonest when selling our home.

The final outcome in this is that the cell phone company realized that they were not going to win this battle and they chose to put the tower on an empty hillside.