Los Angeles used strangler figs because they grow really quickly. They also drop dew when they're stressed because they tend to get infested with aphids really easily. Which means 20 years after someone thought it was a good idea, there are these massive Totorotrees everywhere whose wood is made out of depleted uranium, whose foliage covers a 30' circle with sticky varnish and whose roots... I mean, they patch the sidewalks around here in the PNW when they're about an inch or two separated. In my old neighborhood in LA I measured a 13" height difference between sidewalk tiles, and then gave up because within a mile I found dozens that were taller. Then they hauled the space shuttle through and needed to cut them all down and everyone got super-salty because they figured they wouldn't get replanted. To the best of my knowledge they didn't.
The dark secret of my profession is that 90% of landscape architects knows very little about trees. This square was built ten years ago and I doubt those trees have grown more than an inch or two since then. Common beech has the scientific name Fagus sylvatica, "sylvatica" meaning "of the forest", meaning the complete opposite of a windy, barren granite hellscape. But beech trees are "iconic" of the south and the competition entry promised beech and won because of beech, so beech it is. They have a really shallow root system so the whole sub terrain of that plaza is an artificial vegetation bed kept together with pumice, charcoal and prayers that nobody drives a truck over it. The runoff has to be kept separate and not allowed to infiltrate the bed since the salting of the roads during the winter would kill the trees in a year. A real marvel of engineering, but the landscape architect should be ashamed.