The greenhouse is a commonplace architectural typology, a frequent fixture in a host of cities, built to shield plants from the elements — from excess heat or cold or to prolong the growing season of crops. Evidence of the presence of greenhouses in some form stretches as far back as the 1450s during the Korean Joseon dynasty, but it is in the 1700s that the greenhouse was born as a specific architectural form. Glassmaking improved, and thus the largely transparent, wide-span structures we know today were born. Nestled under the intricate iron metalwork of greenhouses are also wider stories — of control and undeserved wealth, and resistance.
The brief for the large public greenhouses of the Western world was fairly standard — the general arrangement of an open plan, facilitating the straightforward rearrangement of plant collections. Perhaps the provision of various zones, the interior divided to accommodate plants that would need distinct temperature levels. The finishing of the exterior was often ornamental in some manner — the greenhouse was envisaged as a space of attraction for the general public.
In Great Britain, as taxes on glass were abolished in the mid-1800s, glass was manufactured in ever-expanding quantities. The iconic segment of London’s Kew Gardens — the hull-like Palm House — was completed in 1848, subject to much admiration for its technological inventiveness. Architect Decimus Burton’s brief was to create a home to provide for plants from the tropics — brought to the nation by destructive Victorian explorers.
In this imperial era, botany was far from a neutral activity. The voyages undertaken by these explorers were part of a detailed system of dispossession and meticulous organization. Entire landscapes were reshaped in colonial territories, as crops and plants were introduced to unfamiliar land. Under the leadership of Kew Gardens’ first director, botanist William Jackson Hooker, plant collectors were sent across the globe to “discover” plant species, and Kew Gardens became a sorting and growing hub, with specimens from abroad brought to Kew, sometimes cross-pollinated, and subsequently transported to the colonies to be cultivated in a plantation economy.
The Oil Palm is a pertinent example of this process. In 1860, Kew Garden botanist Gustav Mann, reporting from the River Niger in Western Africa, packaged oil palm seeds and sent them to Britain. The quest after this development was to find and grow a variety of oil palm that could produce higher yields and oil palm seeds were thus expropriated from their West African context and grown in Southeast Asia, under an economic system where colonial laborers were marginalized and oppressed.
The Palm House at Kew Gardens, as much as it was a piece of engineering originality, was also a subtle tool of cultural and colonial dominance, where knowledge was transformed into material wealth for the colonial project, where the very act of the visitor being able to experience far-away foreign climates was a method of reinforcing the scale and reach of the British Empire. In other European empires, it was a fundamentally similar story. The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken in Belgium’s capital, for instance, are dome-topped symbols of King Leopold II’s control over African territory, home to plants sourced from central Africa.
But as with all architecture, this typology has been subverted in many ways, resisting a building program of passive observation, or hosting research that would lead to maltreatment. In a plantation situated in the American state of Maryland, where abolitionist Frederick Douglass spent part of his childhood under slavery, researchers unearthed evidence in the greenhouse of agricultural experiments conducted by enslaved people on food and medicinal herbs, and of the practicing of African religious traditions in the greenhouse, that also served as slave quarters.
In Palestine, a greenhouse collaboratively installed by an NGO and the community of the village of Um Al Khair in the southern West Bank is a venue for fostering autonomy, where villagers can grow their own food and sell products to the market — defying occupation of their territory. It is a key structure amidst a precarious existence — with demolition orders pending on a majority of buildings in the area.
Greenhouses as sites of exploitation, either directly as in the United States during slavery, or indirectly as with the case of the Palm House at Kew Gardens, are unfortunately not a long-forgotten thing of the past. The city of Almeria in southeast Spain is famously known for its extremely large concentration of greenhouses, sun-trapping structures covered with plastic and supplemented by wire meshwork to protect from strong winds. This endeavor, however, is driven by expendable migrant labor, and work is dangerous, with workers toiling under high humidity, a forgotten element of the global agricultural supply chain.
The greenhouse is ostensibly a building for plant-keeping. In practical terms, however — at least in the larger-scale greenhouses on our planet — they are, and have been, sites of both ingenuity and domination over people and nature.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on February 24, 2023.
