PALM-HOUSE and the Scalability of Infrastructure
HOME-OFFICE’s The Difficult View: PALM-HOUSE Prototypes for the Orto Botanico Design for PLAT 10.0 examined the relationship between the Goethe palm, the people who care for it, and the architecture that houses it. Brittany Utting and Daniel Jacobs propose alternate tectonic and climactic systems to propose a new awareness of planetary ecology.
A pink glow washes the grid of numbered columns. Truss spans disappear against the white surface of the roof. A network of mesh walkways hovers above the soft carpet of neon green seedlings below. The vast volume of air fills with the digital chirps of climatic sensors, punctuating the background hum of drones monitoring plant health. This is the contemporary industrial greenhouse: a sensing and sensorial machine. The greenhouse carefully calibrates this environment: constantly monitoring interior atmospheres, stimulating thermal shifts and flows, adjusting humidities, and producing artificial suns with grow lights.
As these logistical landscapes become an increasingly prevalent infrastructure, today is a critical moment to reflect on how architects can redeploy these technical systems toward a more entangled relationship with environmental systems and the organisms that they support. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes in The Mushroom at the End of the World, “Scalability is not an ordinary feature of nature...It is time to turn attention to the nonscalable.” While greenhouse infrastructures deploy the scalar logics of abstraction, their artificial environments are also characterized by increasingly intimate, haptic, and sensorial conditions. These conditions are byproducts of the care and maintenance of multi-species life; requiring heat, water, nutrients, air, light, and humus as well as the labor of tending and nurturing. The processes of simulating a living ecology produces new architectural affects that directly tie a climatological condition to an experiential one. Through the design of an enclosure for a single plant specimen, PALM-HOUSE posits another approach to scalable architecture, mobilizing its environmental systems to create a more intimate greenhouse type.
