Mehmet standing in front of the building
Our Senior Designer Mehmet just returned from a two week vacation during which he traveled throughout the beautiful rugged highlands of northern Scotland. He went as far north as the Orkney Islands. Mehmet has been making regular trips like this to wonderful and exotic places a couple of times each year since he’s been with Tanglewood – now almost fifteen years!
His love of beautiful, unspoiled, authentic locales has led him through Western and Eastern Europe, to Morocco, the Americas and to his homeland Turkey many times.
One legacy of these wonderful trips has been an amazing library of photographs particularly focused on the architecture. Often he’ll shoot just a window or a doorway or a small detail of a building framed in the most artistic manner. Sometimes these serve as inspiration for Tanglewood projects current or future. Much of the unique character of Tanglewood’s work is the result of his artistic and creative capabilities.
We’re of course always interested in the conservatories he visits and photographs from around the world.
Edinburgh Conservatory
The classic shot that is often used when photographing the Edinburgh Conservatory.
Here is his photograph of the great Tropical Palm House at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh Scotland. It was built in 1858 and is the second oldest in Great Britain. Designed by R. Matheson, it was built to replace an older structure when the palm trees grew so tall that they protruded through the roof. It is also one of the tallest conservatories at 22 meters. Note the human sized doorway and you’ll get a sense of the scale of the building!
Kibble Palace Conservatory
Mehmet in front of the Kibble Palace conservatory built in 1865 at the Glasgow Botanic Gardens in Scotland.
Kibble Palace Conservatory Interior
The Kibble Palace conservatory is an amazing structure as it almost seems to be covered with a “plastic” material (which of course glass actually is).
Look at the fantastic sweeping curves and the amazing lack of support “structure” shown in this photograph. Could this REALLY be a glass structure? Truly, it is a “glass skin” but unlike the modernist concept which supports the skin with a separate articulated structure, this skin is also the skeleton itself attached to the earth only around the perimeter and a few places in between.
Kibble Palace Conservatory Exterior
This is Mehmet’s photograph of the exterior of the Kibble conservatory. It appears as hardly more than an elegantly formed, solidified soap bubble. No wonder we all fell in love with these fantastic buildings!
From its very beginnings, Tanglewood Conservatories has been inspired by these majestic architectural expressions and sought to bring the same creative ingenuity that brought them to life into all our modern-day conservatory projects.
Alan