Tanglewood Conservatories Blog – Alan Stein's Writings about Custom Conservatory Design and More

Our next stop, Vienna, brought us to the Schönbrunn Palace gardens and the great Palm House conservatory there.

This truly amazing building defies description. It is one of the most exceptional examples of the creativity and energetic vitality that characterized conservatory design and glass buildings at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a time when architects were so possessed of a confidence in the new materials available to them as a result of the advances of the industrial revolution, that they experimented with and devised new methods of construction on a grand scale.

Joseph Paxton’s gigantic cast iron and glass Crystal Palace conservatory built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London instantly became the sensation of Europe and fanned designer’s imaginations throughout the world.

Built twenty years later in 1880, the Palm House conservatory at Schönbrunn, is every bit as radical and technologically advanced as the Kunsthaus in Graz.

The designer, court architect Franz von Sengenschmid toured glass and steel conservatories in Europe before working out the design with the structural engineer Sigmund Wagner.

Among its most unusual features is the steel structure that is on the exterior of the glass house! This is a very unusual feature, as most modern buildings begin with the assumption that the structural skeleton, whether wood or steel is placed inside the exterior “skin” of the building. The structural “skeleton” holds the building up, and the “skin” keeps it weather tight. The Schönbrunn Palm House conservatory is conceived in just the opposite way, the steel structure forming an exoskeleton for the building.

But it is the way in which the architect put the steel structure of the conservatory on the outside that is so interesting. It becomes a very overt expression, in fact, a celebration of the utility of steel as a building material. It’s almost as if the architect was so excited about the design potentials opened up by the new availability of steel, that he put the steel structure on the outside of the conservatory to show it off. It was such an expression of excitement with the possibilities of this great new material available for use in the new industrial revolution. This was radically new stuff!

Inside, steel and cast iron elements are inventively combined to form a richly layered backdrop to the verdant tropical forest.

I can barely imagine the delight and enchantment felt by anyone wandering into this room when it was built over one hundred years ago.

Another noticeable feature of this room is the way in which the conservatory architect incorporates the requirement for maintenance access into the design of the glass house.

Walkways and pivoting access stairways were not added as afterthoughts to the design but conceived as part and parcel from the start and they contribute to the overall decorative effect.

The conservatory was built between the years of 1880 and 1882 as part of the extensive gardens at the summer residence of the imperial court in Vienna at the time.

Next, we travel to Bratislava, capital of Slovákia.

Alan

Our next stop was Graz, the Austrian city which is the capital of the Styrian region in the south of the country. Graz is a lovely old city with 44,000 students at the six universities, which makes it a very lively town.

To arrive at Graz, we traveled the mountain road to the ski resort town of Obertauern high in the Austrian Alps. The town was mostly deserted but the beautiful mountains still had patches of snow covering them.

In the town of Graz, we also found an interesting contrast between old and new. On the old palace grounds, which is now a park, stood this lovely old conservatory unused and somewhat in disrepair.

A building such as this is often termed an orangery as the roof does not have glass in it. Orangeries were the original conservatory buildings, a type of structure that was used to winter citrus trees and other exotic plants (conserve them) dating back as far as Roman times. This is a particularly beautiful and well proportioned example of an orangery conservatory with the glass central atrium solidly anchored by the classically detailed masonry structures on either end.

On the other side of town is one of the most important new buildings, the Kunsthaus Graz (art museum) built in 2000 by Architects Colin Fournier and Peter Cook, who won an international competition for the design.

This building also uses glass as its external “skin”, much like a traditional conservatory, and is also used to “conserve” and display rare artwork just as the historic conservatories were used to conserve and display rare plants.

At first glance, this piece of contemporary architecture is about as far from the traditional conservatory as one could get and makes a radical statement about the value of history and the desire for modernity in the city of Graz. The building is in such stark contrast to its surroundings it could be said to turn its back on everything else in the city.

In many ways though, it perfectly echoes the historic conservatory as a building type. Many of the old conservatories were radical structures of their day (and even now) their sinuous, improbable glass facades seemingly appearing more as glass bubbles than combination of walls and roofs.

These glass conservatory buildings celebrated the new technologies of the industrial revolution just as the Kunsthaus Graz celebrates modern technology in much the same way. Its curvilinear free form not much different from the flowing glass surfaces of some of the great historic conservatories of the past.

Even the use of the building is similar.

Next, we travel to Vienna to see the great Palm House conservatory in the Schönbrunn Palace gardens and then onto Bratislava, the beautiful old-world capital of Slovákia.

Alan

Greeting from Deutschland.

Nancy and I arrived in Germany today on our way to look at a new conservatory project. We will be in Europe for two weeks and will make special visits to see some of the great historic European conservatories in Vienna, the Czech Republic, Budapest – and any others we can find.

Our initial meeting was in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim with Mr. Franz Wurm, Director of the Wintergarten-Fachverband conservatory association of which Tanglewood Conservatories is an honorary member.

Mr. Wurm was responsible for our visit last year when Nancy and I addressed the association meeting and made a presentation of our work to the group.

While in Rosenheim, we took the opportunity to visit the nearby Herrenchiemsee castle built by Bavarian King Ludwig II. The castle sits on an island in Lake Chiemsee which can only be reached by ferryboat. It was built from 1878 to 1885 and cost the current equivalent of about $124,000,000 USD.

The castle was modeled on the Palace of Versailles due to Ludwig’s great respect for King Louis XIV of France and includes a hall of mirrors, the ceiling of which is painted with twenty-five scenes of the French King. After Ludwig’s death in 1886, construction stopped leaving fifty of the seventy rooms unfinished.
The castle was one of the locations featured in the computer game The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, which was set in Bavaria with a storyline that involved King Ludwig.

One of the interesting features of the castle was the way it is sited when it was built and what has been done with it since. From both the front and the back, long alleys cut through the woods directly on axis with the building creating vista’s all the way to the shore of the lake. You can stand on the fronts steps of the castle and peer through the forest all the way to the lake.

The shoreline at the front opens to a man made mooring for the boats of the time and on the far lake shore, directly across the lake (and also on center axis with the palace!), some modern day planner purposely situated a new public swimming pool palace!

I thought this was entirely appropriate, even if Lugwig would not have been so amused, because, outside the castle are very formal gardens with a series of exquisite fountains and pools that were the cutting edge of the technology of the day. How appropriate that the new swimming pool enclosure building, directly on axis with the castle and its garden fountains extend the illusion of sweeping space well beyond what the original monarch, in striving to portray his expansive greatness, might have imagined. In addition to being spatially related, the castle with its water gardens, the lake and the new swimming pool park are thematically related by the water.

The new swimming pool palace is also a modern marvel of technology. It is completely transparent with an ornamental wood structure inside and encloses a large water park where bathers can revel in the warm waters as if outside, year round. How techno-edge is that, Ludwig!

Of course the great irony is that the new swimming pool palace is a public space given over to the whim and folly of the commoners! As such, it is fitting that it is on the other side of the lake in contrast to the castle which was the whim and folly of the royalty on the other side!

Alan