The Great Palm House Conservatory at Schönbrunn Palace
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