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

There is a lot of excitement here as Alan & Nancy, co-founders of the company, head off to China this month to explore export opportunities for Tanglewood’s beautiful hand-crafted custom conservatories and estate greenhouses. It’s something the company has been considering for a while, especially as more people around the globe have become aware of our brand and the exquisite work we do.

Our company was recently selected to receive the “ExportMD Award”, in support of our efforts to promote our products in other countries. The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development’s International Investment and Trade Office awards the “ExportMD Award” grant to Maryland’s small and mid-sized companies to help offset the costs of marketing internationally. Companies are eligible to receive up to $5,000 in reimbursement for expenses associated with an international marketing effort.

“We have been working closely with the state of Maryland and with the trade experts at DBED’s International Investment and Trade Office to investigate ways to promote our products overseas,” says Alan Stein, President and Director of Architecture at Tanglewood Conservatories. “We really excited about this opportunity, and we are grateful for the support of DBED’s people in China.”

Watch this blog for updates and photos from the trip.   Zai Jian!

Just over two years ago, in June 2009, Alan and Nancy visited Greenhouses, Wintergardens, and Conservatories in Germany. After spending two days in Munich, they traveled over several days by car to Hamburg, stopping along the way to visit companies that build greenhouses and aluminum wintergardens (what conservatories and sunrooms are called in Germany). In his next blog post, Tanglewood Conservatories Presentation and Award in Hamburg, Alan writes about the excitement, surprise and honor he felt when he was unexpectedly presented with membership in the Wintergarten-Fachverband of Germany and Austria. Alan and Nancy are now even more excited to announce that one of Tanglewood’s conservatories is featured on the cover of the “Der Neue Wintergarten Ratgeber” (The New Winter Garden Guide), a publication published by the Wintergarten-Fachverband.

The Wintergarten-Fachverband, founded in 1990, is a group of German and Austrian conservatory manufacturers who dedicate themselves to designing and building conservatories using wood or wood-aluminum. The association adheres to strict quality controls, guidelines and ethics and does not allow just any conservatory or winter garden designer or builder to become a member. Alan is honored to have been chosen to be part of this elite group of conservatory enthusiasts.

The “Der Neue Wintergarten Ratgeber” is a 132-page guide featuring full-color photographs, and descriptions and floor plans of conservatories. The guide also includes quotes from satisfied conservatory owners about their “Traum unter Glas holen” (dream under glass). In more exciting news, the same conservatory that graces the cover of the “Der Neue Wintergarten Ratgeber,” can also be found in the current issue of “Homefront Magazine.”

The conservatory pairs perfectly with its poolside location (see page 21). Imagine taking an early morning dip and then enjoying coffee and breakfast while you read the newspaper in this bright and inviting room. Or sipping wine or mineral water, after a late afternoon swim, while watching the sunset. It is easy to see why this glass house is featured in both publications.

Tanglewood Conservatories is proud to be honored in both ways. We hope you enjoy the honor as much as we do!

One of our engineers, Duane, found an interesting story online and sent Alan the link. After that, Alan tasked me with finding out more about this fascinating conservatory at the bottom of a lake! Read on to find out more.

Witley Park was originally a 19th century mansion on an estate in Surrey, England owned by J. Whitaker Wright. Wright obtained the property in 1890 and set about renovating the already large Georgian mansion into a huge residence with 32 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms, a ballroom, a theater and a private hospital!  The estate was located on approximately 9,000 acres of land on which Wright, using 600 men, created lakes, flattened existing hills and then built new ones in other places.  One of the man-made lakes, situated behind where the mansion once stood (it burned to the ground in 1952), contains the aforementioned underwater conservatory.

Finding information on the “ballroom under a lake” or as some writers posited, a billiards room under a lake, proved to be a little frustrating. I was hoping to be able to get first-hand accounts of the buildings, but many of the stories I came across were second or third-hand accounts. No matter, I did find the back-story, which I mentioned above, and many pictures, which I will provide links to below.

Suffice it to say, there are at least two rooms underneath the lake, including a conservatory, and the abovementioned glass-roofed billiards room. In order to reach the underwater conservatory, it’s been said that there is a door, which leads to steps made of stone.

At the bottom of the stairway is a boat that takes visitors (though the land is privately owned now, and presumably the conservatory is not open to visitors) to two large doors that open to a stairway leading to an underwater tunnel.

The tunnel leads to the underwater conservatory, with its algae covered glass panes.

For more pictures, and some informative commentary from some people who were able to access the underwater rooms in April 2006, go to Paul Holmes’ photostream on flickr. Included in that set of photos are some of a statue of a man standing on the surface of the water just above the underwater conservatory.

The next time I go to England, unfortunately it’s been 10 years since my last visit, I plan to see if I can explore this intriguing, mysterious, and unique conservatory at the bottom of a lake.

If you’ve been there, or know someone who has, I’d love to hear from you!

When I first began writing for Tanglewood Conservatories, I have to admit, I didn’t know much about the history of conservatories. I knew that I liked the look of them and that it would be nice to have one, but I didn’t know that they were developed long ago, and that they are known by many different names – orangeries, hothouses, cold houses, greenhouses, lanterns, domes, and skylights, to name just a few. As I began to write this post, I was going to write about my experiences over the past few months and how doing research on different conservatories around the world and delving into their individual histories has taught me so much. However, as I started to write, one of my favorite conservatories all of a sudden popped into my mind and the post took a different route than I had intended!

Image Courtesy of Como Park Website

I have been to many conservatories during my lifetime, but the one in St. Paul, Minnesota at Como Park was probably my first and I have fond memories of it. I lived in Minnesota from the time I was in 4th grade until a few years after I graduated from college, so about 15 years or so. Como Park was probably one of the first places my parents took my sister and me to visit. For one reason, it was close. The other reason, and probably the most important at that time in our lives, was because it was free! Como Park includes a zoo, the conservatory, a lake with a large pavilion (for concerts and other events), and many green spaces. The whole park is a wonderful place to spend an afternoon on a warm spring Minnesota day (other days too, but spring in Minnesota, especially May, was my favorite time of year).

It was these early memories that caused me to write a page on the Como Park Conservatory for the “Our Heritage” section. I hope you will visit the page and perhaps decide that a visit to St. Paul and Como Park is in order. Minnesota has a reputation of being bitterly cold in the winter and hot and humid in the summer, but it really is a lovely place to visit and the people, who may have cold noses in the winter time, actually have very warm hearts all year ‘round!

Among the many historic castles scattered throughout the countryside in the Czech Republic, there are two that have beautiful conservatories of historic significance and are open to the public. We visited both on our recent trip.

Near the southeast border, not far from Vienna, Austria is the town of Lednice, the best-known tourist destination in this southern area known as Moravia. This is the warmest part of the country and it is full of romantic nooks, architectural jewels and unique nature reserves.

The Neo-Gothic Chateau Lednice has an extensive park which is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a large steel, iron and glass conservatory of absolutely fantastic structural design. It was originally constructed in 1843.

The conservatory building is striking. At over 300 feet long, it is made of small, delicately shaped iron ribs spaced close enough together so that no additional structural beams are used. The pieces of glass are small and are used in the traditional method of overlapping shingles to create the curvature of the roof.

The real significance of this historic conservatory however lies in the way that the architect, an Englishman named P.H. Devian, used the panes of glass themselves as structural “shear” panels to give the overall building the required rigidity and wind resistance normally accomplished with the use of steel columns and beams. This was a scheme inspired by architect John Claudius Loudon and used in several of his glass buildings in England. It represented an audacious departure from the status quo of structural engineering design of the day.

To allow the glass itself to take on structural capabilities was a unique innovation and yielded a transparency never before obtained in a building. Even today, structural engineering dictates that the structure itself must be sufficient to support itself without relying on glass or any other “infill” material.

One of the most illustrative features of this design concept are the large arched windows that project out from the curved roof structure.

There is nothing but a small iron rib that joins the surface of the window to the surface of the main roof. The flimsy steel frame would hardly stand up in a slight wind without the help of the glass to make it rigid.

The conservatory at Lednice was also one of the first to use iron for all its parts which was much stronger and long lasting than the wood parts previously in use.

This steel and glass skylight at the entrance to the conservatory at Lednice does not have a structural member at the ridge, but relies on the stiffness of the glass itself – another example of the technical daring by the architect described above.

To the west of Lednice in the Bohemia region, is the Schwarzenberg Castle in the town of Hluboka nad Vltavou. Built in 1847 by architect Franz Beer, this beautiful conservatory also uses iron ribs for support but unlike the conservatory at Lednice, the entire structure is supported internally by steel trusses – a much different and much less innovative approach than at Lednice.

One interesting feature of the Hlubloka conservatory is the way in which cast iron ornamentation is used on the exterior façade of the building. These decorative pieces are in no way related to any structural requirements, but are solely “stuck –on” to the building to give it a certain “look”.

Unlike the conservatory at Lednice, which one could say was a very straightforward, “honest” expression of what it is made of – in that it uses it’s structure as its aesthetic – the Hluboka building turns it’s back on itself and tries to cover what it is made of and become something else.

I wonder if this is a reflection of the personalities and insight of the architects themselves – and maybe their clients. Was P.H. Devian a man who was much more comfortable with himself and his capabilities than was Franz Beer? As artists, their works must be expressions of what is inside each of them. I think this question could also be asked of architects and designers today. What does an architect or an artist’s work tell us about what is inside the person creating the works?

This stairway inside the conservatory at Hluboka is one of my favorites and the only conservatory dedicated to enclose a stairway I’ve ever seen.

Alan

Leaving Bratislava, we traveled east towards the town of Banská Štiavnica our next destination where we were to look at the site of an interesting conservatory project. Banská Štiavnica is a beautiful small town in the heart of the mining region in central Slovákia. I was told that the hills surrounding the town are an ancient volcanic crater which makes for a very picturesque setting.

On the way we stopped for dinner at Kaštieľ Čereňany where we shared one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Anyone in this region should not miss this excellent restaurant and romantic inn and in fact just by itself it is worth its own trip.

With outstanding chef and owner of Kaštieľ Čereňany.

Enjoying a private toast with friends at Kaštieľ Čereňany.

The town of Banská Štiavnica has a rich history, particularly as a center for the mining technology and education that was so important to this region. It was inscripted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, listed as the Historic Town of Banská Štiavnica and the Technical Monuments in its Vicinity.

The designation by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is intended to encourage the protection and preservation of important cultural and natural heritage sites around the world that are considered to be of outstanding value to all of humanity.

Throughout time, Banská Štiavnica was a major destination for many outstanding scientists and engineers who brought it to fame. The old mining-center was built into a major town from its medieval roots with 16th-century churches, Renaissance palaces and elegant urban squares. The surrounding hills contain important items related to its metallurgical and mining past.

This unique heritage is celebrated each year in September with a curiously wonderful festival known as Salamander Days which we were privileged to witness.

This carnival dedicated to the mining and geological tradition has become a popular event throughout Slovákia with area hotels booking up months in advance. The unique name, Salamander Days in fact refers to the culminating processional that ends the festival. A long stream of miners both young and old, dressed in historical costume and waving flags of the various mines, carry lanterns through the town at dusk led by a Chief Shepherd holding a wood lizard that symbolizes the story of the discovery of the mines. Other symbolic characters from mine dwarfs to Judges, prisoners, The Executioner, Rabbi and Death Himself parade behind.

The sight of the lights weaving back and forth through the town streets as the processional moves reminded one of a salamander and the festival was long ago so named.

We stayed in Banská Štiavnica for several days and enjoyed our host’s warm hospitality.

Alan

“The World is in equilibrium, starting with the geometry of the atom and finishing with the geometry of the universe” – Milan Dobeš

Bratislava, the picturesque, largely undiscovered capital of Slovákia, which was our next stop, was a wonderful surprise. Situated on the very western edge of the country, it is a mere 37 miles from Vienna, though it must have felt like worlds apart before the Soviets left in 1989. The beautiful Danube River flows through the city on its way to Budapest and the Black Sea, its terminus in the east.

The city was once the capital of Hungary when it was part of the Habsburg Empire between 1536 and 1783 and is now home to about half a million residents.

Only one of the four original gated tower entrances to the medieval city remain.

Aside from its radiant old world charm, we were introduced to its distinctly modern side.
Among the sites we visited was a small but exquisite modern art museum dedicated to the work of Milan Dobeš, a leading twentieth century artist who was born in Moravia and studied in Bratislava at the Academy of Fine Art and Design. On the website there is a great video of his kinetic artwork.

He is a leading figure in the field of optical and kinetic art using drawing, painting and construction as a medium. His explorations of geometrical and optical illusion, which won him international recognition in the sixties, often use motion and changing light to create an aesthetic experience in the viewer.

Nancy and Alan examine the work of Milan Dobeš up close with the museum director and a patron.

This is modern art as I love it the best and I was in absolute heaven in this museum! Many of the works reminded me of my own early artwork done when I was a design student – but this was much, much better.
The private museum is housed in a 14th century residential building near the Michael Gate in the historic centre of Bratislava and is a must see for anyone visiting the city. It was established and supported with the continuing help of a small local group of devoted art lovers. The address is: Zámočnícka 13, 811 03 Bratislava, Slovakia.
In addition to the permanent exhibition of the Milan Dobeš art, works by other international artists are also on display, both from the museum’s permanent collection and from regular traveling exhibitions. One of the things I really like about the museum is that the rooms are so small and intimate, you feel you can get right up close to the works and really see how they were made.

After visiting the museum, we were invited to attend a concert by the very well known and deservedly loved Czech rock and blues musician Vladimír Mišík and his ETC band.

Though we understood not a word of what they were singing, we were entranced by their music and I felt as if I could understand everything. This was the band that opened for the Rolling Stones at their landmark concert in Prague in 1990 just after the Berlin Wall came down. Mick Jagger specially requested that they take part in their Urban Jungle tour.

I made a cell phone video of this remarkable band that you can watch on our YouTube Channel, or you can visit his website: www.vladimirmisik.cz

Alan

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