Garden for a Plant Collector

The garden for a plant collector, constructed in close vicinity to Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed House of an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park Glasgow, pays tribute to a form of deranged horticulture and displays a heterotopia of plants which once and for all blurs the boundary between the natural and artificial. This horticultural extravaganza of exotic plants is cultivated in a minimalist designed glasshouse composed of layers of high-performance luminous glass. The glass house as archetype can be regarded as speculative architecture. In fact, the origin of the modern architecture is the 19th century glasshouse. Most important, Joseph Paxton who designed the Crystal Palace was not an architect, but a gardener determined to satisfy the speculative gardening of the British upper classes to cultivate the latest discoveries of horticultural eccentricities shipped from all four corners of Britain’s colonial empire. Until this day many of the trendy architectural jargon such as hybrid, rhizome, cloning etc are actually derived from horticultural vocabulary. There is of course, a paradox inherent in a glass house. It is a form, yet implicitly it is a desire to eliminate form.