Designed to protect and propagate exotic plants from around the world, the nineteenth-century glasshouse was a topos for environmental concerns. While historians have pointed to the confluence of glasshouse horticulture and the rise of environmental thought in architecture, how and why these transfers took place is not well understood. In On the Horticultural Origins of Victorian Glasshouse Culture, Dustin Valen examines how gardening informed architectural production in nineteenth-century England by transmitting Victorian science into building culture. He explores how gardening periodicals and books served as vehicles for environmental and scientific thought, and how “artificial climates” made by horticulturalists were reinscribed in debates over human health and transformed into “medical climates” in architecture. Bridging these disciplinary boundaries, the glasshouse played a key role in the emerging environmental paradigm in architecture by crossbreeding building practices with scientific knowledge and illustrating how mechanical solutions could be applied to living problems.
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December 2016
Research Article|
December 01 2016
On the Horticultural Origins of Victorian Glasshouse Culture
Dustin Valen
Dustin Valen
McGill University
Dustin Valen is a doctoral candidate in architectural history whose research addresses the cultural history of architectural and landscape modernism. His interests include the social and political history of landscape in preconfederation Newfoundland, nineteenth-century scientific horticulture, and midcentury architectural modernism in Canada. dustin.valen@mail.mcgill.ca
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2016) 75 (4): 403–423.
Citation
Dustin Valen; On the Horticultural Origins of Victorian Glasshouse Culture. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2016; 75 (4): 403–423. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2016.75.4.403
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