On Greenhouses and the Making of Atmospheres

Abstract

This article focuses on the integration of nature in the built artifact, on the functions and meanings attributed to such integration in architectural thinking and practice as well as beyond the limits of the discipline. Divided into three sections, it explores the evolution of the greenhouse from a place of nature preservation to a vehicle of interdisciplinary experimentation of new ways of inhabiting the city; the ways that the integration of architecture with nature has manifested in twentieth-century design visionary projects by means of glazed, vegetated, controlled spaces; its intersection with theoretical discourses of human atmospheres. It therefore seeks to probe an architectural typology that influences a renewed understanding of the natural-cultural oppositional relation – of the conditions of being within, in between and together – particularly in the way it prompts new aesthetic, spatial and conceptual definitions of interiority, corporeality, and agency in architecture.