ABSTRACT
The contemporary industrial greenhouse is a sensing and sensorial machine: calibrating interior atmospheres, initiating thermal shifts, creating artificial suns, and adjusting fertilizer, water, and humidity. Greenhouse technologies abstract complex ecosystemic relationships to produce a perpetual growing season. Yet while these horticultural infrastructures are increasingly essential for global food supplies, their architecture reproduces many of the territorial conditions and extractive logics of global capitalism: colonizing landscapes, relying on fossil energy, and dependent on waste producing processes. Can these architectures instead offer alternatives to horticultural optimization, deploying new models of cultivation, care, and multi-species life? Greenhouse technologies simulate living ecologies, producing aesthetic effects that direct tie a climatological condition to an experiential one, suggesting pedagogical formats that relate the human to the environment in new ways. Through an analysis of case studies from art and architecture that interrogate—and reorient—the greenhouse, this paper imagines how these technologies can produce unexpected environmental encounters. Thinking through alternatives to planetary optimization, these projects redeploy the greenhouse as a critical life support system for precarious habitats and organisms, imagining a more entangled relationship between architecture and ecology.
