Palm House in Adelaide Botanical Gardens
The 1874-1875 built Palm House in the Botanic Garden of Adelaide is one of the oldest and most popular buildings of the Australian provincial capital. Its architect was Gustav Runge in Bremen . The glass and iron construction is significant as the only surviving structure of its kind from the Victorian era in Australia and an extremely early example of a building with a curtain wall .
Building history
The director of the Botanical Garden Richard Moritz Schomburgk , a German botanist, turned to the Bremen architect Gustav Runge , probably on the recommendation of Franz Buchenau , who had recently constructed a private palm house 63 m wide in Bremen-Oberneuland , which is now the model for the Australian plant. According to a design by Runge and in the workshop of the Bremen locksmith Johann Friedrich Höper, the individual parts, cast iron columns and steel profiles, were prefabricated and shipped to Adelaide in 1875 together with the made-up flat glass in 1875, a total of 24 tons. The glass house was officially opened on January 22, 1877. It had ended up costing £ 3,800 to build, transport, move earth, and sculpt. In 1986 the house was closed due to increasing corrosion damage and only reopened in 1995 after complete skeletonization, further renovations took place around 2020.
Building description
The palm house is a broad structure made of steel and glass that is transparent on all sides. A 12-step embankment protected the building, which was still in the floodplain in 1875, and provided space for the heating system. A glass cube with an edge length of a good 10 m forms the center of the system. An eight-sided dome with a flat conical roof rises from it. A glass portico emphasizes the central axis and marks the entrance zone. The glass house continues to the sides with two symmetrical wings. They are closed at the ends by polygonal exedra covered by half-domes. All roof and wall surfaces are glazed, a band with blue triangular motifs under the eaves is almost the only decorative motif.
Dimensions
Width: 30.5 m; Depth: 10.7 m; Dome height: 11.30 m
Architectural-historical significance
The palm house is in the tradition of European greenhouses, which had been developed especially in England since the first decades of the 19th century. The construction of cast-iron supports, wrought-iron framework and transparent glass surfaces was subsequently used for other building tasks, the best-known example is Paxton's Crystal Palace from 1851. Heated, glass greenhouses in botanical gardens , but also private parks, became a fad between 1840 and 1910 . Their prerequisites were given technically with the industrialization of rolled steel profiles and the more rational production of flat glass, logistically with the emergence of a railway network, politically with colonialism and in cultural history with an interest in the flora of tropical regions aroused by voyages of discovery and natural sciences .
There are no direct models for the shape of the palm houses in Bremen and Adelaide; however, the arrangement of connecting to a high, domed central hall, which offers space for tall tropical plants, is to be connected to the sides with simple, roofed, symmetrical wing structures, a traditional basic pattern in the history of the type of tropical house. What is new about the building in Adelaide, however, is to support the entire roof structure of the central hall with steel girders and to leave a column-free space open in the middle. The pillars and pillars moved to the edge are not integrated into the glass wall. Only at the level of the eaves edge do they support the supporting structure of the roof and hold the suspensions of the glass walls, which themselves have no load-bearing function. Gustav Runge curtain walls ( "curtain walls" ) are a surprisingly early example of a construction technique that was included in the standard repertoire of architects until the early 20th century.
literature
- Pauline Paine: The Diplomatic Gardener. Richard Schomburgk, explorer and Botanic Garden Director. Adelaide 2007, pp. 103-106.
- Alfred Löhr: A palm house from Bremen for Adelaide - and other Bremen greenhouses. In: Bremisches Jahrbuch Vol. 97, Bremen 2018, pp. 51–92
Individual evidence
- ↑ Georg Kohlmaier and Barna von Sartory: Das Glashaus, a building type of the 19th century. Munich 1981, p. 364 ff. - Stefan Koppelkamm: Artificial paradises. 19th century greenhouses and winter gardens. Berlin 1988, pp. 62-67.
- ↑ Wend Fischer : Security and freedom. About building with glass. Krefeld 1970, p. 153 ff.
Web links
Coordinates: 34 ° 55 ′ 4.8 ″ S , 138 ° 36 ′ 32.8 ″ E