conservatory of flowers, golden gate park, san fra

Posted by gene (patterson, United States) on 10 January 2008 in Architecture and Portfolio.

In 1845 British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel abolished the tax on glass. At that time window glass was made by blowing a balloon shaped bubble of glass and then the bottom was flattened. The flattened surface was then cut into a window. This was expensive, took a lot of time and large sheets of glass were impossible to make. Then in 1847 James Hartley perfected a system of rolling hot glass to make plate glass. He became Britain’s largest glass maker. In 1816 a Scottish garden designer, John Claudius Loudon, designed a new kind of wrought-iron glazing bar for greenhouses. This combination of these inventions and the repeal of the glass tax, made possible the construction of larger and larger greenhouses culminating in the Palm House in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England.1 The San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers was constructed between 1887-1879 with money from the James Lick estate and designed after the Kew Garden Palm House. The conservatory has had disastrous fires and earth quake damage over the years. A $25 million reconstruction project beginning in 1999 lead to the reopening of greenhouse in September of 2003. It is considered a world monument.

1 From Jim Endersby, A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology
www.conservatoryofflowers.org/index.htm