Greenhouse and Cabinet of Future Fossils

104, South 5th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

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Greenhouse and Cabinet of Future Fossils

104, South 5th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Firm

Jenny Sabin Studio LLC

Type

Cultural › Museum

YEAR

2011

A large Greenhouse and
Cabinet of Future Fossils designed by designer and artist Jenny Sabin of
Cornell University and the Jenny Sabin Studio now stands in the APS Thomas
Jefferson Garden. The centerpiece of five innovative APS Museum projects (The
Greenhouse Projects), this cutting-edge structure—the first of its kind—reinvents
the greenhouse using digital architectural tools. It is on display from September 9 through
December 3, 2011.
Like all of the five projects, Sabin’s greenhouse references
aspects of the Museum’s current exhibition, Of
Elephants & Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790-1830, and interprets
the show through a contemporary lens. The structure itself, including the Cabinet, is inspired by two
different “breeds” of naturalists in post-Revolutionary France. One was the explorer-naturalist who traveled
the world in search of exotic flora and fauna; the other was the stay-at-home
laboratory scientist who studied the materials gathered by others.
Sabin creates
both closed and open areas in her structure, alluding to the different kinds of
spaces used by these naturalists. Visitors enter on a “boardwalk” that leads
into a more enclosed space. There they discover the Cabinet of Future Fossils—a
riff on 18t-and 19th-century “cabinets” that were filled
with all kinds of stuffed specimens, skeletons, and curiosities. A high, arched
expanse curves up and over this inner space, leading visitors into an adjacent
area that is more open to the garden.
Enclosed but not confined, this space references the movement of
naturalists who left their studies behind and took to the high seas.
Sabin’s
greenhouse was also inspired by the structure of the early 19th-century
greenhouses featured in the exhibition—those at the Paris Muséum of Natural History and the one built by Empress Josephine at
her Malmaison estate outside Paris. But
Sabin’s work stands in striking contrast to those earlier models. Hers is a digitally generated, 21st-century
structure made of recycled materials, and it is wholly contemporary in purpose
as well as design. Rather than a space for scientists or Empresses, this
greenhouse contains within its walls 125 2’ x 2’ x 1’ transparent cold frames
(mini-greenhouses) for use by ordinary city dwellers.
The small rectangular,
lidded, colorful boxes recall the display vitrines of 19th-century
museums, elevating the plantings within them to the status of scientific
curiosities. Through workshops on urban gardening, the general public will
learn how to grow winter plants using the boxes that are perfectly suited to
urban spaces like patios and balconies. A limited number of these boxes will be
made available to workshop participants on a first-come, first-served basis.
The Cabinet of Future Fossils
inside Sabin’s greenhouse contains displays of evocative ceramic and 3D printed
objects that are digitally generated and produced. Like the fossil bones used
by French scientists in post-Revolutionary France to classify extinct mammoths
and mastodons, Sabin’s three-dimensional “future fossils” imply some future era that
will, in turn, look back on these artificially created “natural” curiosities
from the computer age. Sabin’s
referencing of fossil bones even extends to the overall form of the greenhouse
itself, as the vertical cross-ribs that support its walls cleverly echo the rib
cage of the huge extinct vertebrates whose fossils were all the rage in the
early 19th century.