The 18th London Design Festival took place from September 12-20, 2020. It was the first international design event to take place since the coronavirus pandemic forced the world into lockdown. Its Landmark Project, ‘The Hothouse’ – by London-based architectural practice Studio Weave – is an institutional greenhouse structure designed to be a commentary on climate change.
Located in Stratford in Redman Place near the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, ‘The Hothouse’ also pays homage to the district’s history as an edible fruit-growing hotspot. The community occupies 1,300 acres across 20 miles along the Lee Valley corridor. The entire stretch used to be home to greenhouses that grew exotic fruits and ornamental plants and flowers.
Je Ahn, the founding director of Studio Weave, told Dezeen:
“I live in Homerton, next door to Stratford, and knew that the Lea Valley had the world’s largest density of greenhouses in the 1930s. This area supplied a huge amount of exotic fruits, like grapes and cucumbers – that was in my mind.
It has always been important to us to consider context and how the building is responding to the surrounding landscape and how the landscape is responding to the building. So, the building does not stand on its own; it stands on the site’s history and people’s memory of the site. So, we are very aware of this from the early stages of our projects.”
Ahn also said in a conversation with STIR:
“The area that this installation is in is a new part of the city. It has quite a history of being a very productive ground; it had the largest concentration of greenhouses in the world in the 1930s and provided many exotic fruits at the time. That got me thinking about what the place has become now. As a thriving new part of the city, with new parks, new houses, new offices, it now has more of a hard landscape. This got me wondering what will happen to it in the future, what are we talking about here, what is our relationship with the natural world going to be? We wanted to make a commentary on that through the selection of plants.”
‘The Hothouse’ structural design pays homage to Victorian glasshouses. The controlled habitat within allows for the cultivation of plants that wouldn’t ordinarily grow in the UK’s climate but will if the planet continues to warm.
Je Ahn explained further:
“We wanted to create something with an organic feeling that seems to be growing out of the ground. It has the optimum shape for achieving the climate we wanted; tall in the middle with entrances at either side that allow it to draw hot air up to the top, which can be released if it gets too hot.”
Landscaper Tom Massey designed the planting, including tropical plants like avocado, chia seed, chickpea, guava, gourd, lemon, loquat, mango, orange, pineapple, pomegranate, quinoa, sugarcane, and sweet potato. All these species that can’t grow outdoors in the UK now will be able to by 2050 if climate change continues.
While getting to have tropical fruits in the UK doesn’t sound like a bad thing, just imagine what’s happening to the hotter parts of the world where those plants actually grow. That’s a scary reality.
The installation’s purpose is to show the effects of climate change in a more tangible manner. The designers thought that if people could experience it personally, they’d better understand the crisis. Design can be a powerful tool to combat climate change if used to educate people and provide more eco-friendly products.
Ahn said:
“It’s meant to remind people of the relationship we have with nature – we want people to engage with the structure and the plants.”
However, Studio Weave was aware that the pavilion was to be built during the COVID-19 pandemic, so people probably wouldn’t be able to go inside. For this, they designed it to be engaging from the exterior, enclosing the structure with transparent CNC-cut recyclable plastic to make sure the plants were visible. Even at night, the pavilion is lit to draw attention to the planting.
Ahn explained:
“We knew that not too many people would be able to go inside, so we made sure people could engage with the plants from the outside. We made the covering from the clearest material we could find – it’s a large version of an Edwardian Terrarium.”
‘The Hothouse’ is demountable with no permanent foundations. It will remain on display for a few more months before being dismantled and relocated to a yet unknown, permanent location.
