Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Conserving
As a nerd, I tend to key in on the way that buildings and built spaces influence the way people behave in or around them. A stadium focuses energy and attention, but not quite the same way as a procenium theater or a classroom… an office has a different sense of space than a cube, and a natural forest usually feels different than a grove in a city park. But sometimes those city parks have spaces in them that change the relationship between inside and outside, exhibit and fixture, time and space. The old Conservatory is open again and I finally got to go yesterday. I’m not a big plants person; I like a beautiful arboretum and a nice forest, but I don’t grow potted plants or know their names or anything like that. Having so said, the Conservatory blew me away. The main room must be 50’ tall, with a 100 year old philodendron or some damn thing snaking in soft overlapping loops around concrete faux tree trunks. There are bamboo stalks that turn bright red, and when they catch the light stained by the jewelglass you can’t tell what’s real anymore. The building has two long wings, maybe 70 feet long on either side, all made of redwood frames, painted white, holding walls that curve up into ceilings, all glass, all painted white. The whole thing is more like a wedding cake than any other building I’ve visited, frosted and glistening in the sun. One wing has an exhibit of butterflies emerging from cucoons and filling a long, broad hall with their particolored effusions; three large models demonstrate how a fly, a butterfly, and a bat pollinate flowers. In this room, I think, they had an example of the Ghost orchid, or one that was damn like it and sufficiently ghostly to kind of freak me out. On the other side, through the cool humid room and into the hot zone at the east end, there’s a lilypond with a small over-lip waterfall all around it. Glazed urns overflow gently into pools resurfaced in green coruscating disc-like leaves, up to four feet across, that grow from the dark water below. At one point the side of the pond had been cut away and replaced with plastic, so I could view the wispy stems of the lotus and lily plants as they swept down through the water into one of several buckets on the bottom of the pool. That view wasn’t too enlightening. Better, was the view from the back of the lilypond, the peak of the white glass roof reflected in the green of the water, a sense of peace and calm, impossible plants, air hot and moist, and the people spoke in hushed tones, careful about closing doors, careful about respecting each other, each of us charged with the energy of all that living, that oxygen, the brightness and warmth and heartfilling affirmation, even there in that bizarre over-milled relic of a gaudy and effusive time - a relic, in this case, that irrefutably demonstrates that sometimes the old ways really are best, and some solutions don’t bear reworking. The victorian Conservatory is a celebration and a triumph. Come on over on a weekday (not monday, though, they’re closed), I’ll take off the afternoon and we’ll have a gander.
