Alphonse Balat – { feuilleton }

Photo by Roberto Verzo.

If the Schönbrunn Palm House, Vienna, lacks the elegance of Alphonse Balat’s beautiful Winter Garden in Brussels, the structure does have a distinct style of its own. Roberto Verzo’s Flickr views manage to hide the visitors and background details, giving the impression that the building might be larger than it is. Much as I’d love these places to have a Piranesian grandeur à la Schuiten the reality is somewhat diminished. The Palm House was built in the 1880s from a design by Franz Xaver Segenschmids, and is another royal palace adjunct. According to the Schönbrunn palace website this one is more visitor-friendly than the Laeken greenhouses, being open to the public all year round.

• The Schönbrunn Palm House at Wikimedia Commons
• The Schönbrunn Palm House at Flickr

Photo by RobertG.

Photo by Friedrich Böhringer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken
• Arcades panoramas
• Arcades
• The art of François Schuiten
• Passage des Panoramas
• Passages 2
• Passages

The Winter Garden, photo by William Helsen.

My arcades fetish has been aired here a few times to which one might add a complementary fetish for iron-and-glass structures in general, especially railway stations, palm houses and winter gardens. The Royal Greenhouses at Laeken, Brussels, are an impressive example of the latter, even if they happen to owe their existence to King Leopold II whose barbaric exploitation of the Congo is recounted in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Alphonse Balat was the architect of the central Winter Garden built between 1874 and 1876, and reading up on him it turns out that the celebrated Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta was one of Balat’s apprentices. Horta never had the opportunity to create anything this extravagant, unfortunately, but if he had the results may have resembled one of the structures created by François Schuiten for his greenhouse city of Calvani (below), a metropolis of the Obscure World. Schuiten is a resident of Brussels and we’re told that one of the earthly “Passages” to the Obscure World can be found at the Royal Greenhouses. The building is only open to the public during April and May each year, however, so anyone looking for a route to Schuiten’s world may be better off searching elsewhere.

• The Royal Greenhouses at Wikimedia Commons
• The Royal Greenhouses at Flickr