Garden-variety imperialism: Glasshouses and empire as art moyen

My contribution considers the early nineteenth century British suburban glasshouse and its associated aesthetic and cultural practices. Such structures represent an architecture at once physical, social, and epistemological for cultivating global “exotics” within an artificial environment adjacent to, but never part of, the domestic sphere. The mass-market glasshouse and its imaginary in popular circulating media open questions of who participates in practices of empire-, nation-, and race-crafting and to what ends. While glazed structures for the conservation of flora existed well before this key moment at the inauguration of Britain’s imperial century, industrial innovations combined with increased access to capital on the part of a growing middle class fueled a mass-marketing of the form and its commensurate performances of whiteness as a category imbricating class and ownership of land as a unique form of property. The suburban glasshouse acts as a vehicle through which empire becomes a mass cultural intervention, and it emerges as part of a larger cultural shift charting new political cartographies of consumption and empire and remapping what ownership of Britain’s increasingly expansive colonial properties looks like. Reexamining the origins and legacy of such seemingly innocuous structures today—and doing so not within the traditional narratives of modern architecture’s turn toward supposed structural rationalism but rather the aesthetic practices of empire—is essential to avoid exacerbating and reduplicating inequities of power and violences that have left large swatches of the formerly colonized world and its peoples to shoulder the disproportionate costs of environmental exploitation.