London, United Kingdom

“This is a place and a project that literally unfolds. You step through this bewitchingly beautiful garden and discover an object that starts like a jewel and ends like a crown, as the Glasshouse slowly unfurls,” states Thomas Heatherwick.

“I think it also speaks of our need to keep creating amazing pasts. Weaving contemporary inventions into the fabric of historic settings and having the confidence to let each one speak to the other.”

Thomas Heatherwick’s Woolbeding Glasshouse, designed in collaboration with The Woolbeding Charity and The National Trust and created on the historic Woolbeding Estate in England, is an “opening” glasshouse featuring structural sepals that can open and close to provide natural ventilation whilst maximizing sunlight exposure for the plants inside as well as providing a heated environment when the “sepals” are closed.

The National Trust’s Woolbeding Gardens is part of a historic estate in West Sussex.

This unfolding structure provides the focal point to a new garden that reveals how much the ancient Silk Route has influenced the English gardens of today. 

It features ten steel “sepals” with glass and aluminum façade which take four long minutes to open, creating an immense 141m2 space in the shape of a crown.

“This Heatherwick Glasshouse represents the cutting edge of technical design and engineering but it’s also a restoration of something that is part of Woolbeding’s history,” says Mark Woodruff of The Woolbeding Charity.

The project is commissioned by The Woolbeding Charity and the National Trust in an attempt to create a garden that will offer an educational journey, showcasing plants in a geographical sequence of their origin from Europe to Asia.

The Glasshouse draws inspiration from the spirit of Victorian ornamental terrariums deploying cutting-edge engineering to provide a functional protective structure while at the same time offering a beguiling, decorative element to the new Silk Route Garden.

The architect uses a series of hydraulic rams to lower the triangular petals or sepals in an elegant and all-but-silent four-minute dance.

At full stretch, sepals sit at the same angle as the glass sides of the base, creating a kind of glass crown. 

In order to be functional, the glasshouse has to shield umbrella trees, magnolias, and banana trees against harsh winter winds and rain but be open to the elements when they are calmer and kinder.

That demand presented the engineering and aesthetic challenge Heatherwick needed. 

Heatherwick wanted to do more than create a frame for open-and-close windows but, rather, to create a structure that fully bloomed on demand, offering its “occupants” clear blue skies.

The glasshouse accommodates subtropical plant species that make use of the environmental protection that the glasshouse offers.

The primary challenge of the structure was to ensure that the building could handle that shifting center of gravity and that the sepals achieved a weather-proof seal when closed and didn’t get in any kind of tangle in the blossoming process. 

Leaf-skeleton engravings on ground-level grills and a metal door handle shaped after an actual bamboo adds to the glasshouse’s steampunk air transforming the glasshouse into a retro sci-fi structure.

“The Victorian glasshouses were these really gorgeous structures and in some way the forerunner of modern buildings and high-tech architecture in the way they used glass and metal,” states Thomas Heatherwick.

The Woolbeding Glasshouse, funded by The Woolbeding Charity and the National Trust, is a permanent tribute to a particular architectural legacy and an attempt to create something like it.

“The Georgians and Victorians were such prolific builders and those buildings, in their adaptability, flexibility and their cherish-worthiness, have proved to be arguably the most sustainable buildings in history,” Heatherwick proposes.

“Now the average life of a commercial building is 40 years, which is environmentally terrible. But the real terror is that we end up just protecting history and not making new history. I hope that we don’t lose our confidence to make new things that might have some of the qualities and values of the things that we cherish from the past.”

The new glasshouse and gardens continue the journey to re-imagine the spaces at Woolbeding, creating a garden of horticultural wonder and delight for the 21st century. 

“The gardens and parklands of the National Trust are as much about the future as they are about the past. The amazing Heatherwick Glasshouse in the new Silk Route Garden is a fantastic example of this – a wonderful reminder of the historic horticultural legacy we are all so connected to in our gardens today, and simultaneously providing a symbolic reminder of our commitment to and belief in tomorrow,” adds Andy Jasper, Head of Gardens and Parks for the National Trust.

“The Woolbeding project has been an incredible example of technical and horticultural design brilliance. It’s been fantastic working with Heatherwick Studio, Stewart Grimshaw, and the whole project team, and it’s been an inspiring journey that we hope will equally inspire our visitors. It is a chance not only to discover the many stories of owners, gardeners, and designers who left their mark but also experience the excitement and wonder of new designs and ideas.”

Project: Woolbeding Glasshouse
Architects: Heatherwick Studio
Lead Architect: Thomas Heathewick
Client: Stewart Grimshaw, The National Trust, and The Woolbeding Charity
Photographers: Hufton+Crow and Raquel Diniz