The Palm House at Kew Gardens in West London was the beating heart of the British botanical empire. Vena Cava reclaims the Palm House as a site for generative justice, substituting its ideologies of extraction and domination for ones of circularity and repair. In place of the Palm House’s iron and glass construction, often seen as foreshadowing a new age of building design and construction, Vena Cava is formed from a timber frame.
The structure itself is left empty. In this way, Vena Cava turns the Palm House inside out, probing the possibility of a reparative architecture emerging from the rhythms of material life-cycles and their politics of ecological restitution.
Collaborators: Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil.
‘It's a way of moving the debate about decarbonisation, the built environment and sustainability, beyond just questions of materials, and instead connecting them into the history, both of architecture and of colonisation. And how those intertwined phenomena and practices have shaped how we see the world around us.’
Curatorial Team