The Eastern Glasshouse

At the Station it is important for us to name the things we have around. To name is to possess, said writer Jamaica Kincaid, however, maybe it can also mean to re-appropriate, to keep close, to understand one’s limits. The Eastern Glasshouse is the name of the construction at the Station that takes further the mission of the Tranzit Orangerie, part of the tranzit space in Bucharest, which was to offer a space for fragile plants and ideas. The Glasshouse, conceived on the walipini principle of semi-buried greenhouses, which benefit from the heat of the ground, realised by a team of craftsmen from Iasi, integrates, on a metallic welded structure, secure glass panels produced in Medias, Romania, in the 1990s and used by a horticultural engineer for his own, now dismantled, greenhouse, not far from our place. These glass panels have protected crops for over two decades, now it is our turn to use them.

The Glasshouse is Eastern because it is not perfect, the craftsmen were not experts, the glass panels did not have equal sizes, the earth works and moves the structure, at the same time, its mission, besides sheltering the plants that cannot yet survive outside, is to offer hospitality, a place for understanding that shelter is only possible in symbiosis with the wider ecosystem.

The East is a space of imagination, a space we still need to take back from the mantra of transition based on concrete, office buildings, and efficiency.