Architecture where The Desire may Live: June 2010

‘Subterranean LABORATORY for cloning orchids’

This project questions whether the existance of an aesthetic desire can trigger a desire to create something beyond the object or image itself. This idea is investigated through the metaphor of the orchid, an aesthetically beautiful object that is known to provoke responses of obsession and desire. The project takes living organism-orchids- from which the framework for potential architectures of desire are constructed. It is supposed that through this, we ,may find a place where where the desire may live and learn what an architecture of desire could be.

The subterranean Laboratory is the place to clone orchids which explores the underground cave as a representational model of Desire which had never been fully achieved by an eccentric plant dealer and nurseryman John Laroche who is the main character of the true story of beauty and obsession written by the journalist Susan Orlean’s book ‘The orchid Thief’.

The inspiration to construct The subterranean Laboratory is the architecture of desire for John Laroche. He had lost his own plants and had a desire to open his own nursery again and to build a laboratory for cloning orchids. (The story was used as the basis of the 2002 film Adaptation.)

> Story:

New orchids are being created in laboratories or discovered every day, and others exist only in tiny numbers in remote places. To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species will die before even coming close.... John Laroche passion have started when he was growing up, little boy and his mother would hike through the Fakahatchee Strand and other South Florida swamps, looking for unusual things . Sometimes they would tag orchids that were in bloom and come back a few months later to see if they had formed any seeds. For a while, Laroche's passion was to photograph every single species of orchid in bloom in Florida; he and his mother would trudge through the swamp, carrying cameras, for hours on end. As he got older, Laroche went from wanting pictures of orchids to wanting orchids themselves. In 1983 when he was twenty-three, and that same year he and his wife opened a nursery in North Miami. He had dozens and dozens of orchids. Laroche particularly enjoyed cloning them and mutating them. He also figured out how to propagate certain species that had rarely been propagated in a laboratory. Day and night, people would drop by his house to talk about plants and to admire his collection. People would give him plants in exchange for his leading them on hikes through the Fakahatchee just so they could look at a plant that interested them.

John Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors. But he lost his own plants after the calamitous frost in South Florida in 1989 which killed orchids and other plants in greenhouses all around the country. After this accident he decided then and there that he would die of a broken heart if he ever opened his own nursery again.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida, didn't have a nursery, but the idea of starting one was among many self-help projects contemplated by the tribe. Laroche was hired by the tribe. He decided to make the nursery something spectacular. He also wanted to build a laboratory for cloning orchids. He was not interested in corsage orchids: he wanted to cultivate rare endangered species that are now available only on the black market. If he succeeded, he would wreak havoc on the illegal plant trade.

After he was hired by the Seminoles, Laroche's new passion became Indian law. He spent hours in the University of Miami law library. He studied the State of Florida's case against the Miccosukee Indians for poaching palm fronds. When his research was done, Laroche was convinced he had found a loophole in the state code which exempted Seminoles from laws protecting rare plants.

In 1994 Laroche had been arrested along with a crew of Seminoles for poaching rare orchids out of the wild swamp of South Florida. He set off one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native American activists, and devoted orchid collectors. The result is a tale that is strange, compelling, and hilarious.

John Laroche after this case had won and lost. He had found the loophole in the law but lost the case; found the orchids but lost the right to keep them; and found himself famous but slightly disgraced.

Orlean, Susan. January 23, 1995. ‘Orchid Fever’. The New Yorker.

What subterranean cave can offer? What is special about it? Is it the best place for orchids, would it be the right environment for them? Why?

The inspiration for this chosen underground cave location as possibility of future botanical cultivation came from Francesco Trabucco‘s project ‘A Flower Factory for the Caves Beneath Naples‘. Particulary relevant his views on using special equipment and architectural design to transform cave into ornamental flower laboratory : ‘a sterile laboratory, set up at the system entrance, in which plant cloning and micropropagation are conducted. Successful shoots are then placed in growth chambers until they are large enough to transplant to trays, which have holes that are sized and spaced according to the morphology of the individual plants‘. (Trabucco,1988).According to Trabucco, from this special place, these flowers grown in such unique architectural circumstances would be harvested, pruned, crated, and shipped all over the world—and probably no one would know their actual origin.

As Francesco Trabucco, one of Zanuso's collaborators on the project, wrote in Rassegna's underground issue, the project was for:
‘The operating principle of the phytotron involves creating and monitoring the optimum microenvironment for plant growth: temperature, air humidity, lighting, photoperiodism and nutrition. At the same time, all negative factors tied to the natural environment are eliminated, i.e. climatic variation, the unpredictability of precipitation, variability in the length of the solar day, and—naturally—air and water pollution, and infestation by plants and animals. In the conditions created inside a phytotron, a plant grows at a pace that can be accelerated, with the complete absence of pollutants that are now widely present in plants grown 'naturally,' such as weed killers, insecticides, pesticides, acid rain, smog deposits and chemical fertilizers.
It's basically an underground greenhouse, of course, but a fully automated one forming its own subterranean microclimate. The botanical results are not tomatoes, corn, wheat, or cucumbers, however, but prize flowers.
It's a kind of cultivated series of entombed precision-microclimates powered by a surrogate sun‘.

(Cited from: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/flower-factory-in-caves-beneath-naples.html)