The Greenhouse Projects

The American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum launched The Greenhouse Projects—five large-scale and inventive public engagement projects associated with its exhibition on French natural history. These projects took place in fall 2011, outdoors in the APS garden—a part of Independence National Historic Park, which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. All of the programs were designed to create new opportunities for engaging contemporary audiences with historical stories, objects, and ideas. The projects included: a large-scale, environmentally-sophisticated greenhouse designed by architect and 2010 Pew Fellow Jenny Sabin, with a wall grid that housed digitally fabricated ceramic artifacts; Sketchbooks and Seedlings: A Paper Garden, a performance by director/designer/playwright Aaron Cromie; Chaotic Menagerie, a sound installation by musician/composer Kyle Bartlett, inspired by sounds associated with the exhibition; Ghost Gardens and Lost Landscapes, a geocaching treasure hunt throughout sites of past gardens or historical landscapes in urban Philadelphia; and a series of half-hour podcasts on connections between food culture and natural history: Tasteful Nature: French Cuisine and the Evolution of Modern Cooking (with recipes), produced by Lari Robling.

Video walk-through of Sabin's structure with selections from Kyle Bartlett's sound installation, Chaotic Menagerie. This was the same soundtrack visitors heard at the physical site of the greenhouse, made up of sounds and melodies that evoked themes from the museum's concurrent French natural history exhibition. Filmed by Greenhouse Media.

The APS Museum's time-lapse film of the greenhouse's construction in August 2011.