Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

Between 1722 and 1728, the design of the pleasure garden
to the south was begun. In an extension of the west wing
of the castle, three orangeries were created — an additional
fourth in the westernmost part of the circle houses — and
from 1724 the first greenhouses. Three trips by Margrave
Karl Wilhelm to the United Netherlands were decisive for
the beginning of the Karlsruhe greenhouse tradition. With
the simplest technical means, and thanks to the greenhouse
effect and the use of heating, these constructions
were able to trap solar energy to create an artificial climate
for the purpose of reproducing the natural living conditions
of tropical plants and animals so that they might survive
in a hostile European environment. The baroque preference
for exotic plants and animals is all too often — as in the
case of Karlsruhe and Margrave Karl Wilhelm — misunderstood
as a harmless hobby. The exotic worlds of European
glass houses, in which the environmental conditions of
America, Africa, and Asia were reproduced and represented,
aimed not only at a scientific mastery of nature through
botany and zoology, but also at a political, economic, and
cultural hegemony over colonized territories.
From today’s perspective the decision to found Karlsruhe at
a distance of about eight kilometers from Europe’s largest
river and inland waterway is surprising. At the beginning
of the eighteenth century, however, this decision was welladvised,
because of the then fundamentally different topography
of the landscape between the Black Forest and the
Rhine. Due to the swamps and river branches and the immediate
danger of flooding, only a small portion of previously
undeveloped land was considered appropriate for the founding
of a safe and healthy new city. The terrain on the south­
C John Claudius Loudon, Concentric
expansion plan for London, alternating
rings of city and public
gardens or countryside (1829)
D Map of the riverbanks of the
Kinzig-Murg-Rinne between the Black
Forest and Rhine River (o.D.)
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Diskurs