Engineerring used to build tomato greenhouses on the cheap is being used for the temporary main pavilion for the Documenta 12 art exhibition which opens in Kassel, Germany (north of Frankfurt) on June 16. Three-quarters of the contemporary art (140 artists) at the 100-day expo will be displayed in a sprawling 31,000-square-foot art greenhouse, erected on the front lawn of Kassel's Orangerie palace. The greenhouse is a plastic version of the Crystal Palace, an all-glass 1851 London building which introduced the world to transparent walls and roofs. Mass-produced tubes resemble the Crystal Palace's cast-iron arches and polycarbonate sheeting its all-glass walls.
The building's architects have been huffing about modifications to their design that ensure the greenhouse doesn't cook up the art inside. Curtains and a ceiling made of gauze fabric containing thin strips of aluminium that exclude the rays of the sun have been added, as have huge ventilation pipes and pumps to extract excess solar heat.
