Eleanor Armstrong Smith Glasshouse (Cleveland Botanical Garden)

The Cleveland Botanical Garden traces back to the Garden Center of Greater Cleveland, founded on 4 December 1930 by the Garden Club of Cleveland in an abandoned boathouse at the Wade Park Lagoon. Repeated spring floods eventually pushed the organisation to relocate: in 1966 it moved to East Boulevard, onto the former Wade Park Zoo, the city's first zoo, which had operated from 1889 to 1907.

Renamed the Cleveland Botanical Garden in 1994, the institution carried out an expansion of about $50 million in the early 2000s, designed by Graham Gund Architects of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The programme comprised a reworked administration building, a new visitor centre and, as its centrepiece, the glasshouse, which was grafted onto the rear of the 1960s building and opened to the public in July 2003. It is named for Eleanor Armstrong Smith.

In 2014 the garden merged with the Holden Arboretum to form Holden Forests & Gardens, the body that now runs the glasshouse.

The architects describe the building as an "immersion glasshouse" grafted onto the back of the existing structure. Its outline draws on the geometry of quartz crystals: quadrilateral and triangular planes, tilted and faceted, lock together into a prismatic volume. Instead of a contemporary curtain wall, the structure uses lapped glass, following traditional conservatory methods. The SAH Archipedia entry sees in it a blend of the grandeur of Joseph Paxton's Victorian glasshouses and the formal daring of 1980s Deconstructivism.

The garden cites 3,400 panes of glass, roughly 738,000 pounds (over 330 tonnes) of steel and 20 tons of soil used to shape the habitats. Two separate biomes, each with its own regulated climate, call for very elaborate mechanical systems. The floor area is given as 17,000 sq ft by Wikipedia and as 18,000 sq ft by SAH Archipedia and in the portfolio of the firm Donley's.

The glasshouse holds more than 350 plant species and about 50 kinds of animals, including butterflies, birds, reptiles and amphibians.

The Costa Rica biome re-creates a cloud forest: tall trees, ever-blooming shrubs, bromeliads and orchids, together with avocado, coffee, papaya and cacao trees, the firecracker bush and a Juanulloa climber with orange trumpet-shaped flowers. A canopy deck lets visitors climb to the upper layer, and newly hatched butterflies are released there in season.

The Madagascar biome, billed as the "eighth continent", houses one of the largest baobab collections in the United States, the thick-stemmed Pachypodium brevicaule, Madagascar jasmine (Stephanotis floribunda) and endangered species, along with collared iguanas and three radiated tortoises.

The glasshouse occupies the rear of the Cleveland Botanical Garden's main building in University Circle, and about an hour is enough to see it. Tropical conditions are kept up all year round; the Costa Rica biome's butterfly releases, advertised as daily in season, run from April to October.

The Ron and Lydia Harrington Perennial Playspace, a permanent family exhibit, overlooks the tall plants of the glasshouse. A visit combines naturally with the ten acres of themed outdoor gardens, at their best in the warm months, and with the Wade Park setting where the institution began.