Garfield Park Conservatory

In the early twentieth century Chicago's West Park Commission decided to replace three small Victorian glasshouses from the 1880s, scattered across Humboldt, Douglass and Garfield parks, with a single and far larger conservatory. The commission dates from 1905, design and construction took place in 1906–1907, and the building opened in 1908, receiving the plants from the three older houses. The team brought together landscape architect Jens Jensen, the Chicago architects Schmidt, Garden and Martin, and the New York engineering firm Hitchings and Company. It was billed as the largest publicly owned conservatory under one roof in the world, and by the late 1920s it was drawing around half a million visitors a year.

In the 1940s and 1950s the roofs were reglazed with fiberglass panels. After decades of neglect, a multimillion-dollar restoration began in 1994, and the non-profit Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance was formed to help maintain the building and run its programmes. The roofs were brought back to their original glass design, and a new vestibule by Booth Hansen was added in 1998.

On June 30, 2011, a hailstorm shattered much of the glass over the display rooms and production houses. Part of the conservatory reopened on July 3, 2011, the Fern Room on December 1, 2011, and the remaining areas on January 24, 2012. The institution received the National Medal for Museum and Library Services in 2012 and was named one of AIA Illinois's "Illinois 200 Great Places" in 2018.

The conservatory broke with its nineteenth-century predecessors. Rather than showing potted plants on benches, Jensen composed naturalistic landscapes in which plants grow directly in the ground among layered stonework, lagoons and cascades, an approach summed up as "landscape art under glass."

The steel-and-glass complex is made up of interconnected buildings: seven according to the Society of Architectural Historians, eight rooms according to the Chicago Park District. At the front stands the Palm House, the largest, about 65 feet (20 m) high and 90 feet (27 m) wide; its rounded profile was meant to recall the haystacks of the Midwest and sit comfortably in a prairie landscape. Behind it lies the Fern Room, a large gable-roofed hall, followed by smaller houses with a variety of roof forms.

The operator gives about two acres (roughly 0.8 hectare) of public greenhouse space. After the 2011 hailstorm, five renovated display rooms were reglazed with laminated glass.

The Palm House holds more than seventy palms and other warm-climate plants arranged around a reflecting pool. The Fern Room, Jensen's own design, evokes Illinois as it might have looked in prehistoric times: ferns, mosses, liverworts and cycads, some of them more than two hundred years old, rise around a lagoon and rock outcrops.

The Desert House displays cacti and succulents from Africa, Asia and the Americas, from living stones to large century plants. The Aroid House gathers shade-loving plants of the rainforest floor, the wild forms of many familiar houseplants, around a pool set with Dale Chihuly's yellow glass lily pads. "Sugar from the Sun," opened in 2008, explains photosynthesis with the help of fruiting bananas. A double coconut palm, the species with the heaviest seed of any plant, grown here since 1959, died in February 2012. The Show House stages the spring and winter flower shows.

The conservatory stands at the edge of a 184-acre park on Chicago's West Side, about five miles from downtown, a short walk from the Conservatory–Central Park Drive station on the Green Line. Entry is by timed reservation.

One to two hours is enough for the indoor rooms. In summer more than ten acres of outdoor gardens open as well, including the City Garden, the Demonstration Garden, the Sensory Garden and the Artist's Garden, the setting for the summer flower show. The spring show, running from February into May, and the winter holiday show in the Show House are the high points of the year, and the Elizabeth Morse Genius Children's Garden offers a hands-on space for younger visitors.