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How architecture shelters species losing their habitats, from Kew to Svalbard
A designboom essay visits glasshouses, seed vaults, frog rooms and frozen cell banks built to keep vanishing life going.
This designboom essay starts with a single plant under the glass of Kew's Victorian Temperate House: Encephalartos woodii, a cycad known from one male found in South Africa in 1895. Every specimen alive is a clone of it, and Kew has tended its own since 1899. The glasshouse keeps the plant going, but it cannot find it a mate or bring back its forest. That raises the essay's question: what has actually been saved?
From there it moves through buildings designed to hold nature in. Grimshaw, Arup and Haley Sharpe Design are shaping the Oman Botanic Garden across 420 hectares at the foot of the Al Hajar Mountains, with two glass biomes cooled and shaded to recreate misty Dhofar forest and cooler northern slopes. At Jersey Zoo, fogging machines in a room of terrariums coax poison dart frogs to breed, though on a captive diet they lose their toxicity.
There are cold archives too. BVN's mirrored Australian PlantBank in Mount Annan lets visitors look into its laboratories, with more than 100 million seeds in a vault. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault runs more than 100 metres into Arctic rock, and its seeds helped rebuild collections disrupted by the war in Syria.
It is a thoughtful read rather than an itinerary, but Kew, Jersey and Mount Annan are all places you can go and see this work for yourself.
Our summary of a story from designboom, published 22 October 2026. Read the original
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