According to Wikipedia: "the idea of growing plants in environmentally controlled areas has existed since Roman times. The Roman emperor Tiberius ate a cucumber-like vegetable daily. The Roman gardeners used artificial methods (similar to the greenhouse system) of growing to have it available for his table every day of the year... Charles Lucien Bonaparte, a French botanist, is often credited with building the first practical modern greenhouse in Leiden, Holland to grow medicinal tropical plants."... According to the Dutch company Snelder - "The first horticultural greenhouses in the Netherlands were built around 1850 ... to grow grapes... the Netherlands have more greenhouses (24,710 acres) than any other country. Eighty percent of the glass greenhouses outside Europe come from the Netherlands."
The Dutch climate, unfavorable for growing crops beyond a single season, was very likely what drove this innovation. There it is: culture develops in fighting nature; in trying to outsmart nature.
In Spain I tried to find out when the first greenhouses "Invernaderos" arrived. They did in Almeria, where people now talk of a sea of plastic, as the main difference between the Spanish variant from the Dutch one is exactly the use of plastic instead of Glass. Glass was too expensive and not really necessary in Spain, whereas the heavy rainfall in the Netherlands -- and the culture to build -- made for glass the only option. Some sources say that the greenhouses in Almeria (the Andalusean region where the plastic greenhouses started) were built in the fifties as experiments, but massive exploitation started only in the mid seventies.
Greenhouses are one of the perfect examples of business architecture where new business development is solved by the architecture of a new sort of organization; only by means of the greenhouses - which were used before for other purposes in a more private atmosphere - the products (fruit and vegetables) could be grown irrespectively of the natural climate. Basically the new business development is more of the same but by extending the production possibilities.
Now we think these greenhouses are normal, but at the time it was quite an invention.
An alternative to the greenhouse would be to organize the production in a global company, where each production is managed in the best area in the season. Why one may wonder is the investment in greenhouses and the electricity required for heating a better way than building a plant in a country with a better climate and reserve the greenhouse-space in the other country (with the inappropriate climate) for other ways of production.
That is also business architecture. What do you produce and how do you organize it in the most efficient and effective way.
But there is more. Business architecture doesn't stop there. In Spain the plastic greenhouses foster a new challenge that of (environmental) waste management as tons of plastic is to be disposed off each year. And there seems to be more issues in the reflection of the sun of there plastic structures. The net effect on the climate is open to debate. The business architecture element in this issue is the fact that one business (company, greenhouse) impact on the (economic and physical) environment is different than a large and compounded area of greenhouses.
Copyright © 2009 Hans Bool
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