A bridge made of glass

This building, a hundred and eleven metres long, went up in under two years, put together by a firm that normally built bridges, and you can tell.

The Palmenhaus opened in 1882, a skeleton of cast iron with thousands of panes of glass fitted between the bars, and at the time it ranked among the largest structures of its kind in Europe. Each of the three pavilions has its own climate, from cool in the side wings to tropical beneath the high central dome, and that same division is still the reason plants from three different continents stand side by side here.

It all started with a collection that had outgrown its space. Since the eighteenth century the Habsburgs, the imperial family that ruled Austria for centuries, had sent plant hunters all over the world, to the Caribbean and South Africa among other places, and whatever they brought back ended up here at Schönbrunn.

Heating this space used to swallow coal by the ton, and even today the energy bill is the building's biggest worry.

The smaller glass house next door has a completely different climate.