Garfield Park Conservatory
Steel-and-glass conservatory shaped like a prairie haystack, rebuilt with laminated glass after a shattering hailstorm.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Garfield Park Conservatory follows landscape architect Jens Jensen's 1906 vision of a conservatory shaped like a prairie haystack, built with the Prairie School firm Schmidt, Garden and Martin and filled with lagoons and stacked stone rather than pots on pedestals. You'll hear about the hailstorm that struck on June 30, 2011, shattering more than half the glass panes over the Fern Room and Show House and leaving two-hundred-year-old plants exposed to open sky. Listen for how the conservatory, once briefly the largest of its kind on earth, faced the long work of putting itself back together pane by pane.
This audio guide was created using AI.