Paradise Lost? 200 years of Belgium’s love affair with glass

Paradise Lost? is a new exhibition at Meise Botanic Garden that traces 200 years of Belgian glasshouse architecture, from Alphonse Balat to today’s landscape architects.

There’s a particular kind of building that only Belgium’s 19th century could have produced: part greenhouse, part cathedral, built by men convinced they could rebuild Eden out of iron and glass. Meise Botanic Garden’s new exhibition, Paradise Lost? 200 Years of Perspectives on Nature and Architecture, takes that obsession as its starting point. And then asks whether we ever really got over it.

Running from 5 September to 25 October 2026 at Meise Botanic Garden, the show moves across three centuries in three parts: the history of the glasshouse, the artists it has inspired since, and the architects trying to answer its central question today.

A kingdom built on glass

The exhibition’s hinge figure is Alphonse Balat, the architect behind the Balat Greenhouse in Meise’s own Cronquist Garden and the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken (and, not incidentally, the man who trained Victor Horta). In the 19th century, greenhouses like his weren’t just places to keep plants alive through winter. They were status symbols, built by a newly industrialised Belgium flush with the confidence of empire and botanical conquest, sheltering exotic specimens brought home by plant hunters from across the globe.

That confidence didn’t survive the First World War. War damage, punishing heating costs, and a hard turn toward austere, functional architecture meant many of these glass palaces were quietly dismantled or left to rot. The exhibition’s opening section lays this arc out chronologically, drawing on digitised plans from the Royal Archives and rare international material. It tracks the rise of the conservatory as an idea, and its fall as a casualty of a harder century.

Three artists, one obsession

The exhibition’s second act turns to three Belgian artists who’ve each spent decades circling the same subject: the play of light through glass and iron.

François Schuiten, best known internationally for the Cités Obscures series he created with Benoît Peeters, grew up in a family of architects and has long treated 19th-century glass structures as living organisms rather than static buildings. Hans Soenen spent three years with privileged access to the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, producing his 160-piece Laeken Suite. It’s a body of work that shifted, over time, from careful realism toward something more abstract and searching. And Piet Bekaert (1939–2000), trained in Ghent, Paris and at New York’s Pratt Institute, considered himself a poet first and a painter second, though it was his paintings of orangeries and conservatories that brought him wider recognition.

All three are represented here through prints scaled up to three metres high. This is a way of putting the visitor inside the architecture the artists spent their careers observing.

Thirteen firms, one question

The third part of the exhibition turns from looking back to looking forward. Thirteen Belgian architecture and landscape practices are featured. They include Bas Smets (whose Building Biospheres project with Stefano Mancuso represented Belgium at the 2025 Venice Biennale), Robbrecht and Daem Architects (currently designing Meise’s own new Collection and Research Campus), and Binst Architects (reworking Brussels’ Muntcentrum with Snøhetta). Together they present projects that reimagine the relationship between architecture and nature.

The brief has shifted, though. Where Balat and his contemporaries built glasshouses to protect a handful of prized exotic species, today’s practices are mostly asking a bigger question: not how to preserve nature apart from us, but how to fold it back into how – and where – we live and work.

The Balat Greenhouse itself

The exhibition’s final section brings things back to where Balat started. Tucked into the Cronquist Garden, the Balat Greenhouse was his trial run before Laeken; smaller, but no less considered. For Paradise Lost, Schuiten and Soenen each produced a new drawing of the greenhouse, shown to the public for the first time, alongside a timeline tracing the building’s own history.

Practical information

• Paradise Lost? — Meise Botanic Garden: 5 September – 25 October 2026

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