Clouds of mist part in the mountains of Lin’an (临安), China to reveal a fragment of reptilian skin. A mass of translucent scales emerges from the sublime landscape dotted with smaller structures. Footage of the building went viral in 2023 as viewers questioned what such a monumental structure was doing in a remote village. Who designed it? How did it get there? The building has been compared to SANAA’s Tsuruoka Cultural Hall and Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton Foundation for its dynamic roofscape and ethereal materiality. The building is, in reality, a conglomeration of greenhouses that grow bayberries. The bayberry greenhouses were not authored by a sole architect; instead, their form is a consequence of converging ecological, material, and political forces.
The bayberry, or yang-mei (杨梅), is a fruit that has been cultivated for more than 2,000 years in China. This small, juicy fruit, similar in profile to a lychee, possesses a soft and edible skin. Over the last few decades, advancements in cultivation techniques have led to surging production, with about 865,000 acres devoted to its cultivation in 2007: roughly double the acreage used for apple production in the United States. The bayberry is a staple crop of cultural significance in China. The fruit is usually eaten fresh, but it is also commonly made into juices, jams, dried fruit, and candies. The yang-mei can also be infused into a Chinese wine called baijiu (白酒) that was traditionally enjoyed while relaxing on a boat. The red fruit and its green leaves have even been worn as decorative hair ornaments by women in folk culture celebrations.
The bayberry fruit grows on evergreen trees that can reach heights of ten to twenty meters. With a typical floor-to-ceiling height of about three meters in buildings with human occupancy, the bayberry tree necessitates the construction of greenhouses that can soar to seven stories high, contributing to a sense of monumentality. The trees feature a uniform crown that grows to fill a spherical volume. For optimal growth, trees must be planted at least three meters apart. Ideally, the width of the bay should correspond to a module of this plant spacing. The bayberry requires ample sunlight and prefers warm, subtropical climates. As a dioecious species, it produces male and female flowers on separate plants, necessitating proximity between these sexes for successful pollination – a crucial process that influences yield. Maintaining a balanced distribution of pollinating male trees and fruit-bearing female trees is an important consideration in effective bayberry cultivation.
Despite its long history of cultivation in China, the bayberry has struggled to establish itself in the United States, primarily due to challenges in growing conditions and import restrictions. The fruit’s presence in the US is largely confined to its juice, marketed as “yumberry,” which has gained attention for its antioxidant-rich properties and health appeal. The bayberry’s journey to the US exemplifies what Francesca Bray and others have termed the cropscape — a matrix of interconnected forces that condition the movement of a specific crop.1 In 2012, scientist Yunfei Chen teamed up with importers to bring bayberry trees outside of China to the San Francisco Bay Area. The imported trees only managed to survive a year, but he salvaged some pieces to graft onto his own backyard seedlings, developing “elite varieties” of bayberry trees that finally bore fruit in 2015. Chen’s bayberries now sell in a gourmet San Francisco grocery store for $59.99. The crop instigates humans to play a role in its movement.
Nestled in the foothills of Hangzhou’s suburbs is a striking bayberry greenhouse. Aside from exterior photographs and drone footage circulating online, the structure lacks comprehensive documentation. Satellite imagery accessed from Google Earth lacks three-dimensionality, perhaps due to China’s restrictions on publicly accessible information. Despite my best efforts to locate the bayberry greenhouse on a map, I initially wasn’t able to find it. Structures go up rapidly in China and the satellite imagery can be outdated. Or, I thought, maybe the little information I found on the internet about the bayberry greenhouse being in Lin’ an, Hangzhou was inaccurate. At my wit’s end, I contacted the photographer Kejia Mei, who published the images of the greenhouse that went viral online. He graciously guided me using longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates rather than a typical street address. The language differences can make searching for streets and villages in China quite difficult, and the greenhouse itself doesn’t have a distinct street-facing entrance. My attempt to analyze a poorly documented building reflects an ambition to broaden the body of architectural knowledge to include built works from around the globe. There is much to learn from buildings and their sites without cutting into them through orthographic drawing.
In our increasingly digitized world, the potential for mistranslation gives rise to new possibilities. A reliance solely on pristine images constrains our understanding; to anticipate change, we must be able to cipher meaning from low-resolution, ill-defined fragments – what Hito Steyerl calls the “the poor image.”2The future is increasingly unknown and propels at an accelerating pace. The poor images that circulate rapidly online may provide clues to how architecture should be mobilized today.
The satellite image of the bayberry greenhouse shows how the structural bays follow the topography of the hillside. The massing faces the southeast, with the elevational differences producing clerestory conditions, increasing the amount of sunlight that can penetrate the greenhouse. The bayberry thrives under full sun. The patchwork quality of the building suggests that it was built in phases, starting from the northern tip and then expanding down to the south. Ethereal traces of structure amid the surrounding trees indicate potential expansion toward the northeast, wrapping around the hillside. The presence of trees overlapping with white lines of building structure is strange. Typically, sites are cleared of vegetation before being built upon. The coexistence of vegetation with architectural evidence might be a consequence of imaging error, where different satellite images overlay each other chronologically. Another more fantastical possibility lies in the planning process of constructing the greenhouse.
What if lines are directly drawn on the landscape to map out a structure that matches the idiosyncratic topography accurately without the need for complex surveys? Drawing directly on the landscape eliminates scalar translations, streamlining the processes between survey, drawing, and construction.Greenhouses are uniquely designed to sit directly on the earth, allowing plant roots to engage with the soil beneath, reinforcing the connection between architecture and landscape. Off-the-shelf greenhouses typically lack flooring, facilitating direct contact with the land. While gravel and pavers are commonly added as flooring, their porous nature maintains access to the soil beneath. The siting of the bayberry greenhouse in a Zhejiang hillside is perfectly suited to the natural growing conditions of the bayberry plant. Before the bayberry was farmed, it was harvested from the wild for 5,000 years. The fruit grows on bushy evergreens that thrive in the otherwise infertile hillsides of warm, humid areas from the southwest regions of China. The plant tolerates poor acidic soils and its root system can grow up to sixty cm (about two feet) deep. To construct the bayberry greenhouse directly on suitable ground, rather than artificially constructing those conditions on an elevated floor, is to materialize a site-specific relationship between the earth and architecture.
Greenhouses consist of modular frames with translucent membranes that enclose the interior. They are an extremely mobile and expandable type of architecture. The Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, was a groundbreaking implementation of cast iron and plate glass structure. The building enclosed more than 92,000 square meters of exhibition space and was erected in thirty-nine weeks for under £150,000 (roughly equivalent to £17,767,000 today). In accomplishing this feat, it is no coincidence that the building’s designer, Joseph Paxton, was a renowned gardener. The lightweight and modular system of horticultural greenhouse construction was perfect for the function of a grand, temporary event. It was capable of conveying monumentality to a worldwide audience and then being disassembled and deployed elsewhere.
My use of the term “monumentality” draws from Wu Hung’s Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (1995), where he defines how monumentality “denotes memory, continuity, and political, ethical, or religious obligations to a tradition.”3 Monumentality, then, is not just about physical presence; it conveys a monument’s social, political, and ideological significance. Thus, the relationship between monumentality and the monument itself is akin to that of content and form. He points out that “all three major traditions of Chinese art and architecture – the ancestral temple and ritual vessels, the capital city and palaces, the tomb and funerary paraphernalia – resulted from large religious or political projects,” emphasizing that these monuments were designed not to please a sensitive viewer but to remind the public of their beliefs and actions. 4 In a similar vein, China’s contemporary planning goals express the desire to bridge rural and urban gaps. As China’s cities have developed into booming metropolitan centers, there is a fear that rural villages have been left behind. Local districts, like Lin’an, have implemented economic development initiatives to promote tourism and advance a vision of authenticity and cultural pride. Unlike Lacaton & Vassal’s use of the greenhouse typology as a generic standardized module in projects such as housing in Coutras, the Lin’an bayberry greenhouse conveys formal extravagance as competing demands result in clashing geometries. The bayberry’s cultivation becomes a political tool in this context, with the greenhouse serving as an architectural expression of expanded agricultural presence. Monumentality calls for a memorable form.
Courtyards and windows introduce a human scale, breaking down the mass of the greenhouse conglomerate. If the building is intended to accommodate people, it must provide circulation paths and means of egress. These features create a scale that contrasts with that of the bayberry tree. The fruit must be picked when ripe, with its readiness judged by a trained hand. Due to the fruit’s fragile, soft skin, it must also be harvested by hand. Once picked, bayberry is highly perishable, much like a raspberry. Given that the trees can grow up to twenty meters tall, a method must exist to lift humans within reach of the fruit. This could be achieved with ladders, but exterior photographs show what look like casement windows in the upper portions of some of the greenhouses. It’s possible that stairs and catwalks circulate around the trees, elevating workers to fruit-picking height and to the level of the operable windows. Since no construction drawings are available, we can only speculate about the interior based on observations from the exterior. However, knowing that human intervention is necessary to access the fruit presents an array of possibilities. Verifying the built reality is not necessary to draw meaning from the architecture.
The bayberry greenhouses in Lin’an are a result of an interplay of ecological, material, and political forces. Their monumentality can be understood as an architectural manifestation of the unique demands of the bayberry plant, whose growth requirements shaped the form and scale of the greenhouses. The typology of the horticultural greenhouse itself—modular, expandable, and exposed to the ground—responds directly to the plant’s need for sunlight, space, and pollination. Meanwhile, the political and economic context, driven by state initiatives to promote rural economies and bridge urban-rural divides, further motivates the proliferation of these structures. These greenhouses are a synthesis of agricultural tradition, modern infrastructure, and the cultural aspiration of a region in flux. They reflect the ways in which architecture’s response results in formal invention. In an increasingly uncertain world, we must be able to latch onto fragments of information and incorporate the unknown into our episteme.
