Samsara Botanic Garden

About The Entry

This project is a botanic shelter with small guest apartments adjacent to a large greenhouse for resident ecologists as a satellite program for the United States Botanical Garden in Washington Park. Following the US National Park System, the proposal is positioned in the suburban village; at the boundary of the surrounding territory of Mount Rainer National Park. The shelter contains a botanic garden for titan arum, a rare tropical flower originally found in Indonesia, also known as the corpse flower. Titan Arum is typically 2-3m tall and has a pungent smell when it blooms. It has a growing cycle from a seed to a mature flower and then back to a dormant seed. Every year, it will bloom and go back to sleep, and next year it will come back again. Inspired by the growing cycle, the architecture imitates the cycling experience both spatially and programmatically.

One distinct program of the building is the crematory of flowers which is dedicated to completing the loop and cycle. Garden keepers will collect wilted flowers and burn them to get the wood ashes and make fertilizers from the ashes for the next round of cultivation.