The spiral staircase rises at the center of the frame like a vertebral column, and around it the glass-and-iron structure of the Palm House at Kew Gardens unfolds in its full symmetry. Stathatos photographs the space during a renovation when all plant life has been removed: the planting beds are empty, the floor grid exposed, and what remains is architecture in its pure state, stripped of the biological content it was designed to contain. The emptiness is the subject. The structure, revealed.
The spiral staircase rises at the center of the frame like a vertebral column, and around it the glass-and-iron structure of the Palm House at Kew Gardens unfolds in its full symmetry. Stathatos photographs the space during a renovation when all plant life has been removed: the planting beds are empty, the floor grid exposed, and what remains is architecture in its pure state, stripped of the biological content it was designed to contain. The emptiness is the subject. The structure, revealed.
Stathatos photographs the Palm House at the precise moment when its function has been suspended: botanical content removed for renovation, the tropical interior reduced to iron and glass. The building was completed in 1848 to designs by Decimus Burton and engineer Richard Turner, one of the defining achievements of Victorian glass-and-iron construction: a vast curvilinear structure that used industrial technology to create an enclosed tropical climate for plant species collected from across the British Empire. Photographed empty, the architecture becomes legible as pure engineering ambition, the container standing alone without its biological justification.
Without plants, the greenhouse becomes a drawing: the iron members read as line, the glass panels as field, the staircase as axis. In monochrome, the chromatic information that normally anchors this interior in material reality is absent, and what remains is structure, rhythm, and diffused northern light through large-scale glass. The Arboretum series (2006) belongs to the same conceptual ground as the rest of Stathatos’s practice: the most revealing moment is not fullness but suspension, when what a place is built for has been removed and what it actually is becomes visible.
