Paradise Lost? Alphonse Balat, the King’s Architect — Meise, Belgium

Alphonse Balat built the glasshouses that a king wanted and a country then took for granted. Architect to Leopold II, he gave Belgium the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken and, at what is now Meise Botanic Garden, the crown conservatory still known as the Balatkas. From 5 September to 25 October 2026 the garden devotes an exhibition to him — Paradise Lost? — and uses his work to ask a larger question: whether two hundred years of putting nature under glass brought us closer to it or further away.

The show is spread across three buildings in the garden — the Franklinia Pavilion, the Citrus Orangery and the Balatkas itself — and is built in four parts. The first, The Glass Revolution, traces Belgian exoticism from 1825 onward across thirty-two monumental walls, running from the Crystal Palace to Laeken. The second, Ode to the Winter Garden, hangs three-metre-high tributes by contemporary artists, among them François Schuiten and the late Piet Bekaert. The third, Building the Future, gives twelve architectural studios room to answer the question the exhibition poses. The fourth returns to the Balatkas, with drawings and a historical timeline shown inside the conservatory they describe.

Balat matters beyond his own buildings: Victor Horta was his pupil, and the iron-and-glass vocabulary that Horta later turned into Art Nouveau interiors was learned in Balat’s studio and on the Laeken site. The curators — Koen Es, Donatienne de Séjournet, Denis Diagre and the artist-curator Hans Soenen — worked for close to two years, drawing on digitised plans from the Royal Archives and on rare material from archives abroad.

It is a short run for a subject this size. The exhibition closes on 25 October, when the garden’s own season turns.

Practical details

• When: 5 September to 25 October 2026, daily 10:00–18:00
• Where: Meise Botanic Garden, Nieuwelaan 38, 1860 Meise, Belgium — Franklinia Pavilion, Citrus Orangery and the Balatkas
• Admission: included in the garden entry ticket
• Organised by: Meise Botanic Garden (Agentschap Plantentuin Meise)
• Curators: Koen Es, Donatienne de Séjournet, Denis Diagre, Hans Soenen
• Programme: published by Meise Botanic Garden

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition for readers following nineteenth-century iron-and-glass architecture and the roots of Belgian Art Nouveau.