The Greenhouse Preserving Los Angeles’ Botanical Histories

Tucked away in a transformed truck-loading bay in Los Angeles’ Glassell Park, Geoponika is an experimental greenhouse and panorama design studio based by Carlos Campos Morera and Max Martin, the duo behind the pioneering plant collective Cactus Store. 

Spanning 2,000 sq. toes, the area, affectionately referred to by Morera as a “plant orphanage”, homes a rare assortment of greater than 10,000 crops. Over the previous 15 years, Morera and Martin have inherited collections from getting old growers and establishments present process generational change, dedicating themselves to preserving and cultivating these specimens. The assortment features as a dwelling archive that represents an ongoing dedication to botanical preservation and schooling.

The greenhouse itself is a testomony to city transformation, displaying how a former industrial web site might be repurposed right into a thriving ecological enclave. At first look, the gathering appears wild and unstructured with a panoramic abundance of crops stacked in a dense, natural tapestry. But there may be distinctive concord beneath the obvious randomness. Multi-layered cabinets are crowded with crops, every creating its personal microclimate. Overgrown branches solid shifting shadows whereas stacked wooden beneath the pots collects moisture, forming humid pockets throughout the greenhouse. In each sq. foot, practically as many microclimates as crops coexist.

Geoponika—named in Architectural Digest’s AD100 2025—attracts inspiration instantly from this dwelling assortment. Its work treats gardens as evolving ecologies, guided by the identical ethic of stewardship that animates its nonprofit, Nonhuman Teachers, which fosters new types of ecological storytelling. Together, these tasks kind a broader experiment in coexistence: an exploration of how design and wildness can thrive aspect by aspect within the modern city panorama.