Shanghai Expo 2010: Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion is nearing completion for the Shanghai Expo 2010, which opens in May.
Called Seed Cathedral, the wooden structure is pierced by 60,000 fibre-optic rods that each contain plant seeds at their tips.
These rods will draw light into the pavilion during the day and direct it outwards at night.
After the expo the rods and seeds will be distributed to schools in China and the UK.
The Shanghai Expo will take place 1 May to 31 October 2010.
More information in our earlier stories here and here.
The following information is from Thomas Heatherwick:
THE DESIGN OF THE UK PAVILION
AT THE 2010 SHANGHAI EXPO
The UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo expresses British creativity and environmental engagement at the biggest event of its kind since the Expo phenomenon began in 1851 with the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace. Since then, there have been more than 50 Expos – which have also been known as World’s Fairs or World Expositions – and the most spectacular have included those at Chicago in 1893 and Paris in 1900. The latter attracted 50m visitors, a record at the time, setting an early benchmark for a country’s portrayal of innovation and progress.
Held under the auspices of the Bureau International des Expositions, the Shanghai Expo will be the largest the world has ever seen. Staged on a 5.28km2 city centre site beside the Huangpu River, it features pavilions representing the ideas and cultural and commercial ambitions of more than 200 countries and international organisations. Visitor numbers are expected to reach a record 70m during the six month event, which runs from May 1 to October 31.
The UK Pavilion has been designed by Heatherwick Studio. Led by the internationally-acclaimed Thomas Heatherwick, his design team won the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) commission to create the Pavilion following a competition that attracted a shortlist of ambitious architectural proposals from other teams led by Zaha Hadid Architects, John McAslan + Partners, Marks Barfield Architects, Avery Associates, and DRAW Architects with dcmstudios.
Heatherwick Studio’s initial design strategy for the UK Pavilion established three aims to meet the FCO’s key expectation that the pavilion should become one of the five most popular attractions at the Expo. The first aim was to design a pavilion whose architecture was a direct manifestation of what it was exhibiting. The second idea was to ensure a significant area of open public space around it so visitors could relax and choose either to enter the pavilion building, or see it clearly from a calm, non-queuing vantage point. And thirdly, it would be unique among the hundreds of other competing pavilions, events and programmes.
Heatherwick Studio sought an approach that would engage meaningfully with Shanghai Expo’s theme, Better City, Better Life, and stand out from the anticipated trend for technology driven pavilions, filled with audio-visual content on screens, projections and speakers.
In collaboration with a wider project team, the studio developed the idea of the UK Pavilion exploring the relationship between nature and cities. Rather than creating a conventional advertisement for the UK, this was a subject that could make a real contribution to the Expo’s theme; London is the greenest city of its size in the world, the UK pioneered the world’s first ever public park and the world’s first major botanical institution, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
From here came Heatherwick’s idea of involving Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seedbank whose mission is to collect the seeds of 25% of the world’s plant species by 2020.
The design process evolved to produce two interlinked and experiential elements: an architecturally iconic Seed Cathedral, and a multi-layered landscape treatment of the 6,000m2 site.
The Seed Cathedral sits in the centre of the UK Pavilion’s site, 20 metres in height, formed from 60,000 slender transparent fibre optic rods, each 7.5 metres long and each encasing one or more seeds at its tip. During the day, they draw daylight inwards to illuminate the interior. At night, light sources inside each rod allow the whole structure to glow. As the wind moves past, the building and its optic “hairs” gently move to create a dynamic effect.
Heatherwick previously experimented with texture and architecture at a much smaller scale with his Sitooterie projects. The Seed Cathedral is the ultimate development of this.
Inside the darkened inner sanctum of the Seed Cathedral, the tips of the fibre optic filaments form an apparently hovering galaxy of slim vitrines containing a vast array of embedded seeds. The seeds have been sourced from China’s Kunming Institute of Botany, a partner in Kew Royal Botanic Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank Project. Visitors will pass through this tranquil, contemplative space, surrounded by the tens of thousands of points of light illuminating the seeds.
These fibre optic filaments are particularly responsive to external light conditions so that the unseen movement of clouds above the Seed Cathedral are experienced internally as a fluctuating luminosity. The studio’s intention is to create an atmosphere of reverence around this formidable collection of the world’s botanical resources; a moment of personal introspection in a powerful silent space.
The Seed Cathedral is made from a steel and timber composite structure pierced by 60,000 fibre optic filaments, 20mm square in section, which pass through aluminium sleeves. The holes in the 1 metre thick wood diaphragm structure forming the visitor space inside the Seed Cathedral were drilled with great geometric accuracy to ensure precise placement of the aluminium sleeves through which the optic fibre filaments are inserted. This was achieved using 3D computer modelling data, fed into a computer controlled milling machine.
This accuracy ensures that the Seed Cathedral’s fibre optic array creates an apparent halo around the high structure, with the fibre optic filaments rippling and changing texture and reflectivity in the gentlest wind. The wavering external surfaces of the Seed Cathedral form a delicate connection between the ground and the sky.
Among the Expo’s sea of hard surfaces, the Seed Cathedral’s surrounding landscape is conceived to act as a continuation of the building’s texture. A special artificial grass surface has been uniquely developed to act as a welcoming and restful public space for Expo visitors. Beneath the Seed Cathedral and the landscaped surface area is a canopied and naturally ventilated entrance and exit sequence for the Seed Cathedral. This circulation zone, running along three edges of the site, contains a narrative of three innovative environmental installations designed by London-based design studio, Troika. They are: Green City, Open City, and Living City.
Below the circulation zone is a further layer of spaces which can be used for cultural and commercial events hosted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and is available to hire by other organisations throughout the duration of the Expo.
The creation of the extraordinary and complex Seed Cathedral structure and the landscape architecture was achieved through close collaboration between construction managers Mace, lead engineers Adams Kara Taylor, services engineers Atelier Ten and highly skilled Chinese engineers and contractors. In order to reduce unnecessary transportation, 75% of the materials for the UK Pavilion have been sourced from within a radius of 300km around Shanghai. It is also the British government’s intention that most of the materials of the UK Pavilion will be reused or recycled at the end of the Expo.
The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office believe that the Seed Cathedral and UK Pavilion site will prove to be one of the Shanghai Expo’s star attractions. Even before the start of the Shanghai Expo, that belief already has some substance; ever since Heatherwick Studio’s design was first publicised in Shanghai in 2009, along with the scores of other national pavilion designs, it has been consistently ranked in the top five in terms of public popularity, and the Seed Cathedral has already been nick-named Pu Gong Ying, translated as ‘The Dandelion’ by the Chinese public.
After the Expo just as dandelion seeds are blown away and disperse on the breeze, the Seed Cathedral’s 60,000 optic hairs, each one containing the huge potential of life, will be distributed across China and the UK to hundreds of schools as a special legacy of the UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo.
Location: Shanghai, China
Public Opening: 1st May 2010
Site area: 6000m2
Seed Cathedral dimensions:25m x 25m x 20m
Seed Cathedral floor area: 105m2
Optic fibres: 60,588
Optic fibres length: 7.5m
Seeds in Seed Cathedral: 217,300
Landscape area: 4490 m2
Public park area: 2405 m2
Accommodation area: 1525 m2
Exhibition area: 1280 m2
Lead Designer: Heatherwick Studio Project team: Thomas Heatherwick, Katerina Dionysopoulou, Robert Wilson, Peter Ayres, Stuart Wood, Ingrid Hu, Jaroslav Hulin, Chiara Ferrari and Ramona Becker
Main Client: Foreign & Commonwealth Office
Project Manager: Mace Group
Structural Engineer: Adams Kara Taylor
Environmental Engineer: Atelier Ten
Fire & Risk engineering: Safe Consulting
Executive Architect: Architectural Design & Research Institute of Tongji University
Supporting Architects: RHWL
Quantity Surveyor: Davis Langdon & Seah
Walkway Exhibition Design: Troika
Content Advisory Team: Mark Jones, John Sorrell, David Adjaye
Content Advisor: Philip Dodd
Content Coordinator: Adriana Paice
Funding – Sponsors – Public Sector: Foreign & Commonwealth Office UK Trade & Investment British Council Department for Communities and Local Government Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, England’s Regional Development Agencies,
Sponsors – Private Sector: AstraZeneca, Barclays, BP, Diageo, GKN
March 31st, 2010 at 11:20 am
A- MAZ-ING, heatherwick has done it again!!
March 31st, 2010 at 11:20 am
best pavilion at the Expo.
REALLY great Architecture
March 31st, 2010 at 11:26 am
wow… i didnt like the renderings… didn think that these rods will appear as soft organic fur on a body… simply didnt believe in the concept… and i was totally wrong!
really love the pictures… looks gorgeous! would love to see some cluse ups!
March 31st, 2010 at 11:45 am
nicely done Kat!
March 31st, 2010 at 11:54 am
This looks brilliant – can’t wait to see the finished article.
What’s even more fantastic is that Heatherwick isn’t an architect, something that no doubt annoys actual architects a great deal.
March 31st, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Nice idea with the seeds, but this is a 10 year old (and widely published) Thomas Heatherwick design, enlarged, and in a new material.. Maybe he could have come up with something new, or at least reinvent the shape..
March 31st, 2010 at 12:19 pm
puffy! the interior ? is occupied by a lovable, gigantic mollusk ?
March 31st, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Only a “country” could afford to build something like this!
March 31st, 2010 at 1:05 pm
oh this is amazing , like a giant sea plant …..
very artistic . go Thomas!
March 31st, 2010 at 1:14 pm
This is really quite stunning – an intelligent idea well executed. I love the concept that the rods will ‘pollenate’ to schools – quite a heart warming gesture really, and makes the building something of an ‘ambassador’ rather than just a temporary installation (and reassuring to know that it won’t just become landfill after the expo!).
March 31st, 2010 at 2:45 pm
How about some pics of the inside???
March 31st, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Wow Wow!! The enticing picture immediately caught my attention and had me wondering what that large structure ball could possibly be?? What a fascinating pavilion, a great way of combining environment with inorganic architecture. The architecture of the pavilion is a direct manifestation of what it was exhibiting. The weather conditions outside are reflected inside the pavilion, due to the 60,000 fibre optic filaments… not only a great idea, but what an amazing view to experience.
I have no doubt Heatherwick Studio’s initial design strategy for the UK Pavilion to become one of the five most popular attractions at the Expo will be a success.
March 31st, 2010 at 3:22 pm
@HCB: hey, this one has more rods.
March 31st, 2010 at 3:23 pm
i like it a lot! i wish the seeds could be planted, somehow…if those rods could deteriorate and release the seeds…but that’s just being wishy…love the aesthetic
March 31st, 2010 at 3:36 pm
@ mikey 3000: who cares about the actual inside when you have something as flashy as this going on.
March 31st, 2010 at 4:58 pm
thomas understands the beauty of scale and vice versa. is arcelormittal-balmond listening?
March 31st, 2010 at 5:39 pm
this is ssssssssssuper-expensive though..but worth every penny…
March 31st, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Nice project, but what happened to the original budget of £7m? How on earth could this expand to requiring the British tax payer to stump up £25m to see the thing built? MACE were responsible for the original costings for the various schemes at competition stage, how the hell did they get it so wrong?! They should stand up and put their hands in their own pockets for getting this so spectacularly wrong and not pass the buck onto us, especially as 99.9999% of us won’t even get to see the bloody thing!
March 31st, 2010 at 10:15 pm
with all the EXPO pavilions nearly finished, it is defenitely this one the stands out. It seems in general it’ll be a bit disappointing – there’ll be a lot of ‘last decade’ architecture – all these buildings in the formalistic extreme of conceptual archiecture, trying to beat eachother in spectacle …
March 31st, 2010 at 11:57 pm
beautiful. amazing. love it.
hope its doesnt get too dirty….lots of dust in Shanghai.
April 1st, 2010 at 12:29 am
This is undoubtely an outstanding piece of architecture work. It really stands out formally without being harsh or just a matter of volumes play. It relates much more to sculpture and visual arts than to proper architecture. And for me that’s the real beauty of it.
What’s the meaning of creating an exhibition pavilion for a world fair? If you look historically to this type of pavilion, the majority of them are made without being really focused in designing real inovative architecture work, but rather designing a ‘pastiche’ of a culture or a country. Often we see exhibition pavilions as being designed in a very direct visual interpretation of a country. So, what’s the point of having a gigantic postcard of a country?
That’s why I really find this pavilion very interesting because it does not relate directly to anything about the UK nor its culture. It is about innovation and architecture. For me that should be the aim of it.
I even might compare this pavilion to the Finnish pavilion by Aalto in NY, 1939 or the Philips pavilion by Le Corbusier at Brussels, 1958 or even the Spanish Pavilion by Francisco Mangado at Zaragoza, 2008
April 1st, 2010 at 12:48 am
thomas heatherwick goes anal, that’s for sure
April 1st, 2010 at 12:48 am
AMAZING, SUPER WORK !!!!!!!! I LOVE IT !!!!!!!!!!!
April 1st, 2010 at 1:33 am
@Jason –
I have a feeling you’re mixing up ‘Total UK spend’ and ‘construction budget’.
April 1st, 2010 at 3:52 am
额，英国馆啊，有望成为观众票选最喜爱场馆。
点我头像可以看更多图片
April 1st, 2010 at 5:07 am
looks so amazing..
the effect of the fur-like optic rods is so sureal…
it looks fake almost from a distance…
totally in love with the texture!
April 1st, 2010 at 7:59 am
it is beautiful, but i hate that architecture now is all about new and inovative expensive materials, not about real good and working designs. it is realy sad…
April 1st, 2010 at 8:13 am
saw this on dezeen a while ago (pre build), reckon Thomas Heatherwick & everyone involved and the UK should feel really proud, very unique, plus giving the seeds to schools after is such a great gesture, congratulations to all,
April 1st, 2010 at 1:21 pm
I love hedgehogs!
April 1st, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Nice to see all of Heatherwick’s Studio writing in.
Are you after pay rises?
April 1st, 2010 at 2:19 pm
architecture with purpose not just looks, great job!
April 1st, 2010 at 3:58 pm
oh my god.. first i saw the rendering i thought.. okay .. hmm someone found the hair plug-in 3ds max.. funny.. but also a bit lame.. the fact it gets realized makes me some kind of sad.. architecture is not only about grasshopper or other plugins.. it should serve the people.. look back to the expos 50 years ago..
April 1st, 2010 at 6:58 pm
100% great work
April 1st, 2010 at 11:10 pm
this is unbeliveable, what does it look like from the inside?
April 2nd, 2010 at 7:05 am
how’s the spacial quality inside?
something not good looking, but at least new~~~
April 2nd, 2010 at 10:29 am
AMAZING!!!!!
April 2nd, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Another example of Heatherwick vomiting up his same designs again and again. The same one liner, now on it’s third time round… yes he has already used this design twice before.
Have to question if dusting off an old design, putting it on the photocopier and scaling it up, throwing a few seeds at it, then blowing the budget are actions of a designer or a cowboy.
Got my opinion, let you decide.
April 3rd, 2010 at 1:42 am
Great Archtecture
April 3rd, 2010 at 8:33 am
I guess that making today architecture for the people in the same way they used to do 50 years ago is a little bit anachronistic.
I think that as a pavillion it tells exactly how architecture should be today for people. And i doesn’t need to be only about space.
I guess.
Then I must say that, in my opinion, the best pavillions are the UK, France and Poland so far.
I guess Italy and Sweden are the worse.
April 4th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
This still looks like a render in every photo I see :)
April 5th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Beautiful!!!
April 6th, 2010 at 10:15 am
I love to see this in 30 m/s wind storm!
April 9th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Makes me so so so want to cuddle it….like a gigantic organic sponge mushroom……I’m on the plane as soon as I can….I need to do cuddle it for real! This is the first evidence of “imaginary” takes a real shape without trying to be imaginary. Astonishing!!
April 11th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Didn’t Moxon architects do this first?
http://www.designboom.com/cms/images/nate/mx1.jpg
April 12th, 2010 at 12:45 am
I do have to say, this makes DillerScofidio look like cranky teenagers! Now, this is what an architectural installation/performance should be! Great stuff!
April 12th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Unbelievable! Beautiful juxtaposition between the pavilion and the landscape architecture! Best design at the expo.
April 17th, 2010 at 8:29 am
dont like it at all, seems excesive..
May 1st, 2010 at 1:05 am
typically british – all show no content!
May 9th, 2010 at 9:26 am
This design of UK pavillion and the previous one of this Heatherwick Studio is coming first from the french group in 2001
http://www.new-territories.com/unplug.htm
But in this case it was not a pilosity to produce a decor for Chinese word fair but as a powerstation…for transferring sun energy in the Unplug sustainability…
Why architects are always reducing ideas to aesthetic scleroses ?
June 3rd, 2010 at 5:31 pm
poetic and meditative design with a larger than ‘here and now’ concept…
Cathederal of light, seed and hope… LOVE’T
June 14th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
seen again and again, but the UK Pavilion is still amazing
June 30th, 2010 at 12:26 am
@Mark Peacock “A- MAZ-ING, heatherwick has done it again!!”
Indeed, it seems so … Heatherwick has apparently taken the expo’s ’sustainability’ theme and recycled the structure of ‘B of the Bang’. Let’s hope bits don’t start dropping off ’seed like’ as they were reported to do on that earlier public space piece.