U.K. Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo, 2007-2010

Heatherwick Studio won the 2007 Foreign & Commonwealth Office competition to design the United Kingdom’s pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, against a shortlist that included teams led by Zaha Hadid Architects, John McAslan + Partners, Marks Barfield, Avery Associates, and DRAW Architects. The brief asked for a building that could stand among the Expo’s five most visited pavilions, on a site the size of a football pitch and with a limited budget.

Rather than catalogue famous British products, the studio concentrated on the country’s parks, gardens, and botanical science, taking the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Millennium Seed Bank as its cue. The result was two linked parts: the Seed Cathedral, a rounded cuboid about 20 metres high, and a crumpled-paper landscape of artificial turf that wrapped the 6,000-square-metre plot, housed back-of-house spaces, and offered a village-green pause from the Expo’s noise.

The cathedral’s envelope was the exhibition. A one-metre-thick steel and timber composite box — described by engineer AKT as a stressed-skin construction of laminated timber ribs between plywood plates, with a steel-truss floor — was drilled to take about 60,000 transparent acrylic rods. Each rod was 7.5 metres long and 20 millimetres square in section, seated in an aluminium sleeve so the tips could flex in the wind. Seeds from the Kunming Institute of Botany, a partner in Kew’s seed-conservation programme, were cast into the inner 400 millimetres of each spike. By day the rods behaved as fibre optics, pulling daylight onto the seeds; after dark, small light sources in the filaments made the whole silhouette glow. AKT put the weight of the spikes at around 460 tonnes.

Project data published at completion listed a cathedral footprint of roughly 25 by 25 metres and 105 square metres of interior floor, some 60,588 optic fibres, and more than 200,000 seeds (Heatherwick Studio cites 250,000). Seventy-five percent of materials were sourced within 300 kilometres of Shanghai. The pavilion drew more than seven million visitors, was nicknamed the dandelion in Chinese, and won the Bureau International des Expositions gold medal for pavilion design and the RIBA Lubetkin Prize. After the Expo it was dismantled as planned; seed rods were given to institutions and dignitaries and others auctioned, with proceeds donated to a Shanghai children’s charity.

From photographs, the silhouette reads as a hairy cube rather than a conventional wall-and-window elevation: there is no punched fenestration, and the optical rods form a deep, vibrating depth of facade. The landscape’s folded artificial-grass planes contrast with the bristling volume, so the cathedral appears both object and planting. Night views show the rods as a light-emitting skin rather than a surface that is merely floodlit. These readings are from published photography, not from on-site survey.