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Published: 25 February 2010
by DAN CARRIER

THE Beijing Olympics are reputed to have cost £30billion, the most expensive Games in history. But the figure is dwarfed by another international show that China is putting on this year. The Shanghai Expo, due to open in May, has a budget twice the size. 

And one of its most eagerly anticipated pieces has been designed and built by a team working from an Edwardian advertising agency office in King’s Cross.

Designer Thomas Heatherwick is representing the UK at this year’s international celebration of design with a pavilion boasting 60,000 plant seeds individually encased in eight-metre-long wavy glass fibres.

His King’s Cross studio has examples of his team’s work dotted about – models of soaring developments in oil-rich countries, sculptures made of wonky lamp posts, folding wooden benches in light beechwood, and an eye-catching model of a folding bridge. “All it lacks is a river to span,” Heatherwick jokes, as he demonstrates how it works – different metal sections flip onto each other at the turn of a ­handle, allowing space to appear for tall ships to slip quietly through. 

Heatherwick graduated from the Royal College of Art and established his business 15 years ago with the aim of bringing design, architecture and sculpture together. He has been behind some high-profile works including the seven-storey sculpture at the Wellcome Trust in Euston Road that seems to drip down from the roof into its foyer, like a ­cosmic chandelier.

Heatherwick returned  from China last week, having watched his design take shape.

When he won the ­competition to represent Britain nearly three years ago, he decided there were two areas he wanted to consider. With the pavilions supposed to represent a facet of the country, he was very aware of Britain’s image abroad.

“I wanted to find something that was not  obvious,” he recalls.

“It was a challenge to find something to say about Britain other than Beefeaters, black cabs, double-deckers and bowler hats. But we had to – after all, who wears a bowler nowadays?

“The one thing that Britain could add was a dimension of nature. The world’s first botanical institute, and the world’s first public park was British. London, for its size, has more green spaces than any other city in the world.”

This concept goes back to the 19th century when Victoria Park in east London was part of a slum clearance ­programme designed to offer open spaces as a way of improving the nation’s health. 

“This is a still valued,” says Heatherwick. “And our relationship with botanics is not just about the world being pleas­antly green. It offers ­solutions to medical and environmental problems, and has an effect on economies. I wanted the pavilion to say that this is an area we have helped pioneer.”

The result is what is dubbed the “Seed Cathedral”, and has been made with the help of an institute that is linked with our history and culture and in which British experts are seen as world leaders – botany. It draws on a scheme called the Millennium Seedbank run by the Royal Botanical Society at Kew Gardens. They are gathering a seed from every plant in the world to store and catalogue. It has inspired  Heatherwick.

“I went to see them and said: any chance I can have 60,000 seeds for a seed cathedral?,” says Heatherwick. “I didn’t expect them to say yes.”

The concept involves sealing each seed individually into the head of a glass frond, like a fibre optic cable. Heatherwick says it is like the amber-tipped cane that holds a mosquito in the Richard Attenborough film Jurassic Park. Instead of a prehistoric gnat, the tips hold a single seed. The fronds will gently sway in the breeze – Heatherwick calls it a “hairy building”. 

“It gently moves in the wind,” he says. “I almost hope at one stage there is a typhoon.”

Then there was a need to make the pavilion stand out to the expected 70 million visitors due to attend between May and October. The Expo’s ­figures are astonishing – 239 countries are contributing and China has built a new city the size of Gibraltar to host them.

“This Expo is about the future of cities,” says Heatherwick. “We have to ask, as we become more urbanised, what will cities become? Every pavilion goes down the road of saying we are into multiculturalism, sustainability – and by doing so, I am afraid they could make it a very boring Expo. 

“Someone said the seeds could be blown all over China if the wind picks up,” says Heatherwick. 

And they will be. When Expo ­2010 finishes, the seeds contained at the end of each fibre will be given to schools across the country to plant.

http://en.expo2010.cn