Seed Cathedral
shanghai world expo uk pavilion
The cathedral‘s architecture was an elaboration of Heatherwick’s 2003 work of the Sitooterie II in Essex, United Kingdom. The initial design strategy for the UK Pavilion established three aims to meet the Foreign Commonwealth Office’s key expectation that the pavilion should become one of the five most popular attractions at the Expo, but built using half the budget of other Western nations. 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.