Shanghai | Pavilhão do Reino Unido | Thomas Heatherwick

[3CPO]

Heatherwick to design UK pavilion at Shanghai Expo

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A team led by Heatherwick Studio has won the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices' competition to design the £10 million UK pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.

Heatherwick beat a six-strong shortlist, that included Marks Barfield, Zaha Hadid Architects and Eight, a collaboration between John McAslan and young firms such as Nord and Brisac Gonzalez.

Heatherwick's design creates an enclosure clad in a mass of spines which sway in the wind. Each spine is tipped with a tiny coloured light source which can be programmed with a variety of images, colours and messages.

The jury, chaired by trade and investment minister Digby Jones, felt the winning team - which also includes designer Casson Mann, structural engineer Adams Kara Taylor and technology engineer Atelier Ten - "would make something really special for the UK at Expo.”

Jones said: "We were really energised by the uniqueness of the concept and the way it integrated technology with a sensory experience for visitors. It will be a spectacular pavilion that responds to what visitors say and feel and at the same time showcase the very best of brand Britain.”

The winning concept will be presented formally to the Expo Bureau in Shanghai later this year, with the pavilion completed by May 2010.

Fonte: Building Design

www.heatherwick.com

[JVS]

Heatherwick unveils final design for Shanghai Expo pavilion
29 June, 2009

By Anna Winston

Thomas Heatherwick today unveiled the final design for the £13.2 million UK pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo.

Work has already begun on site to build the pavilion, which was originally budgeted at £12 million.

It will feature 60,000 7.5m-long acrylic “hairs” which will move with the wind, and have seeds from Kew Garden’s millennium seed bank embedded in the ends.

The news comes after the curator and designer of the exhibition originally earmarked for inside the pavilion walked off the project last October after an argument with Heatherwick over content.

Heatherwick described the finished design as the “world’s largest ever hairy building”, with the interior space sharing the atmosphere of “the manuscript room at the British Library”.

He added: “I think you’re going to hunger for simplicity at the expo and we’re going to be looking at quite a serious scientific issue in quite a low tech way.

“Sir John Sorrell and Mark Jones have been working with us on this because this isn’t just a shell. There is a solidity to its content as well.”

Natural light, channelled through the acrylic spines, will light the building during the day while at night the structure will glow from within.

At an earlier stage in the design process, the building was to have been lit with a number of different coloured lights, but this has now been scrapped.

Installations and exhibits will be featured along a covered walkway leading up to the pavilion below the Astroturf -covered angled landscape which covers the 6,000sq m site.

Plans for the legacy of the building, which must be dismantled and removed from the site after the Expo, include using the acrylic coffined seeds as an educational tool.

Read more: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3143759#ixzz0mn0rk0cG

in http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/30/shanghai-world-expo-2010-launch

[JVS]

Shanghai Expo 2010 Building, Pavilion, Image, Architect, Design, Winner, News

Links to Selected Expo Buildings lower down this page

HEATHERWICK'S PAVILION TO SPEARHEAD UK CREATIVE INDUSTRIES AT SHANGHAI EXPO 2010

* Expo : key opportunity to enhance UK-China partnership through Arts, Education, Culture, Business, Science and Climate Change

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office today reveals updated designs for the UK pavilion that will represent this country at Shanghai Expo 2010; its theme being 'Better City, Better Life'. Developed by one of the UK's leading creative talents - Thomas Heatherwick - the UK pavilion will provide a dramatic demonstration of creativity and innovation in the UK.

The centrepiece of the UK's offering is the extraordinary pavilion building - a six storey high object formed from some 60,000 slender transparent rods, which will extend from the structure and quiver in the breeze. During the day, each of these 7.5m long rods will act like fibre optic filaments, drawing on daylight to illuminate the interior, thereby creating a contemplative awe-inspiring space. At night, light sources at the interior end of each rod will allow the whole structure to glow. The pavilion will sit on a landscape looking like paper that once wrapped the building and that now lies unfolded on the site. The landscape provides an open space for public events and shelter for visitors making their way into the pavilion structure.

Inside the pavilion building is a unique visual representation of the UK's leading role in conservation worldwide - Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership - the largest collection of wild plant seeds in the world. By encasing tens of thousands of seeds into the ends of the transparent rods, visitors will be able to view examples of seeds of plant species that contribute to national and global conservation programmes. The seeds have been sourced from the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species, Kunming Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences in China - a partner in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew's Millennium Seed Bank Project. The seeds being used are taken from stocks that are both plentiful and readily available. They will create a stunning image of an alternative World Bank, into which is embedded the potential of life.

Visitors will access the 'Seed Cathedral' by a series of walkways, the content of which will depict the role of nature in UK cities in the past, present and in the future.

This design is already coming to life. Construction was formally started in March on China's annual national tree planting day; the UK being one of the first self-build countries to start work on site. Heatherwick Studio is acting in partnership with Mace, the consultancy and construction company, to build the structure.

Thomas Heatherwick, articulating his vision for the pavilion, said: "The Expo in Shanghai will be an amazing event; around two hundred countries competing for the attention of seventy million visitors. Our task is to make the UK pavilion stand out. We decided to do this by making one extraordinary object; not recognisable in conventional terms, set in a calm open site. Each visitor will be able to explore both in their own way. Rather than making a straightforward advert for the UK, we want our pavilion to give each person a more profound understanding of the richness of contemporary UK culture."

Chris Bryant, Foreign Office Minister responsible for the UK Shanghai Expo presence, said: "Thomas Heatherwick's pavilion structure will showcase 21st century UK as a vibrant and dynamic country full of imagination and panache. I am sure it will inspire the Chinese public to learn more about the UK and its wealth of opportunities across business, education, tourism and beyond. The Shanghai Expo is a chance to show China that the UK is a world leader in creative design; this pavilion is a big first step to achieving that."

Ian McCartney, MP and Commissioner General for the UK Shanghai Expo, said: "We see it as a gift of friendship to the people of China - coming in the shape of a just-unwrapped package, with an intriguing structure at one corner, waiting to be explored. We want it to offer an engaging, memorable experience that inspires both the visitors and the Chinese public at large."

Simon Featherstone, Programme Director for the UK's presence at Shanghai Expo, added: "Through research and focus group work, we are learning what local Chinese people currently think of the UK and what their expectations are of our site at the Expo. Research in China suggests that we are one of the top 3 sites people want to see but there is a lack of awareness of the breadth and depth of creativity and leading edge design in the UK. We hope to remedy that during the Expo by showcasing UK creativity, skill and talent - Thomas's structure is a great starting point for this."

Paul Smith, Head of Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership, added: "This is a very exciting project and we are delighted to be involved in conveying the importance of biodiversity and conservation through the inclusion of seeds in this iconic structure. Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership is a unique project managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which, by the end of 2009, will have collected and conserved seeds from 10% of the world's wild plant species. Kew's Millennium Seed Bank is the largest seed bank in the world and its purpose is to enable the use of as wide a range of plant diversity as possible in order to enable human adaptation, innovation and resilience in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges."

Alongside the Expo experience, an extensive series of events for both a business and general audience covering arts, education, science and climate change will take place over the 6 months from May to October a) at the Expo itself both in the public landscape area and the meetings facilities, :s in Shanghai and c) around other key major cities throughout China. Each event will exploit the interest and excitement generated by the Heatherwick-designed pavilion to deliver stories from the UK to develop existing bi-lateral partnerships and create new ones.

The programmes, together with the UK Expo website, are expected to reach millions of people over the Expo period - even more than the tens of thousands a day that are expected to visit the UK pavilion. Visitors throughout China and internationally will be able to make a virtual visit to the UK pavilion to access information on the UK and participate in an enormous range of activities and projects on the Expo Bureau's own Online website.

The public sector founding sponsors, led by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, are the British Council, UK Trade and Investment, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the English Regional Development Agencies.

British Pavilion Shanghai 2010 - images / information from Heatherwick Studio 2009

in http://www.e-architect.co.uk/shanghai/shanghai_expo_building.htm


Shanghai Expo UK Pavilion, 2010, Architect, Design, News, Engineer, Project

Shanghai Expo British Pavilion : Building Information

UK Building by Heatherwick Studio at the World Expo, Pu Dong, Shanghai, China

30 Mar 2010

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.

photos © Daniele Mattioli

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.

photos © Daniele Mattioli

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.



UK Pavilion , Shanghai World Expo 2010 - Building Information

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

UK Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo 2010 images / information received 300310

in http://www.e-architect.co.uk/shanghai/shanghai_expo_pavilion_uk.htm


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