Seed Cathedral

I totally missed this exhibition called the Seed Cathedral for the Shanghai Expo in 2010. Created by the talented Heatherwick Studio, the Seed Cathedral is a platform to show the work of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and their Millennium Seedbank.

In the circulation zone under the landscape that surrounds the Seed Cathedral a series of installations explore in more detail the particularity of nature and UK cities. The Seed Cathedral is a 20-metre high building, constructed from 60,000 transparent 7.5-metre long optical strands, each of which has embedded within its tip a seed.

The interior is silent and illuminated only by the daylight that has filtered past each seed through each optical hair. The UK Pavilion has consistently been ranked by visitors as one of the most popular pavilions with 50,000 people visiting each day.