Seed Cathedral: UK Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010

Heatherwick Studio led the winning team in the competition to design the UK Pavilion for the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The Expo was the largest ever, with 200 countries taking part and over 70 million visitors expected. The theme was: ‘Better City, Better Life’. The Seed Cathedral was constructed from 66,000 transparent 7.5-metre long optical strands, each with a seed embedded within its tip. It acted as a platform to show the work of the Kunming Institute of Botany, a partner of Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank.