Chapter 2 of 25
View Of Biomes From Visitor Centre
The Eden Project is one of The Millennium Commission Landmark buildings. The Millennium Commission wanted both to look at and record the past, but also to look towards the future. And that's really why Eden is such an appropriate way of marking this important anniversary. The planet offers a scarce resource and is something we have to work with and live with. And Eden really celebrates this learning to live with the planet. The planet of course is divided into different environments and one of the initial ideas that we pursued was to create a complete world environment. And rather than just a collection of plants, we wanted to completely recreate the humid tropics which many of us know as the 'rain forest'. And of course there is a great tradition in this country, for the last several hundred years, of exploring the planet, finding new plants and bringing them back to where it's quite a cold, temperate environment, and this has generated a new architectural form which is often utilised in emerging technologies, and in particular wrought iron and mass production techniques. So we have great glass-housing designers such as Paxton, and eventually the Crystal Palace. But for me, one of the fascinating designers was Loudon. And here we have a building, one of the few remaining buildings - it's not so far from Eden - which really utilises wrought iron technology. And what you can see is a very light delicate structure. It has almost no structural support other than the envelope itself, so a real celebration of that emerging technology. We were first approached on Eden in 1995. We had just completed the new terminal at Waterloo, and Tim Smit and Jonathan Ball, the two founders of Eden, had seen the project and thought that would make the sort of architecture they were after, some large-span steel and glass structure which could house their ideas of a very large conservatory to allow plants to grow to their full maturity.