LA CATEDRAL DE LAS SEMILLAS :: an almost alive organic building

THE CATEDRAL OF THE SEMILLAS

The suggestive name of this pavilion comes from the 60,000 optical fibers that wrap it, each of which stores inside various varieties of seeds from Britain's Millennium Seed Bank. Of an iconic character, it has its origin in that London is by size the greenest city in the world and has also been the pioneer in having a public park and a botanical institution, the Royal Botanic Gardens, whose mission is to gather by 2020 at least 25% of the seeds of all botanical species in the world.

The pavilion has 6 levels and 20 meters high. Its steel and wood structure was drilled to be crossed by the 60 000 square optical fibres, 20 mm2 of section, coated with an aluminum case. This metal allowed the LED to be refrigerated from the fiber. The LED does not generate heat forward in the direction of the light beam, but it does backwards. The wood drills were performed with great geometric accuracy, to ensure the precise placement of the aluminum cases, rainwater stagna, and their fiber optics.

The 3D modeling, introduced into a milling machine, controlled by computer was necessary. Each fiber had a length of 7.5 meters and, in addition to playing an aesthetic role, they were also in charge of managing the light of the pavilion. During the day each of these translucent fibers drove the light into the inner space. During the night the process was reverse, as the same fibers were in charge of illuminating the exterior through a variety of colors depending on the direction the fibers took with the wind.

The botanical vocation of the architects of Heatherwick prompted to imitate that bad sheerb, known in Spain as Lion's Tooth. The look of Seed Cathedral is entirely reminiscent of the Lion's Tooth flower, with its transparent acrylic rods extruded as cypselas. In the same segment there is an LED embedded in the fiber, which illuminates it in the two directions of the axis, in and out. The white light (5770ko) is achieved with InGaN and a layer of phosphorus. The LED fiber Optic illuminator used is a product already developed for surgery and microscopic techniques, which concentrates light within the fiber using an appropriate optical system, of negligible size. Heatherwick successfully adapted it to the architecture and got a LED of 1Lumen of luminous flux, with 2 beams of light. Each rod, on the inside of the pavilion, at its end of square section, exhibited one or more seeds.

The visitor of the central room perceived that diffuse light of the 60,000 acrylic fibers, a necessary semi-dark, to observe the seeds illuminated from the outside. The seed exhibitor matrix fully occupied the space, the same as the walls as the vault.

Inside the Seed Cathedral there was no lighting system, only 60,000 optical fibers provided light. By day only the Hall is illuminated, from the south side, the sunny. If there were clouds, the light level fluctuated. At night, with LED lighting, the light intensity was uniform throughout the womb. Of course, the lighting was poor, but the intention of the designer Heatherwick was to create an atmosphere of reverence, to envelop this formidable collection of world botanical resources, a space also silent.

Outside, when the wind was blowing, the building and its 7.5m-long cypselas moved smoothly, creating the dynamic effect of an almost alive organic building.

In the words of Heatherwick Studio, the design had three main objectives: the first, to be a pavilion whose architecture is a direct manifestation of the contents it presents; the second, to provide a significant open public space in which visitors can relax; and the third, to find a simple idea powerful enough that is kept with your head high in the middle of the bullshit of the hundreds of pavilions of the competition.

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Maryan Interior Design: LA CATEDRAL DE LAS SEMILLAs