Innovation UK > News > Innovation News > Shanghai's UK 'dandelion' delights

Visitors to the 2010 Shanghai World Expo have been astonished by an extraordinary new building, created by British designer Thomas Heatherwick, which resembles a 20m high dandelion. Officially known as The Seed Cathedral, the building is formed from 60,000 transparent fibre optic rods, each 7.5m long and each encasing one or more seeds at its tip.

By day, these rods draw daylight inwards to illuminate the interior. At night, light sources inside each rod make the whole structure glow. In a breeze, the building and its optic ?hairs? move gently, creating a sense that it is a living organism.

Other elements of the structure are equally innovative, from the steel and timber composite used for the diaphragm, the aluminium sleeves for the rods and the computer modelling developed by Heatherwick Studios. Once the Expo ends on 31 October, the seeds used in the building will be dispersed to hundreds of schools in China and the UK and most of the materials will be recycled.

Besides drawing massive crowds at the Shanghai event, the Seed Cathedral has won the Royal Institute of British Architecture?s prestigious Lubetkin Award and has been nicknamed ?Pu Gong Ying?, which means ?dandelion? by an enthusiastic Chinese public.

David Nicholson