![]() ![]() ![]() The ground floor, which children can reach from outside through a tiny door and down a slide, is given over to spectacular, Heath-Robinson-like exhibitions based around the power and importance of the world of plants. Inside, there are three floors connected by stair and lift, rather than giant beanstalk. It's a place to grow ideas, a meeting place where you can discover, learn, do, make, play, listen, talk, communicate, participate, watch, be entertained and enjoy, whatever your age." Perhaps, but what is the Core for? "It is," says Smit, " an inspirational hub for events, exhibitions and learning. This is the finest modern building in the world, and anyone who says they can show me a better-looking one is either a liar or clairvoyant." "I hate exaggeration," says Tim Smit, the Eden Project's chief executive, "so I'll tell you the simple truth. Built from renewable materials and designed to use precious little energy, the building promises to be as "green" as the plants blooming in the biomes. It is a happily strange sight, its copper-clad roof spiked through with prickly skylights. The Core, dug well into the landscape so that it appears smaller than it is, is connected to the hubble-bubble of biomes across a new steel bridge. Now comes this floral tour de force, sprouting from the minds of Jolyon Brewis and his team from Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, architects of the Eden Project's "biomes", together with engineers from Buro Happold and Anthony Hunt Associates. ![]() The Victoria and Albert Museum pollarded and then abandoned designs of its Spiral Gallery at South Kensington by Daniel Libeskind and Cecil Balmond, but 30 St Mary Axe, or the Gherkin, by Foster and Partners, spirals up above the City of London skyline. There has been a reawakening of interest in recent years in an architecture rooted in the laws and forms of nature and blossoming from a new-found excitement in those of mathematics, and especially the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Rectangle and the spiral form that winds through and connects the two. "We were delighted to discover that this produced an efficient and elegant network of timber beams for the roof," says architect in charge, Jolyon Brewis. This is better known today as a plotting device in Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Its design, inspired by the plant "architecture" of sunflower heads, follows the famous mathematical sequence, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on, discovered by Leonardo da Pisa, and called Fibonacci, in the 13th century. Randall Page's Stonehenge-scale stone has yet to arrive, yet when it is finally craned through the central oculus, or skylight, of the Core, the dizzy logic of this most botanical of buildings will make sense. This winds, gyres and spirals in a great spectacle around and above visitors' heads. ![]()
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