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Feature Ecological Theater
It's a bit of a cross between Kew Gardens and Heathrow Airport: up to 14,000 visitors a day, 1.5 million in the first year after opening. And it's a plant lover's feast: 3,865 species and 4,777 taxa (including cultivars and varieties), for a total of 97,400 plants so far. The Eden Project is set in a reclaimed site—a vast china clay quarry on the Cornish coast, at the southwestern tip of England. The design is derived from the existing quarry, its curved slopes, and its haulage routes. The landscape architects, Land Use Consultants (LUC) of London, wished to echo the history of Cornish china clay extraction. Going to the site today, you pass through the gabion-faced visitor center on the edge of the quarry and then pause to view across the great pit the two domes on the far side. Buckminster Fuller would have loved this moment of gazing at geodesic domes. Within them are displays of lush tropical and temporal planting. It is a Jurassic Park sans dinosaurs. How did this remarkable place come into being? In 1994 Tim Smit—a former record producer who retired in his 30s having made his millions and who now produces garden projects—and horticulturists Philip McMillan and Peter Thoday proposed the idea of "a living theatre...(to display)...the world's flora and the horticulture, agriculture, and forestry." As Smit describes it, "Slowly but surely this developed into an understanding that it would not be enough to just have plants; it had to represent a new way of thinking about living." This led to the idea of showing both wild and cultivated plants in a range of exotic climate houses as well as establishing a contemporary, outdoor temperate garden. Smit, Thoday, and McMillan had already worked together since 1991 on a very different garden project in Cornwall, the restoration of the Victorian "Lost Gardens of Heligan" a few miles to the east of the vacant quarry now known as the Eden site, and had assembled there an experienced horticultural team. These discussions might have remained just that, but for the establishment late in 1994 of the British Millennium Fund using proceeds from the new National Lottery. Smit and a Cornish architect, Jonathan Ball, put together a bid for Millennium funding for the Eden Project. The local district council bestowed a grant of £25,000 ($37,000 ) to support the bid in the hope that the project would ultimately be a major tourist attraction. Cornwall—although its mild, rainy climate is good for gardens—is one of the poorest of European regions with high unemployment. London architects Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners were next approached and a development team assembled. As Smit relates it, he and Ball approached Grimshaw at the end of 1995 by saying, "We're giving you the opportunity to build the Eighth Wonder of the World. The bad news is, we can't pay you." The architects then brought on board the landscape architects Land Use Consultants, a large London-based firm known for their ecological and environmental work. Ultimately, Land Use Consultants would design both the internal and external landscapes. In 1997 the Millennium Commission agreed to grant £37.5 million ($56 million). The European Union Regional Fund followed with a grant of £10 million ($15 million), and bankers contributed £18 million ($26 million). The grant has paid off in fuller employment for the region: The completed Eden Project now boasts a workforce of 400, of which 46 are gardeners, nurserymen, and botanists or other scientists. This is an exercise in horticultural and ecological expertise. The site is a 15-hectare (34-acre) old china clay pit near St. Austell. It faces south, is 60 meters (200 feet) deep, and is two miles from the coast. The site was cheap, and the mild oceanic climate is good for plant growth. Architect Grimshaw's assignment was to provide two greenhouses, one a humid tropic biome, the other a warm temperate biome (the idea of a third, desert, biome was omitted in 1997, but it may be built at some point). The two biomes are housed in large geodesic domes formed of hexagons and pentagons and clad with three layers of ethyl tetrafluorethylene (ETFE). They look like a series of soapsuds mounting the quarry walls. The star of the show is the humid tropic biome—it's huge, 240 meters long, 110 meters wide, and 55 meters high (788 x 360 x 180 feet), and after just one season's growth it has become a jungle. It's a place of wonder. The warm temperate house is smaller, the vegetation is smaller, slower growing, and of grayer greens, and the set dressing—including a Barraganesque wall and Spanish-style adobe walls and terraces—is incongruously dominant. It needs more time to grow. Inside the larger tropical house are displays of plants and crops from the Amazon, West Africa, Malaysia, and Oceania, with waterfall, stream, pools, and stage-set displays of Malay houses. The warm temperate house deals with Mediterranean climate zone vegetation from California, South Africa, Western Australia, and the Mediterranean basin itself. Linking the two glazed biomes is a 500-seat restaurant with a walkway above and a grass roof. But the larger biome
is outside the geodesic domes in the clay pit itself, which has 12 hectares
(30 acres) of cool temperate plant displays ranging from Chilean temperate
rain forest displays to Cornish heath to Atlantic oakwood and crops such
as wheat, sunflower, and lavender.
Beyond this strategy the Eden Project is also developing commercial, educational, and scientific partnerships. One especially exciting point about this is that it acts to counter the "de-skilling" of British garden making as a consequence of the cutbacks and outsourcing policies of local parks departments over the past 20 years. Outside is curious.
The scale is vast, but the problem with a big hole is that from above
you can see everything—so the impact is diminished. LUC, led by Dominic
Cole, has successfully disposed the 1,000 parking places around the pit
in terraces with mounds and banks to hide views of the pit itself. LUC
has used traditional stone-faced field banks in clever ways to contain
and disperse the impact of the parking, so that all you see on approaching
are suggestive glimpses of the domes. The construction and technical problems have clearly been very difficult. China clay is loose and unstable, and the brave decision was to stabilize slopes using vegetation supplemented by coconut matting and to avoid sprayed concrete, meshes, or gabions. The water table is above the floor level of the pit, which was especially a problem in the winter of 2000, the wettest on record. Water is collected via swale systems and then pumped out or used in irrigation. Soil manufacture has become an industrial process at the Eden Project. There was no topsoil to begin with and local mine waste was used: It was like making a garden on the moon. Surplus sand and reject clay from two china-clay operations served as the basis, to which was added forestry bark as an organic component for interior soils and composted, domestic greenwaste outside. This manufactured soil is now being marketed commercially. Several specific soil types were developed. For instance, the tropical soils are predominantly organic; warm temperate biome soils are sand based with the addition of clays and bark; while the South American Fynbos plants demand a nutrient-free soil of composted bark and sand. LUC worked to a brief from horticulturists Thoday and McMillan, which fixed some hundred constraints for each display—aspect, slope, plant size, soil type, and the like. According to Cole the horticulturists' ideal would have been a flat prairie site in East Anglia so they could form rectangular fields. But this was a huge sloping hole, hence a specific functional challenge of balancing plot size, slope, and orientation, and threading this between the circulation routes. The other consideration was the need for "an absolute minimum of moving of materials" once the stable foundation for the dome structures had been constructed. The biome design raises the question of how such displays should be made: In the biomes the approach is theatrical; there is horticultural scene setting as in later 20th-century botanic gardens. The internal horticultural scene setting at Eden is superb, although the artificial pools and rock constructions do not equal a Disney display. Outside the displays are compartmentalized as in older botanic gardens, but rather than the rectangular geometry of 17th-century botanic gardens, here the geometry is twofold. One geometry relates sinuous swirling patterns to the ramps and slopes of the old quarry, which is cut across by the other, straight-line horticultural geometry. The comparison must be made with the similarly sloping Barcelona Botanic Garden by Beth Figueras (see "Beauty and a Botanic Garden," Landscape Architecture, August 2001), which uses a loosely draped, triangular, straight-line fractal structure given strength by Corten steel-faced walls. But then the Barcelona project is about convex slopes on a mountain rather than the concavities of the Eden Project, where the vastness of the displays dwarfs the individual. An alternative might have been to create a series of valley forms feeding into the pit and separated by woodland so scenes and sets could have been created in contained areas. You would review all from above and then descend into ecologically and agriculturally themed spaces. Indeed there is an existing example of this where the service road descends into the site and serves the rear of the link building. Cole, however, rejects such ideas: "We wanted to divorce this from the outside world. We followed the horticulturists' brief." The designers' response here is a geometric functionalism. The quarry is now a vegetated landscape of slopes and ramps with a lakeside arena for events at the bottom. You either descend by the series of ramps or take the land train, which goes around the pit to reach the domes. By September 2001, the main landscape effects were looking like a frayed patchwork. The site horticultural experts are grappling with establishment problems. The pit has been compartmentalized into "interlocking sabre shapes" defined by ramped paths. After one season, the scale and cover of the vegetation are limited. It needs two or three seasons' growth. The most effective displays are monospecific crops like wheat or hemp. The structural tree planting follows the curves and is not particularly noticeable yet. The way the sabre shapes have been cut across and down the slope by straight-line patterns as, say, monospecific planting of hydrangea gives way to bamboo, looks awkward and arbitrarily imposed. Unlike a comparable English project, the Earth Centre in South Yorkshire (see "Design for a Small Planet," December 1999), which has not been a great popular success, the Eden Project's problems are those of too much success. Up to 14,000 visitors per day have strained the local roads and required overspill parking. It is fortunate that the English don't mind standing in line. Of course it takes time to establish a great botanical and ecological collection. The horticultural and ecological management has to develop and the collections grow. The idea for a desert biome is still proposed, and there is room for expansion. The Eden Project is a great theatrical experience that can only get better as it grows. LA Landscape architect Robert Holden practices at Cracknell Ferns, London, and teaches at the University of Greenwich. How to get there: The Eden Project is on the south coast of Cornwall, just east of St. Austell Road. Access is via the A391 motorway. St. Austell is four hours by train from London. By air it is a one-hour flight from London Gatwick to Plymouth and then a 30-mile drive. PROJECT CREDITS
RESOURCES Smit, Tim. Eden. Bantam Books, 2001. |
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