UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010

UK Pavilion wins 2010 RIBA Lubetkin Prize In September 2007, Heatherwick Studio led the winning team in the competition to design the UK Pavilion for the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The event is the largest Expo ever with two hundred countries taking part and over 70 million visitors expected. The theme of the Expo is “Better City, Better Life” and a key client objective is for the UK Pavilion to be one of the five most popular attractions. The studio’s design has three main aims: the first is to be a pavilion whose architecture is a direct manifestation of the content it exhibits; the second is to provide significant public open space in which visitors can relax; the third is to find a simple idea that is strong enough to stand out amidst the busy-ness of the hundreds of competing pavilions. These aims are captured in two interlinked and experiential elements based around the subject of nature and cities – the Seed Cathedral, and a multi-layered landscape treatment of the 6,000sqm site. The Seed Cathedral is a platform to show the work of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and their Millennium Seedbank. In the circulation zone under the landscape that surrounds the Seed Cathedral a series of installations explore in more detail the particularity of nature and UK cities. The Seed Cathedral is a 20-metre high building, constructed from 60,000 transparent 7.5-metre long optical strands, each of which has embedded within its tip a seed. The interior is silent and illuminated only by the daylight that has filtered past each seed through each optical hair. The UK Pavilion has consistently been ranked by visitors as one of the most popular pavilions with 50,000 people visiting each day.

East Beach Cafe, Littlehampton, UK

Heatherwick Studio was commissioned to design a café building to replace a seafront kiosk in Littlehampton on England’s south coast. With the post-war rise in cheap package holidays having deprived the English seaside town of investment and downgraded many of them to cheap clichés, the studio’s client saw an opportunity to change this. Mother and daughter team Jane Wood and Sophie Murray, both residents of Littlehampton, were keen to do something different that might begin to re-establish the importance of the English seaside town.

The studio saw the challenge as responding to the constraints of the narrow site by producing a long, thin building without flat, two-dimensional façades. The envelope is sliced diagonally into strips which wrap up and over the building, creating a layered protective shell, open to the seafront. The elevation looking onto the sea is fully glazed, protected at night by roller shutters concealed within the building’s geometry, the 30 centimetre width of the ribbons being the dimension of a shutter mechanism.

In contrast to the conventional white-washed seaside aesthetic, the building is raw and weathered, with the structural steel shell protected by a coating that permits rust-like patination to develop without affecting structural performance. A kiosk and cafeteria by day and a restaurant in the evening, the East Beach Cafe seats sixty. East Beach Café won numerous awards including a prestigious RIBA National Award.

Gravelly Hill – Spaghetti Junction UK

Gravelly Hill Interchange also known as the Spaghetti Junction is one of the iconic civil engineering work in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Gravelly Hill became famous as the Spaghetti Junction due to its complex design.

This junction is spread across 30 acres and has 18 routes which include slip roads ( 4km or 2.5 miles). It has a total of 559 concrete columns and passes over two railway lines, three canals, and two rivers

The construction work started in 1968 and was completed in May 1972 and till date its considered as one of the most complicated road network in world.