Heatherwick Studio A multi-award winning British design and architecture studio, has unveiled its latest project, a kinetic glasshouse set on the edge of the gardens at Woolbeding, West Sussex.
A bespoke new glasshouse and gardens is a a striking ten-sided glasshouse and landscaped series of garden zones exhibit plants, shrubs and trees that depict the key regions of the Silk Route.
This unfolding structure provides the focal point to a new garden that reveals how much the ancient Silk Route – which linked the Western world with the Middle East and Asia – has influenced English gardens of today.
It features ten steel ‘sepals’ with glass and aluminium façade creating an immense 141m2 space in the shape of a crown. A series of hydraulic rams lower the triangular petals or sepals in an elegant and all-but-silent four-minute dance. At full stretch, they sit at the same angle as the glass sides of the base.
The glasshouse draws inspiration from the spirit of Victorian ornamental terrariums. It deploys cutting-edge engineering to provide a functional protective structure while at the same time offering a beguiling, decorative element to the new Silk Route Garden.
On warm days, the glasshouse opens its ‘sepals’ using a hydraulic mechanism to allow the plants access to direct sunshine and ventilation, while in colder weather the structure will remain closed, providing shelter to a collection of subtropical species.
The Silk Route Garden surrounding the Glasshouse invites visitors on a 12-step journey through a landscape influenced by the ancient trading route between Asia and Europe where commodities such as the eponymous silk were exchanged and along which many plants species were brought back to Britain for the first time, such as rosemary, lavender and fennel.
A winding path allows visitors to move through over 300 species and twelve distinct regions of the Silk Road. From Mediterranean evergreens where visitors can enjoy a rare variety of Mullein (Verbascum sp.) grown from a seed brought here by a friend of Woolbeding Gardens, through to the richly scented Gallica roses, now so popular in England but originally introduced to Europe by traders from Persia.
The Glasshouse itself shelters an impressive, rare specimen of an Aralia Vietnamensis which provides shade for a collection of tender ferns growing alongside umbrella trees, magnolias and bananas.
Heatherwick Studio, has won more than 100 international awards for design excellence, including the Prix Versailles and the RIBA National Awards. The studio’s founder Thomas Heatherwick comes from a background immersed in materials and making.
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