Motherboard

Seed banks tend to be drab, Polar-bound affairs, built in the event of some kind of agricultural Armageddon, the kind of steel-clad underground vaults that wouldn’t be out of place in some dystopian video game.

But for the UK pavilion at the upcoming Shanghai Expo, London designer Thomas Heatherwick has found a way to store and celebrate seeds that’s more Disney than Doom. The building looks like a cybernetic armadillo, with 60,000 luminescent, flexible acrylic rods that stick out like hair, each containing a part of the plant species. It’s not a seed vault but a seed cathedral.

In a nod to the Expo’s theme, “Better City, Better Life,” Heatherwick’s studio worked with Kew Garden’s Millennium Seed Bank, a worldwide project to preserve a quarter of the world’s plant species.

Like cilia, the 7 meter long rods, which will slightly sway in the wind, lend the six-story building an ethereal fuzziness (or, uh, make it look like Star Wars’ entrance into hyperspace). The building is clearly much more bizarre than even the Expo’s mascot, and definitely much better looking. Though the original plan was to use the prickly facade as a pixelated 3-D video billboard, now the rods will be illuminated by LEDs, and visitors will be able to view the seeds from the interior.

Says Stuart Wood of Heatherwick Studio: “We have to create an image that can burn into people’s memory.” That’s partly because, per Expo rules, the £25m building and every other of the 250 national pavilions will need to be dismantled after the six-month cultural and architectural orgy is over. The seeds will be returned to the UK, but how do you preserve (or recycle) a giant Chia pet?