The Core is Eden's Education Centre...

...one of the most sustainable buildings in the world 

The Core is the name of Eden’s Education Centre, a fantastic building that has become an inspirational hub for events, exhibitions and learning for everyone. 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.

Inside the Core

• Inside, there are three floors connected by stair and lift.
• The ground floor, which children can reach from outside through a tiny door and down a slide, is given over to spectacular exhibitions based around the power and importance of the world of plants.
• The second floor branches out into spaces for exhibitions, films, talks and children's workshops.
• On the third floor you’ll find a Jo’s Café, a superfoods cafe, with a terrace view of the biomes, and glimpses of the undersides of the roof.

One of the most sustainable buildings in the world

The Core is one of the most sustainable buildings in the world, having been designed on nature's architecture, with every effort put into minimising its impact on the environment during its construction and in its future use. The design of The Core is based on how plants grow. It incorporates a central trunk and canopy roof that shades the ground and harvests the sun. The most striking feature - the roof created from an intricate web of curved timber beams - is based on Fibonacci spirals, a pattern found in many natural forms including the seeds of a sunflower head, pine cones and snail shells. Innovative features incorporated into the building include:

Water saving measures

• Rainwater is collected and used to flush the loos
• Automatic taps save water (by turning themselves off)
• Roof runoff is filtered through limestone to remove any copper runoff
• Reducing CO2 emissions by reducing fuel needs

The Eden sustainability team worked closely with Buro Happold, the mechanical and electrical consultants to reduce the building's energy needs and modelled then installing the most effective heat and power options. Other measures include:

• Using photovoltaic panels on the roof of The Core to provide electricity
• Insulating the building well, including insulating the walls Warmcel, made from 100 per cent recycled newspapers
• Warming the air via ground tubes before it enters the building
• A lobby was installed to reduce heat loss from the building
• Buying into green tariff electricity for extra needs

The Roof

The Core roof was made from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified Red Spruce (Picea rubens) from Swiss sustainable forests. The beams for the roof are constructed using a technique known as Glulam (glue-laminated timber which is made from bonded, selected, planed layers of timber of parallel running grain). Glulam is incredibly versatile and is one of the strongest structural materials per unit of weight… and it generates no waste because its offcuts are used as a fuel.

The Copper Roof

The Eden sustainability team worked closely with its partners at international minerals company Rio Tinto and sourced the copper which covers The Core's roof from a single US mine: Kennecott Utah Copper Company’s Bingham Canyon mine, which has amongst the highest environmental and social standards of any copper mine in the world.

The building as Art

The Core is as much a piece of artwork as it is a building and as much an expression of the botanical form as it is a space in which to tell the story of plants. The design for The Core was a unique collaboration between artist and architect – perhaps the first time that an artist has informed the design process to such an extent on a building of this scale. In March 2003, the internationally-renowned sculptor Peter Randall-Page was appointed as artist in residence to work with architect Jolyon Brewis, of Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, on the design for the education centre and the appropriate integration of artwork into it. The visionary idea for the collaboration came from Eden’s Chief Executive Tim Smit and Creative Director Peter Hampel. The result is a building inspired by the geometry which defines plant growth. At its centre it has a monumental seed-shaped sculpture based on these same natural patterns.

Seed

Seed is the centrepiece of the Core. It started life as a 167-tonne boulder extracted in 2003 from De Lank Quarry, Cornwall. At 70-tonnes it weighs as much as ten elephants. It is made of prime silver-grey Cornish granite estimated to be 300 million years old. Carved into its surface is a pattern as intricate as the head of a sunflower. Seed, the most challenging work ever created by internationally-acclaimed artist Peter Randall-Page and one of the biggest sculptures in history made from a single piece of rock. “The sculpture within the chamber will, I hope, be an object of contemplation and meditation, a still quiet hub; both fossil and seed.The result of this collaboration … unite concept and form, object and structure, art and architecture in a unique and cohesive whole.”