Discover Eden
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Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
Page 1
What is the Eden Project? ............................... 3
How we use art and automata to put the
message across ................................................ 8
The Core ........................................................ 11
The Exhibition Hall in the Core .................... 13
The Plant Engine ........................................... 14
The Themed Display Cases........................... 16
The Plant Processor ....................................... 16
The Resource Files ........................................ 17
Fridges ........................................................... 19
Thanks ........................................................... 20
Funders and supporters ................................. 21
About this document ..................................... 22
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
Page 2
What is the Eden Project?
- An educational charity
- A regeneration project, demonstrating that
sustainability is possible
- An international visitor attraction
- A Living Theatre of Plants and People
- The home of the biggest greenhouses in the
world
- A botanical garden
- A science museum
The Eden Project, an educational charity,
connects plants and people, and explores and
celebrates environmental conservation,
responsible land use and sustainable futures.
Before we try to communicate these issues we first
have to aim to live by their principles; hence the
regeneration of a china clay pit, the creation of a
Living Theatre and the establishment of an
international visitor attraction that addresses
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environmental and social issues hand in hand with
economic viability. We like to push the boundaries
and so try out new things. It’s not always easy.
Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but the point
is that we aim to share the outcomes with others
so they can learn from our successes (and from
our mistakes!). Recent successes include our
waste reduction and recycling project, Waste
Neutral, and Gardens for Life, a project connecting
schools in the UK, India and Kenya who are
growing their own food and exchanging ideas
about food production, trade and healthy diets.
We communicate our work, and that of others.
Rather than dwell on problems, we aim to
celebrate the world, look to solutions, show what is
being done and what can be done. To reach a
large audience of all ages, interests and abilities
we aim to connect, provoke curiosity, engage,
amuse and entertain using a wide range of
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methods which we are working to assess and
evaluate
This all happens in our Living Theatre, where
two huge greenhouses, the Rainforest Biome and
Mediterranean Biome, serve as a backdrop to the
Outdoor Biome. All Biomes are brimming with
plants, displayed as natural habitats and cropped
landscapes. We use them to help connect, and
often reconnect, us to our world, showing how we
use them for food, fuel, medicines and materials.
Many of these exhibits use art, sculpture and
automata to bring the stories to life. All areas are
designed with accessibility in mind, both in
physical terms and in how we share information.
We work with Sensory Trust to develop an
inclusive approach which includes using cartoons,
widgits (for those with learning difficulties) and
Braille. A combination of plant scientists, artists,
designers and educationalists devise and develop
the exhibits.
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Eden could be described as a museum for the
future full of contemporary stories and future
possibilities. News and views change, so it has to
be very dynamic. As well as changing exhibitions,
we host public and formal educational events on
site which link to our seasonal themes (Bulbmania,
Survival and Time of Gifts) and extend off site
through outreach work, global projects, the web
and published materials.
‘Eden is demonstrating behaviour change on
site, holding a mirror to our values and civilisation
and encouraging respect for the things that sustain
us and respect for each other.’ (Dr Tony Kendle,
Foundation Director, Eden Project)
‘The Trust’s interests lie in exploring the natural
world through the lens of plants in order to
understand our dependence on them and develop
best practice for principles of sustainable living that
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can act as a model for others.’ (Tim Smit, CEO,
Eden Project).
Eden is a project, a work in progress. It is a
symbol of the strength of people working with
nature.
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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How we use art and automata to put the
message across
Many of the public feel science is very complex
and too academic for them. Some even mistrust
science and scientists.
At Eden we help to communicate scientific
issues, and a wide range of other subjects, to a
large audience of all ages and abilities by using,
amongst other things, art to help visitors
emotionally connect with the stories.
Two types of art which really seem to hit the
button at Eden are sculpture and performance. Our
research has shown that it helps people to engage
and learn. We took elements from both concepts
and rolled them into one, commissioning and
installing automata. These are also called
mechanical puppets, mechanical toys or kinetic art.
One of Eden’s most frequented exhibits is the
‘Plant Takeaway’ (better known as ‘Dead Cat’).
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This automaton, built by Will Jackson (now of
Engineered Arts) and automatist Paul Spooner,
both of whom are known internationally for their
work, features a larger-than-life-size kitchen scene
(30 sq. m. ) which is home to two adult puppets
(Alan and Enid), a child and their pets. One by
one, all the plant products are (mechanically)
removed; the fruit from the table, the wooden table
itself, the contents of the fridge, until the room is
bare and Alan and Enid and family are left
collapsed upon the floor with not even oxygen left
to breathe. The message is a simple one: without
plants we would not exist.
Automata are often humorous. People laugh
when poor Alan and Enid sink naked to the floor.
It’s OK, they are not real. The automata convey a
story in the same way as nursery rhymes, fireside
stories and cartoon strips do, enabling serious
lessons to be communicated with a light touch. A
huge bonus of automata is the fascination with
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their engineering technology. Automata have been
with us for hundreds of years and are still as
popular today as they have always been. Building
on the success of ‘Dead Cat’, we decided to base
many of our new 2006 exhibitions on automata…
but ones that were far more intricate.
Links:
www.engineeredarts.co.uk
www.timhunkin.com
www.automata.co.uk
www.cabaret.co.uk
www.cabaret.co.uk/artists/spooner.
www.keithnewsteadautomata.com
Automata, A Historical and Technological Study
by Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Translated
by Alec Reid. B.T. Batsford Ltd., London, 1958.
Automata, the Golden Age: 1848-1914 by
Christen Bailly. Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.,
1987.
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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The Core
When we first planned Eden the aim was to have
three covered Biomes, an Education Centre for
schools programmes and the public events
programmes and an Exhibition Hall to take stories
and issues to a deeper level. On day one, due to
initial funding constraints we had a choice: the
second biggest greenhouse in the world and an
education centre OR the biggest greenhouse in the
world and a tent. Guess what? Yes, we got out the
tent pegs. In the end it turned out for the best as
over the next few years our thoughts and plans
evolved into something more sophisticated than
the original building.
The new building, called the Core, is an exhibit in
its own right, designed to provoke curiosity and
pay homage to the ‘Plant Engine’ that powers our
world. The building was designed by the architects,
Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, and… nature:
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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the structural engineers programmed the
mathematics of the sunflower head, based on
Fibonacci numbers and plant phyllotaxy, into a
computer and printed out a model on which to
base the roof structure. A sunflower is a
composite, made up of many small individual
flowers that together achieve more than the sum of
their parts. This building philosophically
demonstrates collaboration, showing what a group
of people from very different backgrounds and
disciplines can achieve when they work together.
As a fundamental part of social sustainability, it is
inclusively designed, responding to the full
diversity of people who would work in and visit the
building. It is also an example of biomimicry, the
science that studies nature's designs and then
imitates or takes inspiration from them to solve
human challenges. Plants have had 400 million
years to evolve their structural design. After
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securing the funding we had 18 months to turn our
plans into reality.
The Exhibition Hall in the Core
Across the Eden site we touch on how our plant
resources can be managed sustainably, and also
feature some of the world’s ‘wild places’, flagging
up the need to conserve them. The exhibition on
the ground floor of the Core, situated in the heart
of the Eden site gives us the opportunity to take
things a little deeper. It looks at how the ‘wild
places’ keep us alive, the challenges we are
imposing upon our global environment and, most
important, gives hope for the future, showcasing
what people are doing and what people can do
about it.
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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The Plant Engine
Plants are all around us yet we very rarely stop
to think about what they give us. This machine is
designed to grab people’s attention and turn
science into theatre.
The Plant Engine, designed and built by Will
Jackson and his team from Engineered Arts,
demonstrates photosynthesis. Real plants in a
huge glass sphere, grown hydroponically and
aeroponically, take in water, carbon dioxide and
artificial sunlight and produce the energy-rich
carbohydrates and oxygen that keep us alive
(check out the dials around the machine). It was a
very tricky exhibit to build and this helped to
reinforce the complexity of trying to reproduce
natural systems.
The hand-crafted automata in the bell jars,
theatrically ‘kept alive’ by the oxygen coming
through the air tubes from the glass sphere,
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represent the services that the world’s wild places
(our ecosystems) provide. These services,
generated by connected natural cycles powered by
the sun, are crucial to the human race. It was not
until we began to disrupt the services that we
realised their true cost, currently estimated as $33
trillion a year. Paul Spooner, internationally
renowned automata artist, translated and simplified
components of the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment publication (4 years work by 1300
scientists costing $24 million) into an exhibition
that is accessible to a wide range of interest
groups.
Discover more about the services and the vital
role of conserving the ecosystems that provide
them in the cartoon strips, created by Paul
Spooner, beneath the bell jars.
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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The Themed Display Cases
We took three ‘disrupted’ services and talked to
individuals and organisations worldwide to find out
about the challenges and some of the solutions
associated with them. Their views and work are
portrayed in the themed display cases with small
amounts of text and quotes supporting models and
artefacts to create a visual, intriguing, thoughtprovoking display. The exhibits were designed
and built by Engineered Arts.
The Plant Processor
Another attention-grabbing exhibit in the hall is a
thirty-foot-high interactive Heath Robinson device,
the world’s largest nutcracker and also a self-oiling
machine.
It’s a real sledgehammer to crack a nut and
represents the polluting fossil fuel energy we use
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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to process plants every day for food, fuel, medicine
and materials, and how complicated we make it.
Around the base explore some of the issues
associated with production and processing, and
discover what Rob Higgs (the artist) thinks too.
The Resource Files
Here you can explore the big issue questions:
can the world be fed, fuelled, cured? What about
our material world? The Eden team asked people
and organisations worldwide their views and
answers to these questions. To avoid putting
visitors off by presenting walls of text panels and to
encourage people to think about the big,
sometimes uncomfortable, issues the world faces,
we needed a device to provoke curiosity. So
Engineered Arts came up with an interactive filing
cabinet, designed and built by Alan Munden.
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Watch the visitors, they often read one drawer and
then start to walk away. However, when they close
the drawer another pops open, then they become
intrigued and continue reading!
Fridges
Do you leave notes pinned to your fridge?
Visitors can have their picture taken, and write
their thoughts on our Idea cards. Some end up in
our exhibition!
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Key words:
Fibonacci sequence: This code was cracked by
an Italian mathematician 800 years ago. Fibonacci
devised the following number sequence whilst
working out how fast rabbits could breed in ideal
circumstances!
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 …
Each number is the sum of the previous 2. If a
Fibonacci number is divided by the one before it in
the sequence it levels out at 1.618 (‘phi’). The
golden proportion or ratio of 0.618 to 1 is the
mathematical basis for many shapes in and out of
nature.
Phyllotaxy: The mathematical arrangement of
plant parts, such as leaves on a stem.
Hydroponics: Growing plants in water not soil.
Their roots are supported by pots of clay granules.
Aeroponics: Similar to hydroponics except that
the plant roots dangle free in the foggy air.
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Ecosystems: Specific groups of plants, animals
and micro-organisms in particular climatic areas.
These include:
The surface layers of the oceans with their
photosynthesising bacteria
The anaerobic (oxygen free) sediments where
bacteria rot things down
The soils and soil life of the world
The temperate and tropical forests
The grasslands and deserts
The managed forests and farms (which are both
on the increase).
Thanks
Exhibition designed and built by Engineered Arts
Ltd, with special commissions by internationally
renowned artists Rob Higgs (Plant Processor
sculpture) and Paul Spooner (Plant Engine
automata and Biodiversity exhibit).
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Funders and supporters
The Eden Project would like to thank all those
who supported the building of the Core and the
exhibitions within it. Funders include the
Millennium Commission, the South West Regional
Development Agency, the European Regional
Development Fund (via the Cornwall Objective
One Programme), the ReDiscover Programme
(supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Wolfson
Foundation and the Millennium Commission), The
Department of Trade and Industy ( DTI), The
Energy Saving Trust, EDF Energy, The Bernard
Sunley Charitable Foundation, Kelloggs, Misses
Barrie Charitable Trust, Rio Tinto plc, Creative
Partnerships and the Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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About this document
This teaching resource has been developed by the
Sensory Trust in association with the Eden
Project. It is the copyright of the Eden Project. The
original exhibits to which this resource responds
can be found at the Eden Project; they are the
copyright of Engineered Arts and are the property
of the Eden Project.
The teaching resource is free to download from
the Eden Project website/Sensory Trust website
for use in educational activities. Any further use,
reproduction or publication of the full resource, any
parts of the resource, or photographic
reproductions of the exhibits, must be with written
permission from the Eden Project.
This work has been kindly funded by the
ReDiscover Fund, a joint venture between the
Millennium Commission, Wellcome Foundation
and Wolfson Trust.
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
Page 22
This has been developed by the Sensory Trust in
association with the Eden Project. It is the
copyright of Eden Project. The original exhibits to
which this resource responds can be found at
Eden Project; they are the copyright of Engineered
Arts and are the property of the Eden Project.
This document is free to download from the
Eden Project website / Sensory Trust website.
Any further use, reproduction or publication of the
full resource, any parts of the resource, or
photographic reproductions of the exhibits, must
be with written permission from the Eden Project.
www.edenproject.com
www.sensorytrust.org.uk
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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This work has been kindly funded by the
ReDiscover Fund, a joint venture between the
Millennium Commission, Wellcome Foundation
and Wolfson Trust.
This resource has been inclusively designed by the
Sensory Trust in partnership with the Eden Project
The Sensory Trust is supported by the Big Lottery
Fund
Copyright © 2006 Eden Project
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