Eden Project wants one of its main Dundee buildings to be made entirely from leftover construction materials.
And this means no one knows exactly how the finished building will look.
After winning planning permission in June, the Eden team is now working on a timeline and budget for the project, expected to be north of £100 million.
Blair Parkin, chief experience development officer at Eden Project, said its unique approach for the building, currently referred to as venue three, fits in with its environmental and sustainability aims.
He said: “When we talk about construction waste, it’s often not piles of rubbish.
“It’s window frames you didn’t use, it’s paving slabs you didn’t use. Often on a construction site they are just sent to landfill, even though they’re new.
“We are planning to create this building principally out of those kinds of materials.
“But we can’t draw the shape and geometry of every window, because we don’t know what windows we’re going to find.”
Strategy for unique construction challenge
The Eden team has spent months developing a strategy for the building, which will be on the northern edge of the 12.8 acre site.
It believes it has found a solution which has involved reimagining the rules of construction.
Mr Parkin said: “A typical building grid is six metres, so that’s the typical length of wooden beams or steel beams, the maximum for glazing panes.
“What our structural engineers Expedition realised was we should reduce the grid on the building. This means we can use materials that have been trimmed.
“It’s a really simple technique, but it took our team a long while to come up with it, because people haven’t had to think this way before.”
Sourcing the leftover materials will be a complex operation in itself.
But Eden has created its own solution to this by setting this as a task for one of the nine new guilds of Dundee it is creating.
The Guild of Re-Sourcerors will be set this challenge to engage with the building industry across Scotland to find what is required.
The concept for venue three is to explore humanity’s relationship to nature.
What does building mean for planning?
Eden Project won planning permission for the East Dock Street development in June.
Depending on how venue three develops, it may have to go through the planning process again.
Mr Parkin said there is a “threshold” to what’s already been approved.
“We might have to go back to planning and say this facade is changing a little bit,” he said.
“We will take the planners with us on that journey, because this building is a very unique idea.
“We’re trying to demonstrate you could build a large public building – that is safe, operable and maintainable – using materials you can get that would otherwise go to landfill.”
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