Gumuchdjian Architects

Recycled

with Stephen Spence and Shigeru Ban
Millennium Dome, London

The challenge of creating the Nation’s Community Pavilion in the Millennium Exhibition demanded an ambitious response.

We proposed to make our building entirely out of waste and to appeal to the young citizens of Britain to supply the material for recycling.

The intention was to create the largest magic trick ever – the creation of a giant building out of bits of cereal packets.
We designed a giant structure, a brand new building entirely made out of reprocessed waste paper – a Phoenix expressly born from the debris of everyday life.

The design required the fabrication of amongst other components 100 columns ranging from 10m to 20m high for a structure arranged as an enormous spiraling composition.
The project was unveiled on BBC’s Blue Peter to 3 million children and the nationwide appeal launched.

Children were invited to send five CD-sized pieces of card to the Sonoco Paper Mill in Halifax for recycling with the first 25,000 contributors named as the benefactors of the building.
We decided to uniquely use paper because it is easy to recycle, because it allowed every child from Lands End to John O’Groats to post in their donation.

The donated paper was duly pulped and new high- tensile paper created as the raw material for the fabrication of the structural and architectural components of the building.
We designed a bespoke kit of cardboard building components including large primary columns, a secondary system of mullions and transoms and a multiple panel system using rigid and flexible tubes, honeycomb structures and hybrid laminates to provide fire and acoustic separation.
Achieving a 100% fireproof building made out of paper was not without acute challenges.

Six months of intensive research, and laboratory trials were carried out to develop the system and to prove that the building met stringent, structural environmental and fire resistance codes.
Within the building we curated exhibitions developing the theme of interaction between people and space collaborating with artists such as Richard Wilson, Mark Wallinger, Eduardo Paolozzi, Sarah Raphael, Webster and Noble, Mark Wallinger, and Langlands and Bell.

The exhibition was designed as a 20-minute experience with a through-put of 1,500 people per hour.
“Topping them all for sheer beauty is Shared Ground - an extraordinary cardboard structure.”

Marcus Binney, THE TIMES, 4 December 1999

“Beneath the excessive hype and visual overload, two of these spaces stand out for their conceptual finesse and material innovation: Zaha Hadid’s Mind Zone and Gumuchdjian+Spence’s Shared Ground zone.”

Sara Hart, ARCHITECTURE, February 2000
At the end of the year long Millennium Experience, the building was pulped and recycled into, among other things, a book tracking the development and life cycle of the project including a paper kit model of the building – all at the same size of the original donations.