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North West to get rainforest
One of the brains behind the Eden Project has joined forces with Daniel Libeskind to develop a £75m indoor rainforest in northwest England.
Robin Lock, the former curator of the Tropical Biome and international partnership coordinator at the Eden Project, has co-founded an environmental leisure group called Rainforest Ventures Ltd, which will deliver the project.
At the Libeskind-designed Imperial War Museum North last month, Lock outlined his vision for a new concept of urban development – a carbon- neutral rainforest project with sustainable energy at the heart of the design attached to a hotel or commercial building, which would act as the side walls of the rainforest.
He told Vista: “It will be an intensive rainforest with lots of orchids. It’s a smaller area than the one at Eden, with about 70 or 80 per cent of the space, and it will be in a totally different kind of building. The stories will also be totally different: the ones at Eden were all about plants and people and their interaction; these will be very much about the science, the climate and sustainable energy.
“The rainforest won’t use any energy from the grid, because it will absorb so much energy from the sun that there will be an overflow of heat, which will be absorbed in several ways and stored during summer to be released in wintertime. There will be so much heat that it will also be able to supply energy to the adjacent hotel or commercial building, making it carbon neutral.”
At present, an exact location for the project has not yet been agreed. “With this sort of project you have to work with a committed and supportive council, so we have opened it out to all those authorities with regeneration plans and we have a high level of interest from Blackpool and Liverpool, but also Manchester,” Lock added. Rainforest Ventures Ltd is planning similar rainforest projects in Poland and Saudi Arabia. Discuss this article
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