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For the second Blueprint 20/20, we gathered together many of the original protagonists of The Eden Project for an entertaining debate.

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Grimshaw deputy chairman, Andrew Whalley, presented the project with all its trials and tribulations, before Blueprint editor, Johnny Tucker, conducted a panel discussion with Andrew Whalley, practice founder Nicholas Grimshaw and Eden Project founder Tim Smit. The lively evening ended with the news that further Eden Projects are being planned for China and Canada, and Grimshaw will be the architect involved again. Here we bring you some of the presentation and discussion from a memorable evening.

The evening was a sell out

Andrew Whalley: The genesis of the project came out of the Lost Gardens of Heligan, not only are they beautiful gardens, but Tim Smit has a real fascination about learning how you can cultivate and grow all the needs and produce for a Victorian house from glasshouses and the surrounding land. The idea was to take that to a much bigger scale and somehow explore and describe man's relationship with the planet and plants. It was through the idea of creating very large enclosures, creating completely new life environments in Cornwall. When we were approached, we had just finished Waterloo terminal where the inspiration for us was the great Victorian railway sheds, and they in turn were influenced by work of Joseph Paxton.

The construction site near St Austell, Cornwall

Nicholas Grimshaw: From an architect's point of view, this was a life-changing project for our office; so many things were never the same. We'd done some quite big projects before, but this gripped us in a way, I suppose, like some vast film. It was the way it swept everyone along -- we were perhaps only 10 per cent of the picture -- it was quite extraordinary; the economics of it, the politics of it, the whole effect on the region, you just felt everybody down there was involved in it.

The ETFE biomes are nestled in a disused china clay pit

AW: Collectively, as a design team, all of us really bought into it, despite several set-backs. I think as we all went down on that beautiful train journey, we all fell in love with Cornwall and could see there was something magical. Particularly, I think it was the discovery of that site. All of us claim to have been the first person to discover the site and look down; you almost expected dinosaurs to be roaming around in the bottom. It really had to be part of the architecture. Tim's one of the few people who has looked at a derelict site that people are trying to get rid of and said, 'I have to have that site -- I'll pay you anything for it'!

Grimshaw was influenced by the great tradition of Victorian glasshouses

Tim Smit: Imagine if you will, a situation where some jerk from the sticks comes up to the big smoke, talks to these people who are big, big, big and says guys we've got no money, we've just got this dream, because one of things that is really wrong with this country is that dreaming has become the territory of those who do not know how to dream, the big pension funds, the hedge funds, the crap artists, and I mean this seriously, because in this country we do not have a state way of funding the feasibility of projects.

The south-facing site informed the architecture

The Eden Project couldn't have been done without the guys in this room spending at least £5m of their own collective labour to prove that it was possible. It was a huge act of faith, and for us it was terrific.

The enclosures seperately emulate tropical and mediterranean environments

AW: The biggest part of Eden was to be the humid tropics, the Amazon rainforest, where of course we have the most diverse part of the planet, but to do that we needed to create something really large-scale, a completely immersive experience where you wouldn't be aware you were in a glasshouse or in an enclosure; we wanted it to feel like you were in the Amazon.

It was one of the first times Grimshaw used three-dimensional CAD software

I'm a great science-fiction fan and in the Seventies there was a great cult film called Silent Running: it's the story of planet Earth being made barren, and all of its plants and different environments are protected and sent to space in these large geodesic biomes. Also, as a student in Glasgow, I was very impressed with the small glasshouse, Kibble Palace. It always amazed me how it stood up because it's literally just a shell of glass and wrought iron. What it proved is that you can do very lightweight, delicate structures, inspired by nature.

The biomes intersect like a series of soap Bubbles

So we thought, how can we do things more efficiently, and we redefined it -- rather than this undulating shape, we started exploring this idea of interlocking spheres. We've also always been very inspired by the Institute of Lightweight Structures in Stuttgart and they'd done a lot of experimentation using soap bubbles. If you put soap bubbles in a dish, they find the optimum shape and form, so that really became the reimagining and rethinking through: trying to create a much more efficient, optimised structure.

A lot of work, and budget, went into anchoring the pit

TS: One of the problems we have is that we live in a world of big things, but with no substance -- they're hollow -- it's something that spiritually erodes us. The people here understood if we were trying to build a bloody theme park, it would have been a lot easier to do. What we were trying to do was create something that had the language of the popular, of entertainment culture, because we knew that the over-serious wasn't drawing people in. It was a really fine balancing act.

Another unexpected influence came from Seventies cult film Silent Running, where Earth's plants are sent to space in geodesic biomes

AW: We really had the same team as we had worked on Waterloo with, Tony Hunt's team [Anthony Hunt Associates] on structures, Davis Langdon on costs and Arup joined us on the environmental design side. With Tony's team we looked at the whole geodesic structure and started off with a single, poured structure and then brought in MERO the German manufacturer and honed the structure until we got it down to basically what's called a hex-tri-hex, that's two layers of structure. We actually halved the weight of the roof structure; it was great news for us because it meant it was a much more efficient solution.

The biomes are made of a hex-tri-hex - two layers of structure

We then embarked on the construction work of the project. At the time, McAlpine looked at the amount of work they had to do in a short space of time, and said, 'men have been digging this hole for a hundred years and you're giving us six months to try and put it back together again'?

Parts arrive numbered on site

We did also choose the wettest winter in, I think, twenty years -- so we had a few challenges. The site we had pulled out for the first build, the visitors' centre, gave way and disappeared one evening. We found that we had to spend more and more money stabilising what we thought was a granite pit, but which wasn't. It was a very soft pit and a lot of work disappeared into anchoring it.

The panels vary in size up to 11m across

What we ended up with was probably one of the world's largest Meccano sets ever created. All these crates arrived, all beautifully labelled, with all the connectors in it, all the pipework, all the nuts, bolts etc and then we had the fun of actually assembling it. Of course, the question is -- how do you build a geodesic structure? -- because they're very stiff once they're built, but they're very difficult to support until they're in place. After looking at a number of options, it was felt the only real way of doing it was to build a very large birdcage scaffold; this was our first entry into the Guinness Book of World Records. As soon as the structure was up, we took the scaffold out and anything else was done with abseilers.

The biomes were built using a very large birdcage scaffold

The number one goal was to get the maximum amount of light on the floor for the plants to grow, so really we were searching for something that could do that, but also we had this great history of creating these enormous enclosures and we had the reality, as you always do, with the budget. We had to come up with a bit of ingenuity to think about how we could create these big enclosures for much less than traditional glass and steel. It allowed us to really push boundaries and create something that was new.

Nearly half a million people paid £5 each to view the building site

Then, an entrepreneurial stroke of genius -- this is the only time I've known members of the public to be charged £5 a head to come and look at a building site! Nearly half a million people came to watch the construction; that was great, some money straight in the bank before we opened, but more importantly it created a lot of interest in the project.

The project took two and a half years to construct and opened on 17 March 2001

Everyone who came along, I think, felt almost part of the creation of the project. It also brought a lot of publicity in the newspapers, so already it was drumming up interest.

We opened against a rather dire situation which was the outbreak of foot and mouth, and we were surprised at the sheer number of people who came to see the project.

The humid environment of the Tropical Biome

The police became concerned about the numbers coming and blocking the roads, so asked people to delay their visit to another time. If you ever want to boost your numbers, ask the police to tell you not to come to something, as that just drove the numbers up further!

NG: The main thing was it was a key source of industry and employment, and a source of life really for Cornwall. They have a very short holiday season, just a couple of months, and what this gave them was something like a vast industry in the middle of Cornwall, which employed people: cafes, restaurants, taxis, hotels, the train service -- everything was sort of powered by this thing.

ETFE is lightweight and allowed the maximum amount of light to reach the plants

TS: Although it's very easy to make me the hero, I'm not. I actually brought people together and made them believe in the thing, but that whole bunch of people took an enormous professional risk. This wasn't half an hour here, half an hour there -- this was weeks and weeks of time they could have charged other people for. They all believed in the dream. I believed in the project from day one -- I knew we were going to build it. It was going to happen, because no one was going to stand in our way.

We're using the same team for an Eden Project in China. It's going to be the first environmental centre of its kind to be completely powered, we hope, by water, in the city of Tsingtao, which is the former German colony in China. The site is poisonous -- we only want to work on poisonous sites! This was a mixture of salt mining and prawn fishing, so it's got a lot of salt and a lot of nitrate. We don't want to build the old Eden Project, we want to build a new one, so it's like a sister around the world.

The CORE information centre opened in September 2005

NG: The Eden Project in Cornwall can definitely be seen as a building of its time, and I think when we build the one in China it will be completely different.

One particular compliment I would like to pay to Tim is the quiet way he gets across statistics. I think one of the biggest problems with the modern world is that nobody believes anything anybody says. With Eden particularly, Tim set up very quietly to tell the story. He didn't want to shout at people, but just quietly said, 'If all the plants in the world disappear, we'll be dead in a few years.'

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