Shared Ground Zone

Role: Designer employed by Work Design the Exhibition Designer
Client: Millennium Dome Experience
Site: Shared Ground Zone, Millennium Dome, Greenwich, London
Size: 300 square metres
Completed: December 2000

Sir Richard Rogers’ Millennium Dome, housing a year-long exhibition, was designed as the centrepiece for the UK millennium celebrations. Costing over £700 million the 320m diameter, 50m high dome was designed to accommodate 37,000 people and house fourteen distinct exhibition zones.

The Shared Ground zone enclosure, designed by Shigeru Ban, was made predominantly out of cardboard donated by BBC Blue Peter viewers. The zone comprised of a vast time capsule and five installations representing five familiar areas within our neighbourhood – the home, the garden, the terraced street, the high street and the park – all contained within the cardboard enclosure. Each installation consists of a series of panels as if transported directly from our surrounding built environment, such as a garden wall, a terraced house doorway or charity shop window. The panels were then assembled together to create the five distinct installations. Each panel asked a particular question about your neighbourhood, giving the public the opportunity to respond to questions such as, ‘What to you think of your neighbours?’ and ‘Do you look out of your window if a car alarm goes off?’.

The responses were recorded, stored and categorised within the time capsule at the centre of the zone where the public were also given the opportunity to listen to the amassed contributions. It is planned that the time capsule will store the data away until 2999.
“Behind closed doors, we stamp our personalities on our spaces. In public, we’re more reserved. Experience what we could do with our communities and neighbourhoods if we really joined together.” The official Dome leaflet.