Paul Cocksedge Studio recently partnered with Arup to create a 33m-long sculptural shade for the Oman Botanic Garden - designed with Grimshaw Architects and set to be the one of the world's largest garden botanic gardens.
The canopy was designed using planetary data, and has a figure of eight shape that refers to the sun's changing position in the sky across the course of a year - as seen from the garden itself.
"It made sense to use the sun, and our perception of its movements as the basis for our design," said Paul Cocksedge. "Once we started to study the lines of the earth's rotation around the sun, and explore the science of the planets, we were hooked. There's so much data, and so many shapes and lines that we could never have imagined ourselves. We based the shade on the sun's shifting position in the sky, which we plotted using an analemma - a diagram that shows the sun as if photographed from the garden at the same time every day for a year. Every analemma is unique to its location, meaning the canopy's form is specific to its surroundings."