The arching tensile-braced struts enclose a large cliffside habitat with an tapered organically-deformed vault-like form, criss-crossed three-dimensionally by interweaving catwalks.

"It was like a scene out of Stanislaw Lem's science fiction classic Solaris, with the swirling mists spiraling upward from a giant crater deep within the earth. Slowly, through the haze, emerged a city, no ordinary urban conurbation but an epicenter under giant geometric domes on a lunar landscape.

"This is not life, as we know it Ñ this is the future. Welcome to the Eden Project!

"The 21st century Garden of Eden in the southwest of the United Kingdom arouses the senses, encouraging the erstwhile stagnant subconscious to run riot. The mission, to show how human beings rely on plants, has resulted in a series of huge lunar-like domes surrounded by an equally dramatic landscape built into a 200-foot- (60-meter-) deep disused china clay pit near St. Austell in Cornwall. ..."

— Don Barker, "UK Garden of Eden", ArchitectureWeek No. 55, 2001.0620. pD1.1.