John Hope Gateway

The John Hope Gateway is a threshold into the secret world of Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden with exhibitions, a media studio, shops, a restaurant and a new bio-diversity garden.

A porous ground floor allows visitors to enter and leave building from many points and flow freely between the different areas. A sustainable, low-energy, minimum-waste approach to the building's design became part of the message the Garden wished to convey to its visitors.

The roof floats over the entire building as a single horizontal plane, supported by a diagonal timber roof structure on pencil-thin, steel columns.