With three buildings under construction this year, Thomas Heatherwick is one of the UK’s most closely watched young architects. Just don’t call him an architect — he’s also responsible for a 55-ton staircase of undulating steel in New York City, a hydraulic bridge across a canal feeding the River Thames that can curl itself into a ball to make way for passing boats, and the tallest sculpture in England.
The eclectic assortment of projects makes it impossible to pin a label on Heatherwick: The Tate Modern lists him with other artists, but the UK Design Council sees him as an engineer. “He often achieves his projects by defying gravity, and there’s an enormous amount of engineering wizardry involved,” says David Kester, chief executive of the council, which recently awarded Heatherwick the coveted Prince Philip Prize. Flummoxed, the BBC referred to him simply as “the new Leonardo da Vinci” in a recent documentary. No matter what the title — and Heatherwick, for the record, prefers designer — he has taken aim at the intersection of art, engineering, design, and architecture.
When he was 6, Heatherwick would sketch plans in notebooks while sprawled on the living room floor. He would come up with designs for remote-controlled drawbridges and toboggans with pneumatic suspension — and then try to piece them together from scavenged junk and hand-me-down parts from the mechanic near his London home. In those early days, he was inspired by the work of cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, who depicted absurd contraptions for simple tasks, like a massive machine driven by pulleys and a foot pedal that would peel a potato. “I was excited about thinking up things that didn’t exist,” he says. “But as I got older, I found that inventors were considered mad.
They were recluses — weird, disheveled hermits.” To avoid such a fate, Heatherwick studied 3-D design at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art. But school wasn’t a perfect fit: “You get all these boxes to choose from, and none of them are right. I tried to make my own line through the middle.”
Today, Heatherwick, 37, works out of a London studio on a quiet residential street just around the corner from the urban crush of King’s Cross station. Scattered around the two-story space are the remains of his creative process: Miniature models of canal crossings and other structures take up nearly every available surface; sample pieces of buildings lean against walls. “I think of this studio as one big research project,” he says. The results of this research are on display across the UK and in New York, and in the next year or so, he’ll complete a curvaceous Buddhist temple in Japan and revamp a sprawling sports and recreational facility in Hong Kong.
Heatherwick tests his most outrageous ideas in a workshop crammed with racks of tools and equipment on the ground floor of his studio. As a project takes off, he often moves it offsite, sometimes to warehouses and factories, sometimes to the public space where the work will eventually be installed. On a cold winter morning, he showed me a photo of one such installation, a prototype bridge built at London’s science-focused Imperial College. In the snapshot, one of his designers is standing atop a long row of glass panels that seem to hover in midair. There’s no support underneath; the 1,000-plus pieces of glass will stay in place because they’re jammed together by 800 tons of pressure supplied by an enormous underground mechanical vice that squeezes the assembly from both sides.
One recent Heatherwick project is a long, narrow building of rippling corroded steel that appears to have washed up on the pebbled shore of Littlehampton, England, like some storm-twisted tanker. Plunked on a plateau between the community’s beach and its ivory Georgian town houses, the structure is actually a restaurant — the East Beach Café — that serves greasy comfort food in a dining room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and dishes up Mr. Whippy soft-serve ice cream at a take-out bar. Looking more like the hull of a ship than a conventional building, the interior has the feel of an underwater cave. “It’s a test piece,” Heatherwick says. “Every project is an experiment.”
Wired 15.03: Bright Stuff
The eclectic assortment of projects makes it impossible to pin a label on Heatherwick: The Tate Modern lists him with other artists, but the UK Design Council sees him as an engineer. “He often achieves his projects by defying gravity, and there’s an enormous amount of engineering wizardry involved,” says David Kester, chief executive of the council, which recently awarded Heatherwick the coveted Prince Philip Prize. Flummoxed, the BBC referred to him simply as “the new Leonardo da Vinci” in a recent documentary. No matter what the title — and Heatherwick, for the record, prefers designer — he has taken aim at the intersection of art, engineering, design, and architecture.
When he was 6, Heatherwick would sketch plans in notebooks while sprawled on the living room floor. He would come up with designs for remote-controlled drawbridges and toboggans with pneumatic suspension — and then try to piece them together from scavenged junk and hand-me-down parts from the mechanic near his London home. In those early days, he was inspired by the work of cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, who depicted absurd contraptions for simple tasks, like a massive machine driven by pulleys and a foot pedal that would peel a potato. “I was excited about thinking up things that didn’t exist,” he says. “But as I got older, I found that inventors were considered mad.
They were recluses — weird, disheveled hermits.” To avoid such a fate, Heatherwick studied 3-D design at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art. But school wasn’t a perfect fit: “You get all these boxes to choose from, and none of them are right. I tried to make my own line through the middle.”
Today, Heatherwick, 37, works out of a London studio on a quiet residential street just around the corner from the urban crush of King’s Cross station. Scattered around the two-story space are the remains of his creative process: Miniature models of canal crossings and other structures take up nearly every available surface; sample pieces of buildings lean against walls. “I think of this studio as one big research project,” he says. The results of this research are on display across the UK and in New York, and in the next year or so, he’ll complete a curvaceous Buddhist temple in Japan and revamp a sprawling sports and recreational facility in Hong Kong.
Heatherwick tests his most outrageous ideas in a workshop crammed with racks of tools and equipment on the ground floor of his studio. As a project takes off, he often moves it offsite, sometimes to warehouses and factories, sometimes to the public space where the work will eventually be installed. On a cold winter morning, he showed me a photo of one such installation, a prototype bridge built at London’s science-focused Imperial College. In the snapshot, one of his designers is standing atop a long row of glass panels that seem to hover in midair. There’s no support underneath; the 1,000-plus pieces of glass will stay in place because they’re jammed together by 800 tons of pressure supplied by an enormous underground mechanical vice that squeezes the assembly from both sides.
One recent Heatherwick project is a long, narrow building of rippling corroded steel that appears to have washed up on the pebbled shore of Littlehampton, England, like some storm-twisted tanker. Plunked on a plateau between the community’s beach and its ivory Georgian town houses, the structure is actually a restaurant — the East Beach Café — that serves greasy comfort food in a dining room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and dishes up Mr. Whippy soft-serve ice cream at a take-out bar. Looking more like the hull of a ship than a conventional building, the interior has the feel of an underwater cave. “It’s a test piece,” Heatherwick says. “Every project is an experiment.”
Wired 15.03: Bright Stuff
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