Master Builder Thomas Heatherwick
Olaf Blecker
This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired’s articles in print before
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The newest item in the studio of Thomas Heatherwick, the
designer behind the Olympic cauldron, Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan Hotel
and the most recent incarnation of the London bus, is a Singer sewing machine. “It looks quaint, as if
someone’s darning their socks,” admits Heatherwick. “But you’ll see
why it matters.”
Thomas Heatherwick at his King’s Cross studio. The room’s centrepiece is a panel from his Guy’s Hospital project
Nick Wilson
Heatherwick has other machines he wants to show Wired. Dressed
in a white cotton shirt and baggy blue fisherman trousers, he
traverses the studio in London’s King’s Cross, becoming distracted
by each in turn. Sandwiched above and below by a budget hotel, the
ground-floor studio is open-plan, each area devoted to a particular
activity. “There’s food, toileting, bandsawing, computering, all in
one space,” says Heatherwick. This is where 204 bronze petals took shape, eventually coming together to
form the cauldron seen across the world. The seats in the reception
are benches from the new London bus he designed — the first
overhaul of the iconic red Routemaster in 50 years. Here, in 2007,
Heatherwick sketched a rectangle on paper, criss-crossing it with
broad pen strokes; in summer 2010, the UK Pavilion for Shanghai, a
“seed cathedral” — a box 15 metres wide and ten metres high
covered in 60,000 plastic hairs that swayed in the wind — won Best
In Show at Expo 2010 and was visited by eight million
people.
The workshop takes up a quarter of the studio and is, according
to Heatherwick, “the secret weapon — if all else fails in design,
we can make things here.” Phosphor and fettled bronze pieces take
up the workbenches. Tools are everywhere: 3D printers, a combined circular saw, planar thicknesser and
spindle moulder — the first machine Heatherwick ever bought, 18
years ago, which also used to double as a dining table (“It’s nice
to see it having its dignity, rather than having breadcrumbs on
it”). Heatherwick is obsessed with tools for making; he also loves
making tools. “A lot of the design is designing tools to make the
piece you need. And jigs! Inventing jigs that will do things.” To
build the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Heatherwick spent three months
inventing a “crinkling” tool, for denting stainless steel sheets. A
hand-cranked, studded log, it looks like a medieval torture
device.
An aluminium bench squeezed out of a machine normally used for making rocket components
Steve Speller
The wooden master-plan models — of buildings, sites and
developments — are also tools. “It’s an analysis tool. In
Singapore, where we’re building housing projects, we model the
whole context of the surrounding buildings, so we can understand
the topography and relationship to the city centre and nature
nearby. We spoke about making jigs; in a way, this is a thinking
jig.”
A 325,000m2 redevelopment in Shanghai, including 1,000 tree-topped columns
Heatherwick Studio
The sewing machine is being used to test out a new type of
concrete casting. Heatherwick goes to a designer sitting at a desk
and asks him whether he has the miniature model cast. “Yes. In fact
we’ve got the result as well.” “Have you? Oh good.” He turns to
Wired. “A live-action result.” He likes the model, a plaster column
apparently draped in fabric and pinned tight at two points with a
metal band. It stands about 50 centimetres high. “If implemented,
this will be for 1,000 columns that will hold 1,000 trees,” says
Heatherwick. “Some of them go 100 metres high. The belts will
become the light and signage. It’s for a development that is 3.5
million square feet [325,000m2].” Heatherwick walks out of the
workshop and into the main space, to a polystyrene column that is
taller than him. He more or less hugs it. “This is the full-size
column. So in the workshop we can make a full-size prototype just
to get a feeling. It’s not just making tiny weenie tests. It’s
making the biggest, full-siziest test.”
Heatherwick’s ambitions have scaled up from the furniture and
footbridges that made his name. The studio is working on an entire
quarter of Shanghai (the 325,000m2 development of 1,000 columns)
and redeveloping Pacific Place, a 640,000m2 complex in the centre
of Hong Kong with a budget of £166 million. In London, a fleet of
600 of his buses is rolling on to the capital’s streets. And now
his Garden Bridge is an ambitious attempt to link north and south
by a pedestrian crossing over the Thames. “More and more, we’ve
become passionate about the actual infrastructure of a city as the
skeleton that gives character, and less interested in individual
buildings,” he says.
The Heatherwick Studio’s take on the iconic red Routmaster was its first redesign in 50 years
Iwan Baan
Heatherwick just wants to make stuff. His approach remains the
same: everything is designed on the human scale, whether it’s an
intricate card, a spectacular Olympic cauldron, or a sprawling development. “I’m interested
in ideas, at whatever scale. Every project has every scale within
it.”
More importantly, though, Heatherwick is interested “in making
things happen. You can’t wait in aloof disapproval for the world to
come and get it. You have to go out into the world
if something matters, and help things come into being.” His
studio itself is a tool he’s still designing, for making ideas
happen.
When he was ten years old, Heatherwick spent days rummaging
around a bus depot in Westbourne Grove, London. “I just asked. They
let me go in there and showed me to this pile of inner tubes of bus
tyres that buses used to have.” Heatherwick turned the tubes into
inflatable furniture, then sewed and dyed canvas covers for them.
Other Heatherwick childhood designs include a proto-hybrid car that
he thought could be a perpetual-motion machine, remote-controlled
drawbridges and pneumatic toboggans.
A drawbridge in paddington, West London, which doesn’t draw, but rolls itself up.
Steve Speller
He grew up in “an old, shambly, rambling house” in Wood Green,
north London. “That meant there was a lot of space to collect
things that were interesting.” The wooden floorboards of his room
were covered in electronics, televisions and calculators, which he
would dis- and re-assemble. “That smell of old electronics. My
bedroom was a workshop… I was finding that you could make your
ideas happen.” His mother, Stefany Tomalin, kept a
necklace-and-bead shop on Portobello Road. His father Hugh
Heatherwick (he and Tomalin divorced when Thomas was 14), a pianist
and community worker, gave him books about the Victorian master
builders. “I was more drawn to the inventors and I still am. There
had been incredible confidence and derring-do. And a lack of fear
of failure for vanity.” The Victorians also defied categorisation:
“Isambard Kingdom Brunel wasn’t strictly an engineer: he was
strictly ideas and making them happen.”
Heatherwick says there was “no exciting moment when I wanted to
be a designer. I was interested in ideas because children are.
I just carried on — no one stopped me.” After school, he
studied 3D design at Manchester Polytechnic. “Three-dimensional
design covered most things, even if they’re named in different
ways: whether something was a building, or a building on wheels,
like a bus, or a building that floats — oh, that’s a ship — or a
product that you can live in.” He attended the Royal College of Art
afterwards as a postgraduate, riding a recumbent bicycle around
London. But he was frustrated by the confines of the
furniture-design course there. “Why someone wanted something seemed
as important as the product you’re designing. And no one could
answer that.” Heatherwick thought that Terence Conran was someone
who could: he pursued Conran after a visiting lecture and showed
him plans for a twisting gazebo, milled from one piece of birch and
inspired by a Victorian craze for constructing “fascinating, tiny
buildings”. Conran was so impressed, he invited Heatherwick to
build it at his workshop in the countryside. “It was very ingenious
thinking,” Conran says. “Mathematical, but more than mathematical.
He talked very ambitiously about becoming involved in architectural
projects. And I thought, ‘My god, you’ve got a way to go yet.’”
Conran was, until December 2010, provost of the Royal College of
Art and has been involved with it in some capacity for 25 years.
“I’ve seen a lot of designers go through it, and I would certainly
place him right at the top. He is remarkable.”
After graduating, and with Conran as a mentor, Heatherwick set
up his own studio with a fellow student, Jonathan Thomas. They were
ambitious: “There was no business model or precedent for the type
of environment we needed to make,” Heatherwick wrote in the
acknowledgements to his book Making, first published in
2012. They set out to be new Victorians — modern master builders.
First, Heatherwick Studio would make things, not just
design them: “The thinking that we’re trying to do is about the
made world,” he says. “There needs to be a ‘makingness’ infusing
the environment.” Second, it would ignore the strict
classifications of design or architecture or urban planning, which
he sees as “fashions of thoughts. Three hundred years ago, the cake
wasn’t cut up in this way; and in 300 years from now, it won’t be
either. And I’m trying to be true to the actual physics of it, not
what the names of things are.
“I struggled for years for people to understand who we were and
what we did, because there’s an urge to put you into a category
that people know of already.”
The studio’s designs have been characterised by these two
strands: materiality and an uncategorisable ingenuity. A bag for
Longchamp that zippers between hand and carrier-bag size. A
drawbridge that rolls itself up to let boats by. A window display
for Harvey Nichols that erupted out of its window and snaked into
others. A Loire river-boat made entirely from its own hull. Each of
the 143 projects Heatherwick Studio has completed to date is not a
design piece, a product or a building. It’s an idea.
Every Heatherwick design starts with a question: “How can an electron
microscope help to design a building?”; “How can a tower touch
the sky gently?”; “Can a rotationally symmetrical form make a
comfortable chair?”; “How can you make someone eat your business
card?” And then he keeps asking questions. “It feels like you don’t
know what the outcome will be, like we’re trying to solve a crime…”
he says. “You’re eliminating from your enquiries. You just
gradually explore, analyse and then at the end you’re left with
something, and it’s probably not what you expected.” Ideas are more
important than where they come from. “It is unusual for me to come
into the studio in the morning with a drawing of an idea and hand
it to my colleagues,” Heatherwick writes in Making.
“Instead, we iteratively pare a project back in successive rounds
of discussions, looking for the logic that will lead to an
idea.”
Proposed pedestrian crossing for the River Thames, stretching from Aldwych to the South Bank
Heatherwick Studio
For built projects, the first step is to visit the site. “The
greatest respect you can give to a place is to try and do your new
best work for that place, that is specific to that place,” says
Heatherwick. “The colour in our lives tends to be the peculiar,
particular bits that tend to catch our imagination. There’s this
romantic notion of genius loci, as if a place will
horse-whisper into your ear what it wants to be,” he says, smiling.
“But the sheer momentum of cities I think has largely overpowered
most genius loci. So I think the genius loci
needs augmenting, very deliberately — amplifying.” For his London
Garden Bridge design, which started as an idea from Joanna Lumley,
then won Transport for London’s backing, it meant examining the
topography of the Thames: “Look at the rhythm of the bridges.
Westminster, Waterloo, Black-friars. Rhythm, rhythm, gap. So how
could you slot a new piece of infrastructure in, and it means
something and relates?” The studio noticed that Waterloo Bridge
carries on straight up into Aldwych, forming a “spectacular grand
crescent. So if you’re putting a new link, could we allow there to
be a pedestrian link that makes something of that crescent?” The
studio followed Waterloo Bridge up and around Aldwych; its proposed
footbridge extends the route back down across to the South
Bank.
Next, the studio starts making. “It’s a way to do true practical
analysis, because drawings can fool you,” says Heatherwick. “And
models, mock-ups, prototypes — anyone can relate to them. It’s not
just a tool to show people, though: it’s a tool to show
yourself.”
Heatherwick rasterises each project, going back and forth, from
masterplan to detail. Trying to explain, Heatherwick mimics the
sound of a digital camera’s autozoom. “Every project has every
scale within it,” he says. “A masterplan is made of bits, and those
bits will end up as pieces you can touch with your hand. Our role
is to be able to pull right back and see something in its biggest
context, but then be able to zoom in until you’re analysing the
close detail. To never let one thing get disconnected from context
and meaning.”
Zooming — from the sewing machine to the 100-metre column and
325,000m2 development it sits in, from the seeds of Kew Gardens to
a national pavilion in Shanghai — means the most important scale
is not forgotten: the human scale, which is another way of saying
how something makes people feel. The softer lighting on the
studio’s London bus was a solution to how the old fluorescent
lighting made people feel: “Inert, as if you were a bag of
potatoes, rather than as a human being with feelings and
responses.”
UK pavilion for Shanghai Expo 2010
Iwan Baan
The New York High Line — “the point being how you felt on
there, like you’re in a dream” — led to his Garden Bridge: “How do
you make people feel slow, and be in an intimate point, even though
it’s a major piece of infrastructure? For every object in the
world, how you feel is part of its function.”
This is his particular genius, and why non-specialists and
design aficionados adore his work: because his projects are created
for them and because he is empathetic in a way many designers and
architects are not. When he was commissioned by the Design Museum
in 2010 to curate the Thomas Heatherwick Conran Foundation
Collection, he did not fill it with his own creations, but with
1,000 everyday objects he thought exemplified good design,
including corkscrews and pyramid tea bags. The human scale for
Heatherwick, as he writes in Making, means the one “at which people
touch, experience and live in the world”.
A wooden window for the Harvey Nicholas that snaked in and out of the shop’s windows
Peter Mallet
“When I was younger, sometimes I’d worry: maybe I’ll never have
a good idea again,” says Heatherwick. “And then I’d stop, walk out
into the world and see things that could be better. And that’s my
base line, that everywhere, almost universally, are places and
things that can be better. And that applies to everything –
organisations, environments, business models, software, hardware.
I’m far more interested in speaking with entrepreneurs than I am
other designers. Because I feel more of a connection. All we’re
doing is trying to develop a way of analysing what we perceive to
be problems.”
In mid-June, off a quiet country road in Laverstock, Hampshire,
Heatherwick’s latest masterplan is taking shape — a combined
distillery and visitor’s centre for gin maker Bombay Sapphire.
Katerina Dionysopoulou, the project’s manager, is walking around
the huge site, which originally consisted of 40 derelict buildings.
“This is one of the first projects where we were able to do
everything — have a masterplan, have listed buildings, nature and
landscape and a new building. Whatever the visitor sees, we are
responsible for,” she says. She talks about Heatherwick. “We travel
a lot with him… Yeah, he’s weird! He’s weird. He’s going to kill me
if you write this.”
Dionysopoulou traces the route a visitor would take, picking her
way through scaffolds and half-demolished walls. Although
unfinished (it will open in autumn this year), it serves as a
microcosm of the Heatherwick Studio’s design approach: question,
make, zoom, eliminate. The question that started this project was
open-ended: “How do you turn a paper mill into a gin
distillery?”
She and Heatherwick first visited the site of the distillery and
visitor centre in September 2010. “It was very obvious that we
wanted to celebrate the river,” Dionysopoulou says. The genius
loci “needed a bit of supercharging, a bit of oomph, for it to
mean something,” according to Heatherwick. Today it rushes past in
plain view as Dionysopoulou crosses a small bridge: “We were trying
to think how people progress through the site. We found the
entrance and used the route. It was a bit like connecting the
dots.”
She arrives at two huge sunken foundations and points out two
windows in the building above. From here two glass houses,
containing the botanicals for making Bombay’s gin, will emerge.
“The biggest question was how does the glass house look? It was a
really long process,” Dionysopoulou says. “We sat with Thomas for
hours and hours, and everything just got demolished through
argument. The point is to have that friction, make sure through
questioning, through eliminating. It’s a very intense dialogue,
like a trial… You go through hell. So much questioning. So much
pain. You say no to him and he keeps asking so many questions until
he finds out the actual reason for no, and from that he will find
an answer.
“The way Thomas works, it’s like breathing. He zooms out, always
has the big idea, but then zooms in on the details, and they’re one
story. As you zoom closer, there’s more information that’s revealed
to you, more elements.”
Dionysopoulou and Heatherwick went through 12 different,
well-developed ideas before they found their chosen option: “We
realised we have two climatic conditions, so we could have a
playfulness, make them intertwine and look really fluid. And that
they could come out of the building where the gin was being made.”
Then they started making: “We made a lot of models analysing the
glass houses themselves — drawings just couldn’t do it,”
Heatherwick says. “In order to understand the jointing and the
glass lines, we made full-size glazing bars, for us to stand next
to them and really imagine whether that’s what we wanted to be
doing.” The glass houses look like elongated blown bubbles settling
on to the ground and will comprise 15,000 elements and be made in
Spain — but they began as mock-ups in the workshop. They were
“generated through the process of something bubbling in the distil
house and boiling — the gentle touch of something that can be
liquefied, can be dissolved — a frozen moment,” Dionysopoulou
says, looking onto the building site, imagining the twisting
domes.
When planning on the distillery started in September 2010,
Heatherwick Studio was 27 people. Now there are more than 100.
“It’s changed the studio,” says Eliot Postma, also working on the
distillery. “The culture is still there. But you can become a
megabrand. It’s a weird one. The next couple of years will be a
really interesting challenge for us — whether we can keep what’s
made the studio what it is, as the projects are getting bigger and
bigger.”
204 flaming bronze stems came together to form the centrepiece of the London 2012 games
Heatherwick Studio
Heatherwick acknowledges that the studio is entering a new
phase. “We have the chance to work on more strategic projects,
which is what I’ve always been interested in. Most of our work is
designing buildings and infrastructure and thinking about cities.”
The scale of these projects means the purpose of the studio
– making ideas happen — faces new stresses, as with the £100
million Garden Bridge, when economics are as important as
ingenuity. “We’re in the thick of trying to see whether we can take
this from idea to the possibility of it becoming a reality,” he
says.
The obstacles that city-scale projects face seems to intensify
Heatherwick’s determination to make them happen. “The world doesn’t
quite tolerate dictators in the way it used to, who were able to
shape cities just through their force of character,” he says.
But Heatherwick is approaching this new phase of the studio as
its own design challenge: “The last eight years have been a period
of massive apprenticeship for all of us. We’ve been
developing a way to be as an organisation — attempting to
apply as much ingenuity as we hope to apply in our projects to
ourselves as an organisation. In a way, the biggest project of the
studio has been, is, and will always be, the studio itself.” For
this project, his father is playing the role Heatherwick usually
takes: “His passion is organisational development. He’s a sounding
board. But he’s ever so frustrating because he won’t tell you what
the answer is. He lets you decide for yourself what the answer
is.”
The answer will be to maintain his focus on the peculiarities of
a project, the genius loci and the human scale. “The next
phase is to be more expansive as well as more detailed than ever. I
see it all as design. It’s all one thing. And it’s about analysing
and critiquing and spotting and trying to see if there’s a way to
bring thinking together, and make something that can make a
difference.”
Each Heatherwick design to date has been surprising: he has
deliberately avoided a style, instead focusing on the particular,
answering a unique question every time. “It would be funny to limit
yourself to one invention, which is a style, and repeat that. I
have a sense of how life goes very, very fast, so it’s a waste to
repeat yourself.
“We are romantic about the projects themselves and doing
whatever it takes to achieve that goal. We want to just be
chameleon-like with change and adjust in whatever way, because it’s
all about the outcome.”
Heatherwick Studio is divided by big car-showroom doors, all of
which can be opened on to one another: “It’s one space,” says
Heatherwick. All the machines in the workshop are on wheels, “so
that we can reconfigure the space in whatever way we want. All of
the furniture out there is here to be moved, all the tables, the
storage, the circular saw. The whole place in my mind is one big
workshop. Everything shunts around for what we need to do. You know
that phrase, by whatever means necessary? That to me is what the
studio is: by whatever means necessary.”
Tom Cheshire is Wired’s associate editor. He
wrote about Secret Cinema in issue 06.13
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Master Builder Thomas Heatherwick
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