British designer Thomas Heatherwick’s imaginative legacy reflects his desire to create meaningful pieces and places—ranging from a scalable sculpture in New York to a residential tower with hanging gardens in Singapore
If potential clients ask Thomas Heatherwick for a napkin sketch upon their first meeting, he’d decline politely, for his creations are born in his workshop through comprehensive experimentation and back-and-forth discourse. Like master builders of yore, Heatherwick is a tinkerer who is unencumbered by categorisation.
As such, the British designer’s works are fascinatingly tactile, detailed and original. For the Pacific Place project in Hong Kong, the toilet-stall hinge design was as agonised over as the mall’s undulating stone exterior. The 2010 UK Pavilion for the World Expo in Shanghai had 60,000 acrylic rods protruding like porcupine needles and his London 2012 Olympic Cauldron deconstructed into 204 copper petals as souvenirs for participating countries after the event. Currently under construction in Shanghai is the 1,000 Trees multiplex, whose columns peak into planters that appear as rolling hills.
Heatherwick’s creative family shaped this progressive, exacting sensibility. His grandmother founded Marks & Spencer’s textile design studio and his painter-jeweller mother took him to model engineering shows and craft fairs where he observed processes of iron forging, glassblowing and metal machining.
“It was exciting to go to a steel factory and see the workers rolling giant sections of steel or hammering ball bearings. This contrasted with the many buildings I saw that had been built in the 1980s and 1990s which seemed so sterile and did not (demonstrate) the way materials are made,” he says.
See also: Heatherwick Studio to take centre stage at Singapore Design Week