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How 'Jurassic Park' and Samurai Swords Inspired London Architect Thomas Heatherwick

The famed British designer and architect explores his 20-year career as part of a new touring exhibition on Heatherwick Studios
Heatherwick Studio. UK Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo. 2007–10. Photo: Iwan Baan. Images courtesy the Hammer Museum, unless otherwise noted

A number of Thomas Heatherwick’s Spun chairs, symmetrical and circular in shape, sit outside his new exhibition Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studios, currently at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum. At first glance they are sculptures, and yet once someone decides to take a seat the sculptures transform into playthings as they (safely) swivel the occupant around.

The chairs are a perfect reflection of Heatherwick’s lively and inventive replies to the many briefs that he and his London-based, 160-member design team have received since being founded in 1994. Skyscrapers, gin distilleries, and mosques, down to simply a purse or Christmas card—Provocations serves as both a retrospective of the studio’s iconic successes, as well as a peek at the sketches and models that never made it past the early stages.

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The placards by each project state the initial, TED Talk-style question behind it: Can a drawbridge open without breaking? Can you make a park out of the desert? Can a building change the way we learn? Heatherwick found answers for all, and on the same night The Creators Project visited the exhibition, the London-born designer and architect took the Hammer theatre’s stage for a chance to describe his working philosophy and process.

Heatherwick Studio Spun Chair. 2007–11. Photo: Susan Smart

“In 1970s and 1980s Britain, there was sort of a resigned quality—it was the world's fault for not making your brilliant ideas,” Heatherwick said. “But I'd been around people who'd made things. When someone had an idea, whether in ceramic or steel, they'd make it, find out what's wrong with it, rework it, and learn from it. An idea always led to an outcome.”

Having studied design at Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, Heatherwick found his first singular outcome when he unveiled a “rolling bridge” in the Grand Union Canal of London’s Paddington Basin—perhaps the only public work ever to be jointly influenced by sports injuries and Jurassic Park. During a bout of illness, Heatherwick dreamt up a bridge that didn’t just snap up like a broken footballer’s leg, but instead one that could “get out of the way softly” using hydraulic articulation, similar to Stan Winston’s dinosaurs used in Spielberg’s 1993 film.

Heatherwick Studio Rolling Bridge, London 2002–2004. Photo: Steve Speller

Though Heatherwick has repeatedly been selected to represent the UK and England in several venues, his lack of a thudding nationalism reveals an environmental focus that has proven more effective. In his stunning Seed Cathedral (above) for Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo, the Union Jack is there, but you’ll find it shrouded in the building’s 66,000 fiber-optic rods, each embedded with a sample of seeds at the tip supplied by the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens (who gave 250,000 seeds in all).

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“We had to have the confidence to not wonder, ‘What about Marks and Spencer? What about the Queen?’” Heatherwick described of the project. “We had to just do one thing, [because] otherwise you're spread thin and you just disappear into the cacophony. And the British government agreed. So instead of trying to play a game of shapes, we just made something that was an extreme texture within this landscape.” Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion ended up winning the top prize out of 200 pavilions at the Expo that year.

Exhibition View. Image by the author

A stripped-down perspective similarly filtered into the studio’s plans for the Olympic cauldron, after they were chosen by director Danny Boyle for his 2012 London opening ceremony.

“[We] had the realization that two billion people were going to see the Olympic cauldron, and then the realization that two billion people were going to instantly forget it,” Heatherwick said. “Nobody remembers the design of Olympic cauldrons. When speaking to people, we found they remembered Muhammad Ali shaking in Atlanta, or the Paralympic archer in Barcelona that shot an arrow to light the cauldron. We realized that this was about designing moments.”

The result, a slow convergence into a unified flame of 204 unique copper fragments each given to the competing national teams, was a brilliant reminder of that fact. However, Heatherwick recalled the Olympic organizers were wary of the idea at first.

Heatherwick Studio Olympic Cauldron, London 2012. Photo: Edmund Sumner

“As a designer, it's that figuring out at the beginning of what the person's told you, and then you figuring out the archaeology of what they said. What they said was, ‘No moving parts’. What they really meant was that the Sydney [moving cauldron] had gotten stuck for two minutes, so make sure it doesn't go wrong.”

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The success of the cauldron—and the London Olympics as a whole—afterwards opened up what Heatherwick called a “moment of surprise optimism” for the British people. It’s an outlook that he credits for the mostly positive reaction to two other homegrown projects: a complete retooling of the iconic London double-decker bus—the first in 50 years—and a Garden Bridge connecting North and South London across the River Thames.

Exhibition View. Image by the author

Aiming for 40% less fuel usage and a more streamlined design, Heatherwick found the old London bus designs to be a mix of shocking regulated colors and additions—“barnacles building up one by one.” Rounded exterior edges, fiberglass, and warmer interior lighting have entered the new design for Heatherwick’s fleet of buses—600 of which will be delivered in 2016—but so has a rather peculiar request by the London government for their bus drivers’ safety:

“Most of our work was on the inside, and part of our brief was that it couldn't be possible to kill the driver with a samurai sword,” Heatherwick said. “After someone says that to you, it lingers in your brain forever. So we spent a lot to try and make it not look like the driver was there to not be killed with a samurai sword.”

Heatherwick Studio. New Bus for London. 2010–12. Photo: Iwan Baan

Proving more controversial is the London Garden Bridge, conceived by actress Joanna Lumley 18 years ago and brought to Heatherwick not long after. Featuring a fully-functioning garden with 679 plant species and 1,000 cubic meters of soil, the bridge is supported by two river pyles—but the duo actually envision the project as less of a link than its own destination.

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“I think people forget quite how large the Thames is. Go to Paris and the Seine is 300' wide, but the Thames is 900',” Heatherwick said. “So it's no wonder that historically it's been treated as an obstacle—there are many people on one or the other side who are more likely to come to Los Angeles or New York than to go to the other side of the river.” “I think there's more understanding than ever that really successful cities and city centers are walkable," he added, "and I think people, city makers, are challenging themselves to try and increase their walkability.”

If funding is secured by the end of this year, the Garden Bridge should start construction in 2016. But if not, due to the resources needed for the city’s planned Thames Tideway Tunnel, the project will have to wait another 10 years for construction to proceed.

Heatherwick Studio Garden Bridge, London 2012– Rendering: Arup

Regardless, Heatherwick should have more than enough work internationally to fill that decade. Under near-complete secrecy is his work with Danish architect Bjarke Ingels at Google’s Mountain View campus in California, figuring out “how to integrate one of the most extraordinary companies that's ever been… with the nature and community around it.”

He’s also in the process of converting an historic grain silo on Africa’s Cape Town waterfront into a modern art museum, as well as in the finishing stages of building an eye-popping “learning hub” in Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. With each there’s been budgetary and material constraints, but as the Provocations exhibition presents, with its pristine scale models next to footprint and dirt-blotched blueprints, the reality of Heatherwick’s works end up as, in his words, “Rough, raw… but true.”

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Heatherwick Studio. Learning Hub, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. 2011–14. Rendering: Heatherwick Studio

Heatherwick Studio. Al Fayah Park, Abu Dhabi 2010– Rendering: Heatherwick Studio

Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studios runs at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum through May 24, and then moves to New York’s Cooper-Hewitt from June 24 through November 1, 2015.

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