Thomas Heatherwick
Thomas Alexander Heatherwick, is an English designer and the founder of London-based design practice Heatherwick Studio. He works with a team of about 250 architects, designers and entrepreneurs from his studio in King's Cross, London.
Heatherwick's projects, many of which have won design awards, include the UK pavilion at Expo 2010, the renovation of the Hong Kong Pacific Place, the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, Vessel in New York City, and the New Routemaster bus. The Garden Bridge over the Thames in Central London was cancelled.
Life and career
Heatherwick was born in London. His mother designed jewellery; his father was a musician, ran a charity and later worked for Heatherwick's design firm. His maternal great-grandfather was the owner of Jaeger, the London fashion firm, one of his grandmothers founded the textile studio at Marks & Spencer and was subsequently an art therapist, and his uncle was the journalist Nicholas Tomalin. After primary school in Wood Green, he attended the Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley, in Hertfordshire, which emphasises gardening, handcrafts, and the performance art of eurythmy, and Sevenoaks School in Kent. He studied three-dimensional design at Manchester Polytechnic and furniture design at the Royal College of Art. In his final year at RCA in 1994, Heatherwick met designer Terence Conran; after seeing Heatherwick's plan for a gazebo made of two curved stacks of birch plywood, Conran invited him to construct it at his country home, and bought it.Heatherwick founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 after his graduation from the RCA. Conran asked Heatherwick to make an interior display for the Conran Shop, which led to his first public commission after Mary Portas saw it and commissioned Heatherwick to make a window display for the 1997 London Fashion Week at the Harvey Nichols department store.
Heatherwick is the general director of the 2025 Seoul Biennal of Architecture and Urbanism, under the theme ‘Radically more Human’.
He is a Senior Fellow and external examiner at the Royal College of Art, a Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum; a fellow of the Royal Academy, and a Royal Designer for Industry. He has served on numerous judging and advisory panels and has given talks at institutions including the RIBA, Bartlett School of Architecture, the South Africa Design Indaba conference, the Royal Academy and TED2011.
Selected works
Rolling Bridge
In 2002, as part of a redevelopment of Paddington Basin, Heatherwick Studio designed The Rolling Bridge, a canal bridge that opens by curling into a circle rather than rising in one or more rigid sections. The Rolling Bridge won the 2005 British Constructional Steelwork Association's Structural Steel Award.''B of the Bang''
Heatherwick's design for B of the Bang, a £1.42 million 56m-high sculpture of 180 giant steel spikes, was unveiled outside the City of Manchester Stadium in 2005. The tallest public sculpture ever erected in Britain, it was commissioned to commemorate the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and took its name from a quote from former Olympic sprint champion Linford Christie about the explosion of energy as a runner starts out of the blocks. Danny Boyle said it was the inspiration for his asking Heatherwick to design the Olympic cauldron.However, technical problems caused one of the spikes to dislodge within two weeks, and a further 22 required removal over the next four years. Despite a plea from Angel of the North creator Anthony Gormley to Manchester City Council which described the sculpture as "remarkable, dynamic and engaging", it was dismantled and placed in storage in 2009. The council sued Heatherwick Studio and their subcontractors over the problems, settling out of court for £1.7m, and in 2012 the sculpture's core was sold for scrap.
East Beach Café
In 2007 Heatherwick Studio completed the East Beach Café at Littlehampton, West Sussex. The long, single-storey building with a rippled silhouette evoking a sea shell has an outer skin of steel which was allowed to rust before the resulting colours were fixed with an oil-based coating. The café won a RIBA National Award in 2008.Worth Abbey
In 2009, Heatherwick was appointed to redesign the church interior at Worth Abbey. The new furnishings, including pews, choir stalls, monastery seats, desks and confessionals, were made of solid hardwood, ash embedded within walnut, but the pews began to crack after a few months. Heatherwick blamed the contractor.UK Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010
Heatherwick Studio designed the UK's pavilion, dubbed "Seed Cathedral", for Expo 2010 in Shanghai. In keeping with the exposition theme, "Better City, Better Life", the pavilion explored the relationship between nature and cities. It was set in a parklike environment and consisted of a timber and steel composite framework pierced by 60,000 fibre-optic rods, each housing on the inside one or more plant seeds from Kew Gardens' Millennium Seed Bank Partnership.The UK pavilion won the gold medal of the Bureau International des Expositions for best pavilion design in its size class, and the RIBA Lubetkin Prize. After the Expo, the pavilion was dismantled, and some rods were donated and others auctioned off for charity.
New Routemaster bus
In 2010, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson announced that Heatherwick Studio would be designing the New Routemaster double-decker bus, the first bus in more than 50 years to be commissioned specifically for London. A prototype by Wrightbus was unveiled in December 2011; the first buses entered service in February 2012 and Transport for London ordered 600 in September 2012 and a further 200 in 2014. The design features a long front window for the driver and a wrapped glazing panel for passengers, with three doors and two staircases for faster and easier boarding. The diesel-electric hybrid engine is also significantly more fuel-efficient than previous hybrid buses. The first buses reinstated the rear open platform of the 1950s AEC Routemaster, but the expense of staffing the rear door led to elimination of the feature after 2015.After complaints from passengers about excessive heat in summer, starting in 2015 the buses were retrofitted with openable windows. There were also complaints about faulty batteries leading to high emissions from over-reliance on the diesel engine. The New Routemaster influenced Alexander Dennis's Enviro400H City Bus, which Transport for London began introducing in 2016. In January 2017, Sadiq Khan discontinued Routemaster purchases as a cost-saving measure, promising instead to retrofit older London buses with the latest sustainable technologies. At Euro Bus Expo 2022, Equipmake showed a New Routemaster converted to fully electric operation; the bus is being tested by Transport for London.
2012 Olympic cauldron
Heatherwick Studio was asked by Danny Boyle, the artistic director of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, to design the Olympic cauldron to be used for the Summer Olympics and Paralympics. Heatherwick's design departed from the tradition of a raised bowl by instead consisting of an 8.5m-high "dandelion" of 204 copper "petals" hand-made by skilled car body workers, which were brought into the Olympic Stadium by children representing each team as part of the Parade of Nations, then mounted on blackened steel gas pipes which were lit by seven torchbearers and then rose in concentric circles from the centre outward. The merging of the flames symbolised the nations coming together in peace. After the close of the Games, each participating country was offered a petal. In July 2014, an exhibit on the cauldron opened at the Museum of London.In June 2013, New York design studio Atopia claimed that Heatherwick's Olympic cauldron design was substantially identical to a composite flower powered by solar cells which they had designed in 2007 at the request of the London Olympic committee for a One Planet Pavilion. Heatherwick, Boyle, and Martin Green, who had been head of ceremonies at the Olympic committee, all denied knowledge of Atopia's proposal. In summer 2014, the organisers of the London Olympics reached an out-of-court settlement acknowledging that key elements of the cauldron were present in Atopia's proposal. Heatherwick however said that "the design process was categorically our own, from start to finish."
Proposed Thames ''Garden Bridge''
In 2013, with the support of actress Joanna Lumley, Heatherwick proposed the Garden Bridge, a pedestrian bridge across the Thames in central London that would be planted as a woodland park. The project was originally to have been entirely privately financed; in 2016, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan froze funding after £60m of public money had been committed to it out of a total estimated cost of £175m, some by Transport for London to strengthen Temple tube station in order for it to bear the weight of the north end of the bridge.In 2017, it was found that Heatherwick was the sole founding member of the Garden Bridge Trust and had attended eight trustee meetings, leading to accusations of conflict of interest; he had repeatedly denied being part of the trust. Heatherwick had also attended a secret fundraising meeting in California with Apple with then-Mayor Boris Johnson in 2013, before the design contract had been officially awarded.
In April 2017, in a report ordered by the Mayor, Margaret Hodge, the former chair of the Public Accounts Committee, concluded that the project should be cancelled: the £46 million of public money already lost was preferable to risking additional demands if the project proceeded. The report stated that the appointments of Heatherwick Studio as designer and Arup as engineers "were not open, fair or competitive ... and revealed systematic failures and ineffective control systems". The project was officially cancelled on 14 August 2017.