Thomas Heatherwick

Last summer's competition for a sculpture for Derriford Hospital appears to have gone to sleep (see previous post) but one good thing to come out of it was a £20 book token for getting shortlisted.

I added 99p to the token and bought Thomas Heatherwick's "Making", a thumping great tome of a book listing a lot of his projects.

I like the layout!  Most of the projects are dealt with on a 2-page spread, which makes it nice and simple to read.  I've adopted the same idea for the research and design journal I'm doing for the "Public Realm" assignment we're currently doing at college.  In it, I've included a page about Heatherwick himself.

 One thing I'm not so keen on;  Heatherwick simply lists projects without saying whether or not they were actually made and I suspect that plenty of them weren't.

In some ways, Heatherwick represents the sort of creator that I would like to be, although I've probably left it a bit late in my own life to be saying that!

In any case, I like

• The way he is willing to take on anything to do with design, whether it's a piece of art, a building, a bridge, a London bus or anything else.  
• His approach of spending a lot of time and effort trying to get to the essence of the requirement before starting design work.  
• His desire to push boundaries (and accept that this will sometimes result in failures).
• The way he spends a lot of time and effort experimenting with stuff, often as a sort of intellectual exercise with no particular project in mind.
• He works in any material

One big lesson to learn here is that some of his most successful projects are a sort of culmination of previous experiences.   Two examples:

 UK Pavilion at the World Expo, Shanghai 2010

This evolved over a period of more than a decade.  It started by looking at the way Play-doh was squashed through holes in toys depicting hair growing.  Heatherwick used the concept on other projects before creating this monster one.

Cauldron at the 2012 Olympic Games in London

Heatherwick used similar hydraulic power systems to create bridges over waterways that roll up to allow the passage of boats.  Interestingly, the design of the cauldron has been the subject of intellectual property wranglings - see this article in the Guardian.