AN explosive moment captured in steel; a
magical cube emitting a thousand pinpricks of light; a bridge that curls up
like a centipede – all of these works bear witness to a remarkable talent
whose work cuts across architecture, design and contemporary art. At 37,
Thomas Heatherwick has achieved something unique in the recent history of
British art: to defy categorisation by being an equally inventive and
original sculptor, interior designer, architect and engineer. Perhaps best
known for his awesome frozen firework B of the Bang (2004), a 56-metre high
sculpture in Manchester built to celebrate the 2002 Commonwealth games,
Heatherwick is fast gaining recognition for his other work.
The diversity of his output may be due, in part, to his training.
Heatherwick managed to avoid being hemmed-in by a single discipline, reading
three-dimensional design at Manchester Metropolitan, one of the UK’s newer
universities, before moving back to London and the rather more predictable
surroundings of the Royal College of Art in 1992. He still clings
steadfastly to the vision of an artist in the wider sense, uninhibited by
the arbitrary professional criteria that his first degree implies. ‘I’m a
three-dimensional designer,’ he has said. ‘I can’t describe myself more
specifically than that.’
In 1994 he founded Heatherwick Studios and in 1997 scored a major coup with
a commission to create an installation for the Harvey Nichols building in
honour of London Fashion Week. The project, which garnered a British Design
and Art Direction Gold award, consisted of a strand, like a scarf or a
scrunched up piece of paper, which threaded its way in and out of the
windows of the iconic London store, stretching the length of the façade.
Using everyday materials, vastly magnifying them and transmuting them whilst
retaining their outward appearance, has become a Heatherwick trademark. The
sensual form of a Buddhist temple, commissioned by monks of the Japanese
Shingon-Shu sect and still in development, was determined by a piece of
scrunched-up neoprene that had been hanging around the office. The timber
that has taken its place in the final design retains, nevertheless, the
voluptuous, organic curves of the original. Similarly, the giant metal vents
that lurk behind a nondescript office building close to St Paul’s Cathedral
in London started life as a concertina of paper. Perhaps his most enigmatic
work, again in London, is the glittering Bleigiessen (2005), a 30-metre high
sculpture that hangs in the atrium of The Wellcome Trust’s headquarters. The
principal component of this design, an extraordinary, globular, string-like
mass, is derived from a small piece of molten lead dropped into a swirling
funnel of water.
But there is more to Heatherwick than the simple computer-aided scaling-up
of objects. His creations include the geometric and space-age Sitooterie II
(2000), a summer house composed of an aluminium cube pierced by almost 5,000
hollow tubes which let in light during the day and emit it at night. There’s
the ingeniously engineered rolling bridge and other neat, quirky design
solutions such as the Zip-Bag (2003) for Longchamp (a bag with a zip running
in a spiral around it – open it fully and you have something resembling the
peel of an orange, taken off in one go).
With such a diverse portfolio and so many projects there are bound to be
problems, hiccups. The B of the Bang’s reputation has been tarnished by a
string of problems, and its future is uncertain. The important thing is that
Heatherwick is clearly bursting with ideas, enchanted with the possibilities
of things, and possessed of a thoroughly three-dimensional imagination. One
can only wonder: where will this fantastic journey take him and his
ever-growing legion of fans next?
DAVID SHARIATMADARI IS A WRITER BASED IN LONDON