Small, Medium, and Large — Scale in the Work of Heatherwick Studio
By Pilar Viladas
This article first appeared in the Spring 2015 Design Journal, published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in conjunction with the exhibition Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio.
One of the hallmarks of Heatherwick Studio, which was founded by Thomas Heatherwick in 1994, is its fondness (and facility) for working at vastly different scales. Indeed, when you visit the studio’s website, its projects are organized not by category, as is usually the case, but by “small,” “medium,” and “large.”
At the 160-person studio — which includes architects, designers, and makers, and which is located in the Kings Cross neighborhood of London — a Christmas card is designed with the same enthusiasm, and in the same spirit of exploration and innovation, as a bus or a corporate headquarters.
This philosophy of design grew out of Thomas Heatherwick’s upbringing, which exposed him to what he described in his introduction to Thomas Heatherwick: Making (a monograph on the studio’s work) as “people who pursued strong personal interests, exposing me to different influences and encouraging me to develop any natural aptitudes I might have.” Heatherwick’s mother, an expert on beads, introduced him to “people who were forging iron, blowing glass, machining metal,” and “erecting timber building frames,” among other things. His father took him to car shows and introduced him to forward-thinking architectural projects. His maternal grandfather’s passion for the history of engineering rubbed off on the young Heatherwick, whose subsequent studies in design at the small scale — from glassblowing and ceramics to wood joinery, or what he called “exploring different scales of problem- solving” — gave him the skills to pursue his longtime interest in “the design of buildings and the built environment.” He saw “an opportunity to take the aesthetic sensibilities for smaller scales of making . . . and introduce these into the large-scale world of building design.”
Thus, the notion of a “hairy building” that resulted in the Barnards Farm Sitooterie — a small, porcupine-like pavilion made of 4,000 meticulously machined aluminum tubes, each of which transmits light from inside the structure — was implemented on a much larger scale in the studio’s design for the UK Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. This time, the tubes — 66,000 of them — were made of clear acrylic, and while they were also illuminated, in this case they were used to display 250,000 seeds of the world’s wild plant species.
This scale shift is especially noticeable in another subset of the studio’s projects — that of bridges. For a tiny pedestrian bridge project envisioned for the garden of an English stately home, hundreds of stainless-steel discs were welded onto what looks like an oversize piece of shimmering jewelry. Another (somewhat larger) pedestrian bridge, the toy-like Rolling Bridge in London — one of the first projects to bring the studio widespread exposure in the press — allows the bridge to open without one end simply hanging in mid-air by having it curl into a tidy octagon. A variation on this principle was used in the design of a much larger bridge, also in London, meant to cross the River Thames. That scheme remains unbuilt, but an entirely different kind of bridge spanning the Thames will begin construction in the fall. The studio’s Garden Bridge, which connects North and South London, was conceived as a lush, elevated garden intended to create “a new kind of public space in the city.”
And the scale of the studio’s projects continues to grow. Pier 55, a densely planted, undulating park and performance space in New York, will sit on a series of mushroom-shaped columns in the Hudson River. The Learning Hub — the winning entry in a competition sponsored by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore — rethinks the traditional idea of forward-facing classrooms accessed by windowless corridors by stacking fifty-six rounded tutorial rooms into a cluster of towers around a central atrium. The building, which was recently completed, will be open to students twenty-four hours a day and includes communal and recreational spaces, as well as gardens, terraces, and a planted roof.
Perhaps the most ambitious of Heatherwick Studio’s current projects is Google’s Mountain View Campus (California, USA), designed in collaboration with Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’s firm, BIG. The design features undulating, translucent canopies that hover above lightweight, modular structures, which — unlike conventional office buildings — can be moved and reconfigured according to Google’s needs. Landscape figures prominently in the project, with extensive greenery — groves of trees, walking paths, and gardens — integrated into the plan. Heatherwick calls the project an opportunity to “make a vibrant piece of town at the same time as protecting and enhancing the local natural habitat.” At over two million square feet, Google’s headquarters is enormous, but in a video released by the company, Heatherwick is seen folding white paper into small umbrella shapes, which then appear in a computer animation, flying in large numbers toward the translucent roofs to become shading devices. Of course, any structure with such roofs would need shading, but the delicate, almost winsome way in which Heatherwick envisions it here typifies his insistence on the small, human moments in even the biggest projects — which is why he will likely be designing a lot more of them.
Pilar Viladas writes about architecture and design. Formerly the design editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, she is currently the architecture and design editor of Town & Country magazine.
Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio was made possible by generous support from Edward and Helen Hintz. Additional funding was provided by the August Heckscher Exhibition Fund and the Ehrenkranz Fund. The exhibition was on display June 24, 2015- January 3, 2016.
