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Thomas Heatherwick - Designer

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Thomas Heatherwick (born 1 March 1970) is an English designer, often mislabelled as a sculptor or artist. He is known for innovative use of engineering and materials in public monuments.
Born in London, he studied three dimensional design at Manchester Polytechnic and at the Royal College of Art, winning several prizes. Shortly after graduating from the Royal College of Art after a two-year furniture MA course in 1994, he was commissioned by Harvey Nichols department store in Knightsbridge to design a temporary structure for the shop's facade.
Heatherwick's design was a ribbon of laminated wood that wound through the storefront windows. The design was widely acclaimed and won him a D&AD yellow pencil (the gold award) in 1996.
He founded Thomas Heatherwick Studio (now called just Heatherwick Studio) in 1994 with his aim being "to bring architecture, design and sculpture together within a single practice".
Originally based at Camden Mews, the studio moved to larger premsies in Kings Cross in 2000. It presently comprises a thirty-strong team which includes architects, landscape architects, designers and engineers. Work is carried out from a combined studio and workshop where concept development, detailing, prototyping and small scale fabrication take place. The studio's work spans commercial and residential building projects, masterplanning and infrastructure schemes as well as high profile works of public art.
Heatherwick is a Senior Fellow and external examiner at the Royal College of Art, a fellow of the Royal Academy and was recently chosen to become a Royal Designer for Industry. He has served on numerous judging and advisory panels and has given talks at various institutions including the RIBA, Bartlett School of Architecture, the South Africa Design Indaba conference and the Royal Academy.
In 2004 he curated an exhibition at the Design Museum consisting of 1,000 'every day' design objects that he had collected. The 'B of the Bang' also reached completion in 2004.

East Beach Cafe Littlehampton, West Sussex



yankodesign.com
 
Longchamp Store, NY.


When designer Thomas Heatherwick of London-based Heatherwick Studio saw the photos of a building at the corner of Greene and Spring streets in New York’s SoHo district, he was concerned. The site was to be the new flagship for Paris-based leather-goods manufacturer and retailer Longchamp, but the building itself was not ideal. For the next two years, Heatherwick worked with Longchamp’s managing director, Jean Cassegrain, and architect Louis Loria of Atmosphere Design Group, Mount Kisco, N.Y., to create a retail store that is now acknowledged as a work of art. The building that designer Heatherwick found so initially uninspiring is a circa 1936 brick rectangle set amidst the lushly detailed iron front façades of the buildings in the architecturally landmarked SoHo district. In fact, the appellation given to the SoHo store—La Maison Unique Longchamp—distinguishes it as the only one of its kind in the 100-store chain.
La Maison Unique Longchamp’s 1,500-sq.-ft. first floor serves as an entry and display area. The entire second floor, which has 4,500 sq. ft., is the main selling area, reached by a dramatic swath of steel staircase. Longchamp’s wholesale showroom occupies the 1,700-sq.-ft. third level, and a penthouse and 50-ft.-long, landscaped rooftop terrace have been added as well. A skylight cut through the original top floor’s ceiling brings daylight deep into the interior. Merchandise on the ground floor is for display only; a receptionist directs visitors up to the second level to view the collection and make purchases.
“We wanted a one-of-a-kind store, not a prototype,” says Cassegrain, whose grandfather founded the company in 1948. Longchamp is still family owned and operated, and has had a New York retail presence on Madison Avenue at 64th Street for the past seven years. The French company has expanded its initial product line from leather pipe coverings after World War II to a luxury collection of high-end fashion handbags and men’s and women’s accessories sold worldwide. SoHo hosts the chain’s 100th shop, and Cassegrain planned to celebrate the occasion with a store for which there was no precedent.
“I envisioned a great space—interesting and unusual,” Cassegrain says. “Three years ago, Thomas (Heatherwick) came to us with a design for a handbag. It became the Zipper bag, and has been quite successful. We got to know him and like him—he is pleasant, agreeable and enormously talented.” Heatherwick founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 and is best known for his innovative use of engineering and materials in exterior art projects.
Cassegrain’s objective when he leased the 9,380-sq.-ft. space was based on the open expanse of the daylight-filled second floor and the structural ability to add more usable levels above it and support other architectural elements. “It gave us the opportunity to create an artistic tool that could perform to sell products,” he explains. He and Heatherwick agreed that the first floor should function as a display area for products, with retail selling space concentrated on the second floor. To entice customers to visit the upper level, Heatherwick envisioned a monumental steel staircase that flows from the ground floor up to the second level.
The task of implementing this architectural wonder was given to Loria, who worked on the façade of the Longchamp Madison Avenue store and has served other luxury goods purveyors, such as Louis Vuitton and L’Occitane. “We had to reconfigure the whole building,” Loria notes. Its footprint was extended to the property line. The elevator and fire stair that had been in the front were placed in a new rear enclosure to allow more space for the enlarged entry.
By far, the 55-ton staircase demanded the most attention from Loria and his staff. “Thomas sent us four sketches,” he recalls. “We could see that we were dealing with sculpture here, and that it would take very precise engineering to make it work.” His firm produced 100 complex CAD files from which the stair was cut in sections to tolerances as close as one-quarter of an inch. These were turned over to Hillside Iron Works, Albany, N.Y., for fabrication. A new foundation was installed in the middle of the building to carry the massive weight of the staircase. “It was quite an endeavor,” affirms Cassegrain. “The entire staircase was delivered in 17 units. It was scary to watch these massive pieces coming off the truck and then welded together on site. They fit together like a huge puzzle.”
Heatherwick likes to inject what he calls “secrets and surprises” into his work, a philosophy that is evident in the staircase. “People typically don’t like to mount staircases in retail stores to get to the next level,” he points out. “So instead, we created a steel landscape, with ribbons instead of typical treads, to draw visitors up to the selling space.” Each ribbon is a 1.25-in.-thick steel plate, edged in rubber. Overall, the cascading stair measures 60 ft. by 46 ft. by 17 ft. A panel of steel ribbons also extends up the back wall, another visual link between the two levels, emphasizing the store’s verticality and upward visual motion.
Maple floor planks laid parallel and front-to-back to the stair emphasize the linearity and geometry of the entire interior. Two counters on the street level are maple, as well as freestanding plinth-based maple display tables on the upper retail level.
To create product displays on the second floor, Heatherwick opened panels in the new wood ceiling to give the space more height. His visual “surprise” here was to simulate a molded wood waterfall spilling down from above. “It’s as if we peeled back the layers of the ceiling and turned them into a backdrop for the displays,” he indicates. The effect is like a museum installation of environmental sculpture. The pale blond ash wood background gives products an added artistic dimension to their already elegant designs.
General contractor Shawmut Design and Construction coordinated the manufacture of the waterfall displays. To produce the effect, ash veneer was bent under heat and pressure, and then laminated together to the desired thickness that tapers downward from the top in most of the units.
For the staircase and balcony balustrades, Heatherwick supplanted typical flat glass panels with clear polycarbonate, a strong material with specialized uses such as airplane windshields and headlight lenses on racecars. Heatherwick wanted a warmer and more organic look—”like ribbons flowing from above,” he says—than is possible with glass. He knew that polycarbonate becomes malleable when heated to a sufficiently high temperature, and he worked with the supplier to bring the polycarbonate sheets up to a temperature where they just begin to ripple. “Each one is slightly different from the other,” Heatherwick says. “When installed, they look as if they drape.”
Heatherwick took additional advantage of the metal back wall to develop a merchandise display system based on strong, repositionable magnets. The products on display appear to float, contributing to the upward-directed feeling of lightness.
Cassegrain reports that the store is drawing customers and camera-toting tourists, too. He’s proud of the outcome of the two years of planning, design and construction that it took to create La Maison Unique Longchamp and is pleased to share the results with visitors.
Heatherwick shares his client’s satisfaction with the finished product. “Art and architecture are not meant to live in isolation,” he says. “The Longchamp store is a merger of these forms of visual expression made to coincide within a retail context.”
square-mag.co.uk
 
Last edited by a moderator:
B of the Bang Manchester, England.




The B of the Bang is 56 m (184 ft) tall and has 180 hollow tapered steel columns or spikes radiating from a central point. It is angled at 30 degrees, and is supported by five 25 m (82 ft) long, heavy steel tapered legs, which connect to the spikes 22 m (72 ft) above the ground. The sculpture weighs 165 tonnes, with the concrete in the foundations weighing over 1,000 tonnes, including a 400 m2 reinforced concrete slab. The foundations go down 20 m (65 ft). The sculpture was made from the same weathering steel as the Angel of the North sculpture, and gradually changed to a rusty colour as it was exposed to the weather. However, it will not corrode, nor rust internally. The sculpture sways slightly in the wind, and can withstand gusts in excess of 100 mph. There is a time capsule in the centre of the sculpture containing kids' poems and paintings, due to be opened circa 2300.
It was commissioned by New East Manchester Limited to mark the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The design was selected by a panel consisting of both local residents and art experts, via a competition in 2002. The designer selected was Thomas Heatherwick. The sculpture was constructed in Sheffield by Thomas Heatherwick Studio, Packman Lucas, Flint and Neill and Westbury Structures. It was approved at the start of 2003.
The central core arrived in Manchester on the 13 June 2004 this was the largest load that could be transferred via road from the factory, and required a police escort. The main part of the sculpture was lifted into place in August 2004. It was officially unveiled on 12 January 2005 by Linford Christie.
wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_of_the_Bang#cite_note-bbc_legal-12
 
Rolling Bridge, Paddington Basin, London, UK.




Heatherwick Studio's Rolling Bridge is located within a new residential, office and retail quarter set around part of the Grand Union Canal.
Rather than a conventional opening bridge mechanism, consisting of a single rigid element that lifts to let boats pass, the Rolling Bridge gets out of the way by curling up until its two ends touch. While in its horizontal position, the bridge is a normal, inconspicuous steel and timber footbridge; fully open, it forms a circle on one bank of the water that bears little resemblance to its former self.
Twelve metres long, the bridge is made in eight steel and timber sections, and is made to curl by hydraulic rams set into the handrail between each section.
The Rolling Bridge opens every Friday at noon and won the 2005 British Structural Steel Award.
heatherwick.com
 
i love these .. :heart: *swoon*

so what is he called then? if not artist nor sculpture
maybe landscape architect?

and what does "Royal Designer for Industry" mean..

thanks for this awesome thread diamond star
 
i love these .. :heart: *swoon*

so what is he called then? if not artist nor sculpture
maybe landscape architect?

and what does "Royal Designer for Industry" mean..

thanks for this awesome thread diamond star
I was wondering that :ermm: I read one article where he described himself as a ‘three-dimensional designer’…but I don’t know if that is any clearer!

Royal Designer for industry (from wikipedia)

Royal Designer for Industry is a distinction established by the Royal Society of Arts (or RSA) in 1936, to encourage a high standard of industrial design and enhance the status of designers. It is awarded to people who have achieved "sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry". Those who are British citizens take the letters RDI after their names, while those who are not become Honorary RDIs (HonRDI). Everyone who holds the distinction is a Member of The Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry (founded in 1938).
Their work is diverse, ranging from fashion to engineering, theatre to product design, graphics to environmental design.
New RDIs are elected annually and the Faculty continues to support initiatives to further excellence in design, including an annual Summer School for innovative young designers.
Only 200 designers may hold the distinction RDI at any time and it is regarded as the highest honour to be obtained in the United Kingdom in the field of Industrial Design. In addition, the RSA may confer HonRDI titles up to a maximum of half the number of people who currently hold the distinction RDI.
 
Interview with Thomas Heatherwick and Hussein Chalayan.
image.jpg


We’re in a light-flooded room in the middle of Thomas Heatherwick’s vibrant King’s Cross studio and workshop. It’s manned by a total of 48 staff ranging from architects to theatre designers. Phones ring petulantly, computers hum and large detailed architectural models of Heatherwick’s most recent projects rise up around everyone gathered here. Today the Turkish-Cypriot designer Hussein Chalayan MBE, 37, has come to meet Heatherwick, also 37. But while Heatherwick designs buildings, Chalayan designs clothes, and their aim is to examine the similarities and differences between the two processes.

Both men’s work is the antithesis of cheap, ephemeral, celebrity-driven design. Both are celebrated worldwide. Today Chalayan – dressed stylishly in subtle navy cashmere and leather Brasher walking boots – is in good spirits. He’s recently been enlisted as creative director for German sportswear label Puma, owned by PPR (Pinault Printemps La Redoute), who will also invest in Chalayan’s own fashion label. Just three weeks ago, he also won the Brit Insurance Design Awards at the Design Museum for his seminal a/w 2007 Airborne collection. A key feature was crystalline dresses embedded with lasers which made it appear as though the wearer was emitting light (these will be exhibited in the exhibition along with other key Chalayan designs).
Heatherwick is equally softly spoken and down-to-earth. He is often mistitled an architect but he prefers to be known as a designer. Like Chalayan, he set his studio up in 1994 – and has been in the news ever since. A string of striking modern buildings and interiors has included an award-winning shop interior for luxury fashion label Longchamp’s SoHo, New York branch. He also designed the revolutionary Zip Bag for the brand, which incorporates an extra long zip enabling the handbag to double in size when unzipped.

Like Chalayan he was shortlisted for the recent Brit Insurance Design Awards under the architecture category for his East Beach Café, a bold weathering steel construction on Littlehampton Beach, West Sussex, overlooking the sea with a shape that mimics the waves. Other recent projects include the rolling bridge in Paddington Basin, which coils-up elegantly into a complete circle using hydraulic rams, and the spectacular, if technically flawed (some of the spikes have been removed for safety reasons), ‘B of the Bang’ sculpture in Manchester, a giant starburst of steel spikes the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, commissioned for the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

Though creatively Heatherwick and Chalayan share similarities, their backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Born in Nicosia, Cyprus, Chalayan divided his childhood between London and his troubled homeland, attending Highgate School before following his instinct for fashion and studying a BA in fashion at Central Saint Martins. Remarkably, he sold his 1994 graduate collection – which he buried in his Crouch End garden to get the required decaying effect – to Browns boutique.

Born in London and brought up in Wood Green, Heatherwick, on the other hand, is the product of a bohemian London upbringing. His mother was a jewellery designer with a shop on Portobello Road and his father a musician-turned-charity worker. After studying 3D design at Manchester Polytechnic, he went on to study for an MA in product design (the architecture course was too classical) at the Royal College of Art. A chance meeting in a college corridor with Terence Conran led him to be invited to the designer’s Berkshire home to construct a plywood gazebo, which Conran bought when it was finished. Conran then offered him his own show at the Design Museum.

Both Heatherwick and Chalayan are innovators rather than followers. They look for what hasn’t been done yet, experimenting and inventing new styles. Neither is afraid to go against tradition or, occasionally, even make the odd mistake. But what will they make of each other?

Hussein Chalayan 'Unlike you, Thomas, I don’t think I’m that much a product of my parents. My mother was very artistic, though, so from a very young age I drew things and was very hands-on. My father was one of the first people to study computer programming in the 1960s but didn’t pursue it – he went on to study silver service. My Turkish-Cypriot upbringing and fact I spent time between Cyprus and London made me a rootless person, I think my work has become my roots in many ways.'

Thomas Heatherwick What was your mum doing?
HC 'I’m an only child and my mother looked after me. At that time she was constantly making things in the house. She was very good with her hands – we’d go to the beach and make sand sculptures. When you are in a remote Mediterranean environment you have to keep yourself occupied so you don’t get bored. A lot of my way of thinking, and how my work has been informed, is related to that.’

TH 'It’s interesting that you think your displacement helped to nourish a curiosity.'

HC ‘Absolutely. I’ve only been able to articulate it in the last few years.’

TH 'I felt displaced; I didn’t feel normal. Everyone else had nice white sandwiches and I had an old brown banana that looked like a cat poo! I lived in Wood Green and we had this big, rambling house and my parents’ bedroom was through a workshop (my mum was into enamelling at that point). Everyone else’s mums were quite glamourous. Mine had calluses because she fixed everything in the house. She was going to craft fares and I was tagging around after her meeting people who were making replicas of fourteenth-century thatch or blacksmithing, so I had a chance to nourish my curiosity.’

HC ‘Your mum actually worked as a craftswoman?’

TH ‘Oh yes. She was a jeweller and an enameller before that. For a child, when you are around that, it’s brilliant. Your bedroom becomes a kind of workshop.’

HC ‘It’s true that as a child you want to fit in, you want to feel normal. You don’t want to stand out.’

TH 'I think at school I must have been very irritating. I think I’ve got quite a slow brain. There was a stubbornness to not pretending you knew if you didn’t know [his school nickname was ‘How-Why’]. At the time you were wishing you did know like everyone else. But now I realise they probably didn’t know either. Now we’re working on buildings there are lots of acronyms and you just have to cut people down when they start talking like that and ask what they mean. I enjoy it when they say: "I don’t know what it stands for".'

HC 'I was also called a "question machine" at school. I would bombard the teacher with questions. I went to a good English school in Cyprus but the teachers just memorised their lessons. At times I may have annoyed other children. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn’t taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable. I wanted to be a pilot but I was always drawing bodies. When I realised I wanted to pursue something creative my parents pushed me towards architecture.’

TH 'What’s funny is no one mentioned architecture to me (even though now a lot of the work we do involves making buildings). I got very interested in inventions.'

HC 'I think that where I came from parents didn’t know what to do with kids like me. I was lucky I went to school in London because the tutors could see what to do. I knew I wanted to do something different. Why would I want to do what other people were already doing, because they would always do it better? I always wanted to work around the body. So throughout my college years my work was quite free. I was about 16 when I knew I could do something at Saint Martins. I thought: It will be the perfect environment.’

TH ‘I feel quite lucky to have been born in a city that happens to be a very creatively inspiring place to be. I didn’t have to uproot myself. What I love about London is that if you are really interested in something, wigs for example, within an hour you can probably find the expert in the whole world on wigs.’

How do designing fashion and designing buildings compare?

HC 'Fashion is so much more transient: you have to design at least two collections a year. We design four in total, including the younger line. When you start developing a new idea, sometimes it goes beyond the six months so you end up doing eras of work, ideas can flow for two years. But what you do, Thomas, is something really indelible.'

TH 'Could you do one collection every two years? Is it possible to have a no-show. Do you have performance pressure?'

HC 'But then I’d go bankrupt. You are part of a system where there is a demand for people to buy a product every six months; you are part of a chain. Of course, I have thought whether I could be like a musician and release an album every three years. It’s impossible to reform the system but that’s why I do other projects in my own time like making films, installations and pieces for museums and galleries.’

TH 'How do you have any "own time"?’

HC 'I multitask. I can be working on a collection and a film at the same time. It can take a lot out of me, but the processes come from the same source. From a brief I set myself I can make a film, I can make a collection, I can make an installation.'

TH 'I was actually really envious when I was at the RCA. I found it so funny, the difference between the electricity of an audience sitting looking at a piece of white MDF while waiting for a fashion show versus my department, where a visitor walks in, has a look and then walks out. I had show envy. I thought: I’d like that medium. I asked if we could have the same way of presenting the products and I was told "no".'

What motivates you?

TH 'Is there the sense, Hussein, that you are an artist just there expressing yourself, oblivious to the world around you, or is it a response to what’s around? For me and my studio, it’s a response to what’s around. It’s the gaps that interest me. I find it off-putting when people work on similar ideas to me. When I was growing up I had a lot of questions, such as: Why are ice creams so small? A few years later someone invented the Magnum. If someone hadn’t, I expect by now I would be designing bigger ice creams.'

HC 'I call it the blind spot. Almost every single project is filling a blind spot. One example is the idea of making a fabric that is like a film; I call it the video dress. My work is about extending the body and appropriating the body, and also amplifying what’s already in the body. Even buildings are like bodies to me. They have a system, a centre, drainage.'

TH 'I’ve been interested in areas where ideas haven’t been explored. I’m quite interested in prisons. Everyone lavishes time on the local library, the art gallery. The cliché is that a town must have a landmark art gallery or a landmark bridge. But how about making the world’s best car park?'

HC 'What you are saying is you want to carve out your own niche. Fashion is a very scrutinised business, it’s all about power and money so for me to carve out a little space in that is a miracle.'

TH 'I see no professional difference in designing garments you wear and objects you use – they are one connected thing.'

HC ‘I think curiosity is the driving force in both cases. I don’t really understand the world. I’m not really that bright but I’m always curious and exploring, and finding another way of looking at something. In a way, designing is a form of self-imposed therapy for understanding.’

With that, Heatherwick talks Chalayan though his model of the East Beach Café. Chalayan is fascinated by how the drainpipes act as columns and how the raw steel has coroded into a warm russet brown. I needn’t have worried about them getting on; within minutes of meeting, their similarities were spookily obvious. And, most refreshingly, in industries so often driven by egos, Heatherwick and Chalayan have a shared humility.

It’s as we say our goodbyes, exchange cards and shake hands that I realise exactly how much the worlds of architecture and fashion do collide. We have a quick glance around Heatherwick’s cocoon-like office, within it a small desk and a poster on the wall, an anatomical drawing of the human body with some Turkish writing. ‘It says “The Human Body is Like a Machine”,’ explains Chalayan with a knowing smile. ‘I have exactly the same poster on my office wall.’
timeoutmagazine.co.uk
 

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