Saturday, June 27, 2015

Worth Your Time: Thomas Heatherwick



This audio interview with designer / architect / ideas man extraordinaire Thomas Heatherwick (born 1970) is intensely stimulating and covers quite a range of ground in a half-hour. It opens with a discussion of how people define what Heatherwick does, a topic that, although it comes up frequently in consideration of his work, he has some mild impatience with because he is multi-disciplinary and anti-"silo."

Many of Heatherwick's projects have attracted a high level of attention; he is very good at publicity and self-promotion, although one sense that he does not want to admit this ("I'm a terrible, terrible businessperson"). The Seed Cathedral that he designed as the U.K. pavilion for the Shanghai Expo in 2010 is eye-popping:



Heatherwick designed a new London double-decker bus that has proven extremely popular:



He was responsible for the memorable "Cauldron" that graced the 2012 Summer Olympics:



"The second it feels that you're not doing something with your whole heart, believing that you are contributing something, it feels like you should close down and stop immediately."

I listened to the whole interview for a second time this morning and found it just as absorbing to re-visit.

Thomas Heatherwick: Making

No comments:

Post a Comment