Thomas Heatherwick Inspiration

SEED CATHEDRAL

Seed Cathedral UK Expo Pavilion – World Expo 2010

Thomas Heatherwick is a British architect and designer. His studio works with various scale projects – from perfume bottles to power plants. What I find particularly inspiring about his work is his response to architecture that is, in his opinion, often sterile, cold, and soulless. His inspiration stems from his mother’s bead shop and his explorations with mechanics and making as a child. He felt that an earring had a sense of craft, materiality, and soulfulness that many buildings lack – especially in the lens of modernism as we understand it today. Given Britain’s impact on the world of agriculture and botany, the studio created a seed cathedral that magnifies seeds from all over the world in silicone tubes that pierce through the box form of the building.

Seed Cathedral UK Expo Pavilion – World Expo 2010

In the process of imagining this elegant design, Heatherwick took inspiration from the absurd – a crude Play-Doh toy that grows “hair” when you push down on a plastic bit with small perforations in it. Thinking of such a beautiful end product through the lens of playfulness and discovery is quite admirable. All too often, architecture is cold, sterile and soulless – something that Heatherwick strives to achieve. The end result appears soft and actually sways and moves with the wind. To respond to the project budget, the moderately-sized Seed Cathedral only takes up a small portion of the site allotted, allowing it to gain emphasis on the surrounding space approximately the size of a football field.

KINETIC BRIDGE

Rolling Bridge
Paddington Basin, London

Heatherwick’s studio designed a kinetic bridge in the style of the great drawbridges of London. However, Heatherwick felt that drawbridges give a sense of brokenness, as they are simply split at the middle. Rather, the pedestrian bridge designed rolls to close. Hydraulic rams in the balustrade pull the bridge up in tension, allowing the eight segments to curl into an octagon shape in which the two ends of the bridge meet. Using simple materials and very straightforward mechanics, Heatherwick successfully re-imagined the idea of the drawbridge in an interesting and elegant way.

COMPOUNDING DENSITY

I too am interested in materiality, kinetic features, and aesthetic design in architecture. One project I recently completed was material research with speculative applications. I studied the responsiveness of liquid wax as it touches water and the various ways it can be shaped based on different parameters of temperature, tooling, and time. Like Heatherwick, I approached the project with a sense of playfulness and emphasis on materiality and human scale. The project definitely verged on the absurd, but that was part of the concept overall. Also similar to Heatherwick, I was curious about materials and textures. The different way wax responds to water creates different conditions that can be taken advantage of in each application. Below is the full video showing my animations and explorations with wax studies.