At the launch of the 2025 Seoul architecture biennale, a giant twisted wall made of 1,428 steel tiles captures the attention of passersby walking through Songhyeon Green Plaza. This 90 metre-long, 16 metre-high wall twists in the middle, forming an opening that draws people into the plaza. Dubbed the ‘Humanise Wall,’ the structure features images of 400 buildings from 38 countries and by 110 architects, as well as nine community projects that convey ideas of how buildings in this city can change.

Welcome to the 2025 Seoul architecture biennale

The ‘Humanise Wall’ is the gateway to the 5th edition of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, which aims to spark a public conversation about how to ‘humanise’ buildings for the well-being of citizens. This year’s event, titled ‘Radically More Human,’ is helmed by British designer Thomas Heatherwick as general director and builds on his ‘Humanise’ campaign, a global initiative launched with his 2023 book ‘Humanise.’ The campaign argues against the creation of 'boring' structures, claiming how dull, soulless buildings are bad for our brains, our economy, and the planet, and calls for more joyful, engaging and human buildings and cities.

'We've had an epidemic of boringness. Blandemic (bland + epidemic), I called it. The argument is we've had things where everything's just too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous, too serious. When you get all of them again and again, it's harmful boring,' said Heatherwick in Seoul ahead of the biennale's opening. 'Just like we need nutritional complexity for our gut biome, we need visual complexity. There’s a necessity for fascination.' It’s not his own argument, he flags, but one 'made by researchers who are looking at how our brains respond to buildings.'

According to studies by the Humanise Campaign, being surrounded by boring buildings which lack visual complexity can have a profound impact on public health as well as culture and society. Buildings without texture, warmth, or variety can leave people feeling low and disconnected, architecture that is too uniform or repetitive can lead to mental fatigue, disorientation, and stress, and curved façades and organic shapes may reduce cognitive stress and help make everyday surroundings more comfortable and intuitive.

'We’ve done polling across thousands of citizens of Seoul for the biennale by the Humanise campaign and 97% of them, which is an incredibly high number, say they don't like the residential buildings that are built here. And 90% of people in Korea say that buildings affect how they feel,' said Heatherwick, citing research data conducted by his studio for the biennale, which will be announced during the ‘Emotional City Conference’ on September 27 and 28.

But because there is 'no public conversation about the global epidemic of characterless places,' this biennale has a huge role to play, he says. 'The whole biennale is about health and the need for places to be more engaging. It's actually a nutritional public health conversation.'

In order to engage people in this public conversation, he had to attract people’s attention and draw their curiosity – hence the giant wall. The ‘Humanise Wall’ was inspired by jogakbo, a Korean patchwork textile made by sewing together small, leftover pieces of fabric (usually from silk or ramie) to create a wrapping cloth, called a bojagi.

'At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, there is a collection of jogakbos. I've been to Korea many times, and I love the fabrics and the textiles. The ‘Humanise Wall’ is like a big, gigantic magazine. The patchwork of the jogakbos could be a mechanism to have many different stories being told and the work of the local communities all coexisting in a miscellaneous way,' Heatherwick said. 'It’s like a giant bibimbap [a Korean mixed rice dish with vegetables].'

When entering the gateway, visitors encounter 24 smaller partitions facing the ‘Humanise Wall.’ These ‘Walls of Public Life’ are giant fragments of buildings, 2.4m wide by 4.8m high, inspired by Stonehenge in England, and highlighting how the façade of a building plays a big role in shaping people’s emotional responses. The walls are created by 24 design teams from across the globe, coming from a variety of creative and cultural backgrounds, some with no experience of designing a building. Korean American chef Edward Lee, British fashion designer Stella McCartney, a jeweller, a car manufacturing team at Hyundai, and two traditional building makers from Burkina Faso, among others, have participated.

'It is emotion that makes you cherish something. So it's really a mindset shift for our industry to be more interested in looking closely at how people experience,' says Heatherwick. 'Just as Korea is a world leader at skincare, I thought we would focus on skin, skins of buildings, for the biennale. It's like a cutout of a future building. Every single one of them has visual complexity and fascination, and is an example where you could take any one of those and say, ‘turn it into a building, please.’ The campaign is about changing the buildings that get built.'

Until now, there has been huge importance given to the interior, but for the public, the exterior is more important, he continues to explain. 'There is a smaller group of people who are inside most buildings and a much bigger group who are going past the outside. I'm not saying the inside doesn't matter. It does matter. But we're actually quite good at the insides. The balance of love has been on insides.' When asked whether people might feel stressed if a city becomes too visually complex and stimulating, Heatherwick says he’s not arguing for buildings to look 'crazy.'

'You go to a forest, it's full of visual complexity. But there are no big show-offs in a forest. So we mustn’t mix up my work with the argument,' he said. 'In effect, I've overreacted with my own work to this drought of storytelling in buildings. I'm not proposing every building to be a crazy shape, and it's not going to happen because it's not affordable. But just be generous, be kind.'

The biennale’s main site is the Songhyeon Green Plaza, but the event extends to the Seoul Hall of Urbanism and Architecture which offers a further three exhibitions – the 'Cities Exhibition,' featuring 25 building exteriors from 21 cities, the 'Seoul Exhibition,' revealing 18 projects on the future of Seoul, and 'Global Studios,' an interactive media exhibition exploring the emotions and memories evoked by the outsides of buildings.

'The goal is the city-wide conversation. I think Seoul could potentially be one of the first humanised cities and show other cities around the world how to engage the citizens because it has receptiveness and open-mindedness,' he said.

'Korea is a global powerhouse in beauty and understanding of skin. Korea is a powerhouse in pop music, in drama and in food, but it isn't in architecture. The economic miracle of Korea, which has facilitated and superpowered the growth, is amazing, but now the pali-pali ['quick quick,' in Korean] mindset needs to be used and adjusted to bring in the human dimension properly. And underneath it all, emotion is the thing that drives us.'

The 5th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism is on show until 18 November 2025

At Tala’s Rivington Street showroom during London Design Festival, visitors were asked a series of personal – some might say impertinent – questions, the first being: What do you usually do before going to sleep? Below the words, four glass beakers invited a response. The container marked 'I spend time on my phone or screens' quickly filled with red marbles.

The poll captured the problem neatly. Our phones, it turns out, make excellent alarm clocks – and terrible sleep companions. 'They are the first and last thing you see in the day,’ says Thomas Heatherwick, founder of Heatherwick Studio. 'Even when you don’t pick them up, if they’re in sight, your brain is still spending time on them. Sleep is a fragile thing – we need to treat it as a precious commodity.'

Heatherwick is here at Tala’s Rivington Street store for the launch of the studio’s latest product. Three years in the making, ‘Wake’ is Heatherwick Studio’s response: part bedside lamp, part circadian-aware sleep aid, created with British lighting brand Tala. It pairs hand-glazed ceramic and pressed glass with programmable light and sound sequences designed to help users wind down at night and wake gently in the morning – no harsh blue-light-emitting screens required.

Thomas Heatherwick x Tala: from idea to object

‘We all know what it feels like to have a bad night's sleep,’ says Stuart Wood, Executive Partner at Heatherwick Studio, who led the project alongside Heatherwick. ‘A poor night's sleep, of course, affects your mood… it's now proven scientifically that a repeated poor sleep really harms your ability to recover, for your body to repair itself, to replenish, renew… the better your sleep… everything feels better – every question, every thought, every movement, just feels better.’

Yet, he points out, the current offering of sunrise alarm clocks is lacking. ‘If you go to a store and say, show me your sleep lights, they’re very plasticky, feel very temporary and very techy. We wanted to get rid of the visual noise so that it actually meets the objective.’

Heatherwick agrees: ‘It was about trying to make something that felt more like it belonged in your home, rather than something that looks like a micro spaceship that’s landed ready to go in a landfill site tomorrow.’

Tala, founded in 2015 by Josh Ward, Max Wood and William Symington, has built its reputation on championing the emotional quality of light. With ‘Wake’, the brand wanted to move beyond the bulb to create its first full smart lighting product, aiming squarely at the rapidly growing $600 billion global sleep market. The brief to Heatherwick Studio was deceptively simple: design something tactile and beautiful that helps people reclaim bedtime from their phones. The result took three years to develop and is the most technically ambitious object Tala has made to date.

Touch, light, and sound

The final design feels simple but hides a surprising amount of engineering. A weighted ceramic base, hand-glazed so each one is subtly different, is topped with a softly rippled glass ‘sun’. Rotate the base to adjust brightness; press once to start a wind-down or wake-up sequence. The display hides behind the glass, glowing only when needed.

‘We were absolutely set on zero buttons,’ Wood explains. ’Rotating and pressing felt intuitive. The hard part was making the screen bright, legible and affordable while keeping it hidden.’

At night, the light fades gradually to warm tones as the room darkens; in the morning, it brightens slowly like dawn. Users set preferences in the Tala app once, then leave the phone out of the room entirely. 'The rhythms in our body are controlled by light,’ says Heatherwick, demonstrating a slow 'wind down' cycle designed to promote melatonin release. 'The idea that we can have a more gentle progression into sleep is quite important.'

Sound soon became part of the story, too. ‘For a number of people, actually, myself included, audio and sound complement light. And actually, those two go together,’ Wood says. ‘Some people prefer naturalistic sounds, whether that be rainfall or birdsong, but others actually do prefer versions of white noise… that help your brain sort of disconnect from the noise inside your brain.’

Material intelligence

Material choice was as much about feeling as function. Heatherwick talks about wanting to ‘not touch plastic’, about creating something ‘earthy, rooted, calming’ that carries weight and won’t skid off a bedside table. The grooves of the lamp’s ceramic base recal a sunset over water but are also a natural fit for fingertips to run over surface.

That thinking draws partly on the studio’s architectural work, including a vast new district in Xi’an, China, where extruded ceramic was used across façades to introduce warmth and imperfection at urban scale. ‘Ceramic has the imperfect qualities that give you the necessary visual complexity that our eyes and brains need,’ Heatherwick says. ‘Actually, if our environment is too clinically perfect, our cortisol actually rises.’

The same principles shaped Wake. Wood explains that while the team was drawn to ceramics and glass for their warmth and tactility, working with natural materials on a product of this complexity proved challenging. 'It's a very hard thing to mass manufacture, because those are imprecise materials with tolerances that can't be controlled, like plastic.' In the end, the studio decided to celebrate these imperfections and differences between each ceramic base. 'I really like the fact that it's this sort of technology and science delivered through the lens of something that feels natural and calm and a bit varied, because we couldn't control everything – I think that was an important part of the project.'

For Wood, this cross-pollination between projects is key to Heatherwick Studio’s work. ‘For me, the connection is thinking about functionality at the same time as joy, delight and emotion. It's all design. Designing an airport, in a way, is the same process as designing a sleep light. It's just bigger and there's more of it.’

Heatherwick links Wake to a broader shift in society’s interest towards health, human experience and rediscovering our basic, but often overlooked, needs. As general director of the Seoul Architecture Biennale, opening this week on 26 September, he is leading a city-wide conversation about the impact of buildings on wellbeing. ‘We’re talking about sleep health,’ he says, ‘but also looking at the impact of buildings from a health perspective on society more broadly… it's so obvious that buildings affect your health, and yet there’s no training at all on their wider impact on society. It’s been treated as though [architecture is] not part of our public health. So I think there’s a sort of spectrum on which these things relate.’

Available in the UK (£255), US ($295) and EU (€305) through tala.co.uk and John Lewis, Wake is the studio’s most accessible product to date which is a prospect that fills the team with excitement. ‘The idea that this could be in hundreds of thousands of homes, helping people have a nicer day,' Wood says, ‘that gives me real pleasure.'

tala.co.uk

When Thomas Heatherwick was tapped to design Longchamp’s New York flagship in 2004, he had one goal: ‘to scoop people in off the street and make them go upstairs.’

To do so, Heatherwick, who was little-known in the US at the time, opted to punch a hole through the building and install an undulating stair made from steel ribbons that seemingly cascaded down the three-storey building like a waterfall. Those strips created what the designer thought of as a ‘hill’ for shoppers to summit, a slope that would usher them into a retail wonderland. The New York Times, in its review of the building, called it a ‘work of art.’

Two decades have elapsed since the opening of that radical flagship, and both Heatherwick Studio and Longchamp have grown. The designer has become one of the world’s best-known creatives for projects ranging from Little Island on Manhattan’s West Side to Coal Drops Yard in London. Longchamp has also evolved, expanding its range of products, delving deeper into sustainability and rethinking traditional retail. It was time for a change in energy.

‘You can buy anything you want online,’ Heatherwick tells Wallpaper*. ‘The hyper-digital has been dominating, and that means you need the hyper-physical.’

His relationship with Longchamp began in 2003, when he was asked to design a bag for the company. The result was a series of totes and purses that featured a single long zipper that wrapped around the entirety of the bag. Longchamp’s leadership was so impressed that they asked Heatherwick to take on their New York flagship.

‘The space called for something extraordinary,’ remembers Jean Cassegrain, the third-generation CEO of Longchamp.

In the years that followed, it was clear the store needed to be updated to reflect changing customer behaviour and desires. ‘It needed to be adapted to our new ways of doing business and for new ways to welcome customers,’ Cassegrain explains. ‘We didn't want to redo it entirely, and we were not going to go to someone else.’

Heatherwick Studio was back in action – and welcomed the opportunity to re-evaluate the firm’s old ideas. ‘Originally, we were seeing [the store] very much like a theatre – it had dark floors and very theatrical lighting,’ Heatherwick explains. ‘The underlying shift [in this version] was moving from a theater set to a Parisian apartment.’

The designers opened up the primary upper-level shopping floor, maintaining a series of original bent plywood forms that peel off the wall to form shelves for bags and accessories, but eliminating some to let in additional light and views. Plush green carpets, custom designed with the French company Lelièvre, swirl in puddles on the floor and creep all the way up the room’s columns like velvety trees. Custom timber displays flaunt silk scarves and small leather goods while vintage furnishings – including a Gio Ponti coffee table and a 1970s ‘croissant’ sofa by Raphaël Raffel – encourage lounging.

Sculpture and ceramics pieces, including works by Dorothée Loriquet, Tanaka Tomomi, and Nitsa Melotopoulos appear throughout the store, in addition to time-worn archival pieces like gameboards and a display model of a leather-clad pipe. ‘We’re less rigid,’ says Cassegrain. ‘We've introduced some randomness, let’s say – elements that are unexpected.’

That original sculptural stair, of course, stayed put, but got a glossy coat of Longchamp’s signature ‘Energy Green’ – a zingy hue inspired by the colour of the turf at the Longchamp Racecourse in Paris. ‘We wanted to make sure it was vivid,’ Heatherwick says. ‘From the street, we needed the feeling of enticement and energy.’

So what does it feel like to return to these formative stomping grounds all these years later?

‘I think maybe I have more confidence to be more eclectic and be a bit looser,’ reflects Heatherwick from his perch on the croissant-shaped couch.

‘I feel proud, not humiliated, to adapt and adjust and breathe new life into it for the next decades.’

Just walking into Making House, the building near London’s King’s Cross that has housed Heatherwick Studio since 2023, offers insight into the studio’s newly completed project: a 115,000 sq m retail development in Xi’an, the storied industrial metropolis of 12 million in central China. It also tells you much about the philosophy of 54-year-old founder Thomas Heatherwick.

‘[The studio’s approach] is a human-centred approach,' says Heatherwick as he welcomes me to the cavernous yet cosy space that allows glimpses into his universe and his take on compositional storytelling; there are models of projects large and small, as well as a full-size recreation of the rear of his 2011-designed Routemaster double-decker bus.

At Xi’an CCBD (Central Cultural Business District), the need to create a varied narrative within the landscape is equally evident – only here, it’s on an urban scale. Ceramic-clad buildings containing shops, restaurants, and offices nestle and interlock, arranged among manicured gardens and terraces.

Xi’an’s new district by Heatherwick Studio

So, is it possible to define a 'Heatherwick effect' from London to Xi’an? 'The general prevailing sense amongst almost everyone I speak to in the public is that we’ve had a real catastrophe of city making, in terms of making places,' he says. Behind him, wooden models and a retained brick wall contrast with glass, metal, and the aforementioned shiny red bus, while Persian-style rugs of varying size and condition are fixed to the floor.

Now, in his trinket-laden office, it’s clear Heatherwick is committed to ornaments with a story; he has always, unashamedly, loved aesthetic expression. Nowadays, however, he is keen to point out that this defence of decoration is not for its own sake. Heatherwick’s 2023 book Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World puts forward a simply phrased manifesto, admonishing 'boring' and 'inhumane' buildings in favour of designs that draw attention, create intrigue, and ultimately spark joy.

Heatherwick’s energy and fervour on this topic is palpable, but he acknowledges he hasn’t yet answered the question that brings the conversation back to Xi’an. 'The [Humanise] book is codifying and clarifying lessons learned over the last 30 years,' he says in a convincing last plug for the publication. 'We can only look at Xi’an CCBD as part of a journey of trying to explore how to make public-facing projects that might engage people more.'

A crucial part of this public engagement – and fitting neatly into the Humanise philosophy – is adding visual complexity to the design of buildings, especially their exteriors. 'I learned a lot from really good property developers,' he says frankly. 'Developers who need to make something that will have long-term value.' Having built expertise through collaborations with top developers in Singapore and Hong Kong, the studio has gained priceless customer feedback. 'It gave us enormous insights into human behaviour,' says Heatherwick.

Perhaps the most striking of Xi’an CCBD’s many purposeful quirks, curves, and kinks is the glazed ceramic tiling. For Heatherwick, more than a nod to the area’s ancient manufacturing traditions and its famous Terracotta Warriors, the ceramic samples on display in his office celebrate material imperfections and add the complexity our brains crave.

However, Mat Cash, lead architect for the Xi’an project, demonstrates that the material selection was about more than emotion. 'The use of ceramics was made feasible by the scale of the project, which allowed mass production of bespoke elements.' In an effusive yet practical tone, the partner at Heatherwick Studio of 18 years distils the nuts and bolts of creating Xi’an CCBD: 'The design embraced imperfections as a cost-effective, sustainable, and visually engaging approach.'

For Cash, part of the formula has to be a good client, and he praises developer CR Land for its openness to innovation. 'They had this incredible thirst to build mock-ups,' the architect admits. 'Almost more than we did… They were going, “OK, let’s build a bit of it, let’s build a bit of it…” really pushing us.' The result is a richness drawn from visible workmanship throughout the project; structures are encased in beautifully hued, glazed fragments.

Back at Making House, displayed alongside the models are glazed ceramic casings that surround the lift buttons at Xi’an CCBD. They are large and sculptural, almost font-like in appearance, much grander than a humble button would deem necessary. 'You can't afford to make everything all around you be special and bespoke,' says Heatherwick, referring to the cast ceramic object. 'But you can focus love on certain bits and things like lift buttons in moments where everyone touches them and there's an engagement.'

Considering that the Xi’an project is predominantly retail-oriented, Heatherwick holds no punches when he says, 'I'm not actually interested in shopping at all.' Turning back to the core tenet of the Humanise book, he continues: 'What I'm interested in is what brings people together.'

As earnest as this mission might be, in the cultural and economic context of the so-called ‘death of the mall’ in America and China’s own bursting property bubble, Xi’an’s patchily glazed CCBD begins to make imperfect sense. In fact, project lead Cash argues that the development could be a model for the future of retail and urban design, creating a modern heritage that adds value to the city. 'These projects can become the most successful by creating places that the public wants to be in.'

By designing joy, complexity, and an imbued sustainability into every detail and materiality, the project offers a compelling vision for how architecture can better shape the most commercial and economically volatile parts of our cities. Back at his office, Heatherwick reflects on those ceramic lift button casings: 'Even if you hate them, you'll know that they're special and particular, and those glazes too, they’re just so fascinating.'

heatherwick.com

A garden has always been spatial shorthand for sanctuary; in times of crisis, this gets amplified. As many of us increasingly seek the safe haven of our garden, the local park or nearby nature reserve, we raise a glass to the many, gorgeous green projects that bring cheer and serenity to our everyday lives. From small domestic gardens and urban gardens, to plant-based urban interventions, woodland installations, leafy architectural landscapes and even the dry terrain of desert flora, here, we tour some of the best projects set to green up our views and encourage the healing and balancing power of nature to filter through into our day. 

Morgan North, New York, USA

The complex, mixed-use project that is Morgan North sits in Midtown Manhattan – a part of town that is always in flux. Though demand for office space is changing, taller towers continue to pop up, replacing old structures and filling every last plot of land. It’s predicted that New York’s iconic skyline will be unrecognisable by 2030. And yet, rather than constantly building anew, a handful of developers have set their sights on transforming existing buildings, creating state-of-the-art facilities that meet new workplace standards while also preserving original characteristics.

Promenade Samuel-de Champlain, Canada

Quebec's Promenade Samuel-de Champlain has opened to the public, with the third and final phase of the project now completed, comprising some 2.5km of a waterside urban boulevard. The finished development is a new community space, ideal for bankside walks, beachside cafés, and recreational activities, carefully intertwining urban design with its surrounding context. Architecture studio Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecke wrapped up this final phase 15 years after its initial proposal from Commission de la Capitale Nationale du Québec. The area, set in the heart of the Canadian city, along the St Laurence River, previously consisted of neglected highways and rail corridors, which felt unwelcoming and unloved. The goal was to return the river to the local community.

House Under the Ground, The Netherlands

Eindhoven-based architecture studio WillemsenU has hidden a house in an undulating meadow on the edge of a nature reserve in The Netherlands. Surrounded by wild flowers and meandering streams, House Under The Ground has a curved concrete, green roof that rises from the ground and could easily be mistaken for a grassy hill. Occupying the plot of a former goat house, the two-bedroom house has a compact footprint yet feels generous and expansive inside. The poured concrete roof hides three levels of living spaces beneath it, two of them below ground level. Though, contrary to what you might expect from a mostly underground house, this one is filled with daylight and cleverly connects its inhabitants to the outdoors.

Terremotto, USA

Terremoto is the kind of firm that enthusiastically describes its approach to a recent project as ‘hippie-dippy gooey goodness.’ The landscape architecture design studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco digs a countercultural vibe. After all, they did restore and enhance the landscape of the Sea Ranch Lodge, the historic (and famously hippie modernist) outpost on the Northern California coast master planned by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. Their gardens and landscapes are mini habitats—places where people, pollinators (birds and bees), native plants, and even art share the love. In the 7th Avenue Garden, designed in collaboration with artist David Horvitz, a weedy, vacant lot was transformed into a small park made up of a jumble of milkweed, plumeria, and wildflowers. Terremoto added a few chunky wood benches and a deck, and rubble and rebar from the demolished LACMA buildings were shaped into found-object sculptures. 

Villa M, France

This architectural garden is a vetical one. Design by Brazil and France based Triptyque Architecture and Philipe Starck, the project features an extensive green facade, built around the principles of biophilic design and wellness. The mixed use scheme houses healthcare professionals in an innovative mix, including a hotel, restaurant, bar, conference area, a check-up area, a co-working space, and a showroom for start-ups in the world of health. The idea is ‘to promote mixing, exchanges and mutual aid between the different specialties and the different generations of health professionals,’ explain the architects. 

1105 West Peachtree, USA

This new mixed-use development in the heart of Midtown Atlanta features a garden at its heart. Designed as a ‘sky terrace', this expansive architectural garden not only adds a green lung to the heart of the city but it also helps direct circulation and connects the three different buildings it's placed among (the development comprises residences at 40 West 12th). Designed by Atlanta-based firm SITE solutions, this green space was created around the scheme's masterplan, conceived by architects Rule Joy Trammell + Rubio. The aim was ‘to bring the human experience of the street to the development’s many users, offering a strong sense of community through smart design.'

Hillcrest Meadow Gardens, Canada 

Canadian ecological designer Nina-Marie Lister has been recently announced as the recipient of the prestigious $50,000 Margolese National Design for Living Prize, which is offered by the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture. Recognized by the jury for ‘her commitment to addressing and nurturing the coexistence of wildlife and people in safe, healthy, and interconnected landscapes, as well as connecting people to nature in cities,' the designer has several green projects under her belt. One of them is Hillcrest Meadow Gardens - Lister's own personal home garden, a pollinator meadow with a biodiverse, native urban habitat (pictured above). 

GuangzhouGarden, UK

2021 Chelsea Flower Show’s Gold Medal Winning GuangzhouGarden, created by Grant Associates includes five latticework bamboo structures developed and fabricated by Bristol-based advanced timber structure specialists Xylotek. ‘Taking part in our first RHS Chelsea Flower Show is an exciting creative challenge for us as we look to capture the essence of vast and vibrant Guangzhou, with a population of 15 million people, and distil it down into a garden plot just 20m x 10m!,' says Grant Associates' director Peter Chmiel. Xylotek's Martin Self adds: ‘We were thrilled to work over the past two years with Grant Associates on the design and realisation of the ‘Guangzhou Garden. We particularly enjoyed exploring bamboo’s technical potential and harnessing its capacity to create poetic new forms.'

FormaHQ rooftop, UK

One of London's latest cultural hubs, FormaHQ in Southwark, also boasts a fabulous green roof. The existing modernist building was refurbished and reimagined by Sanchez Benton Architects with international artist Gabriel Kuri and features a cleverly planted rooftop with a garden by Nigel Dunnett. Offering views of the surrounding cityscape as well as respite from its central London's densely built setting, this little gem plays with colour as the greenery contrasts the redesigned building's vibrant orange hues. The building hosts a varied artistic programme and the garden will be open to the public during office hours. 

Garden Among The Courtyards, Italy

Milan has long been a city of secret gardens. In this dense, industrial, grande dame of a metropolis, composed of large apartment blocks and walled-off palazzos, one of the great joys of wandering aimlessly is accidentally discovering the planted clearings and courtyards that offer respite from its fabricated scenery. Still, many such green spots remained private and off-limits to most until recently, when more parks and community vegetable gardens slowly started to make an appearance. Milan Green Week in 2019 and local organisations such as Clever Cities and RoofMatters have been helping to foster sustainable practices in the city, including a culture of urban gardening and green roofs. Brera-based architecture studio Piuarch has been cultivating its own planted roof since 2015, titled Garden Among the Courtyards – enhancing liveability, wellbeing and social relations for both employees and the local neighbourhood. Directors Germán Fuenmayor, Gino Garbellini, Monica Tricario and Francesco Fresa believe that while the design community is aware and engaged in the dialogue about creating more green space in their city, there’s still much to do. ‘It is not only about urban planning but also about subverting social, cultural and educational policies within the city and people,’ says Fresa.

Sky Garden, UK

This new indoor botanical delight is Sky Garden; a green space in the heart of London, right at the top of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Commissioned by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and its charity CW+, the piece was designed by award-winning landscape designer and CW+ Artist in Residence, Jinny Blom. ‘Gardens, quite simply, improve our lives,' says Blom. ‘To go and sit amongst plants and nature, especially in the context of a bustling hospital, has an immediate positive impact on stress levels.  The Sky Garden will provide an irreplaceable source of respite to those in need.' The design takes its cues from Modernist architecture and features clean planter shapes engulfed in greenery and calming colours. 

South Ken Green Trail, UK

The South Ken Green Trail is a new series of green interventions on London’s Exhibition Road. The three projects are ‘The Algae Meadow' by Seyi Adelekun and Wayward (in collaboration with the V&A, and working with specialists from UCL and Imperial College London), ‘Home away from Hive' by Mizzi Studio (pictured here), and ‘Windflower' by Urban Radicals with Adam Harris. They are free for all to visit and together are ‘supporting the post-pandemic recovery of London’s arts and science district,' say the project's organisers. Highlighting our natural environment as well as great design and architecture, the installations are part of the 2021 London Architecture Festival and will remain in place until the Great Exhibition Road Festival which runs from 9-15 October.

Taiyuan Botanical Garden, China

The botanical gardens at Taiyuan City in China commissioned Austrian based studio Delugan Meissl for a new home; and the results are impressive. The team transformed a former coal-mining area into a landscape park, incorporating architectural structures, like pathways, greenhouses and a bonsai museum (pictured above) with planting and greenery of all kinds in a harmonious, eye-catching design. ‘The centrepiece of the buildings, which are very precisely inserted into the modelled topography, consists of three greenhouses, which were realised as three hemispherical timber lattice domes,' explain the architects. Publicly accessible areas are matched by a cleverly integrated research centre containing laboratories, studios, office buildings, workshops, meeting rooms, lecture rooms and a library. 

RHS Hilltop, UK

Designed by architecture studio WilkinsonEyre, RHS Hilltop is the gardening science hub for The Royal Horticultural Society at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey. Blending modern architecture with lush gardens, the project is an exciting new centre for horticultural science and learning, and the result of a five-year transformation. The surrounding green spaces of the newly landscaped Wisley gardens, have been masterplanned by Christopher Bradley-Hole, and designed in detail by Matt Keightley and Ann-Marie Powell. ‘The new centre is designed to integrate with the working gardens and provide a central hub for the scientific community based at RHS Garden Wisley and the million plus visitors that come each year,' says WilkinsonEyre's Geoff Turner. 

New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing Dedicated to Victims of Gun Violence, USA

According to data collected by Gun Violence Archive, at least 5,132 children were shot in the USA last year. As a response, Svigals + Partners have created a garden that ‘honours the lives lost to fatal gun violence in New Haven and raises awareness of the immense emotional impact of the crisis.' The project is located in New Haven and was envisioned as both a green space for healing and a call for action for the local community and beyond. Leafy expanses and sculpture blend in this architectural garden that is perfect for contemplation. 

Silence by Pawel Althamer at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia

Nature, art and contemporary building design meet in this green installation at the Garage museum of contemporary art in Moscow. The brainchild of Polish artist Paweł Althamer, this spatial piece was conceived as a garden for meditation. The project has a clear collaborative and therapeutic nature, according to the artist. ‘Each element of the garden—be it a fallen tree or a particular deciduous bush—is a hidden quote, while the composition as a whole is a unique environment where the restless city dweller of today can alter the regime of time, as if transported to a picturesque space in a past era, where the rhythm and pace of life were not by default accelerated to the limit,' says the museum's statement.

Elephant Springs, UK

There is an exciting new natural stone and water landscape in London. Elephant Springs, located in Elephant Park in South London and designed by landscape architects, Gillespies in collaboration with artist Mel Chantrey of The Fountain Workshop, blends greenery, natural materials and water features in a sculptural environment that is open to all. ‘Elephant Springs sits at the heart of this landmark regeneration project, nestled in an ever-expanding central park that saw the first phase open in 2017 before any of the buildings,' says Gillespies' Armel Mourgue. ‘Our landscape-led approach created very early on a destination for relaxing walks, playful times and essential human interaction. The new phase will see all these activities expand into a much larger park, where unforgettable moments of play and water are revealed amongst a landscape of rain gardens, pockets of lawn and groups of mature trees.'

Little Island, USA

A new public park has opened on the Hudson River. The new green space, which encompasses three new performance venues for New York, is designed by London based Heatherwick Studio, who was invited to the project by philanthropist Barry Diller and the Hudson River Park Trust. Set on an impressive sculputral constellation of some-280 concrete piles that rise from the water, the park was created as a haven for both humans and wildlife, filled with nature and opportunities to connect with it. Its construction was impressive and the result is certainly eye-catching. ‘The project began when we were asked to conceive of a sculptural structure to go on a design for a newly enlarged piece of the Hudson River Park promenade,' says studio founder Thomas Heatherwick. ‘The project was interesting, but we saw the opportunity to create a more engaging experience for New Yorkers and to build on the city’s heritage of inventing exciting new public spaces. Instead, we had the idea to make an entirely new type of pier as a lush rectangular garden island, connected to the land with generous gang-planks as bridges, aligned to the street grid of New York.' This undulating pier structure is like no other. 

Swing Bridge, UK

A project instigated by the community of Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, this elegant new bridge forms part of the landscape at the well-known South London Crystal Palace Park. The structure was designed by architecture studio Tonkin Liu, and it's inspired by the architecture team’s decade-long immersion in biomimetic studies. The project was launched to create a necessary and secure crossing to the park's Dinosaur Islands and their sculptural displays. The Swing Bridget is a pivoting design with one central foundation; this allows it to move and only allow access to the island when needed, therefore protecting the exhibits. Made out of steel, the structure is visually powerful through its skeleton-inspired design and geometries. 

Al Fey Park, Abu Dhabi

Al Fey Park claims to be the Middle East's very first urban biodiversity park. Boasting great biodiversity in its wildlife and planting, as well as its own microclimate and a design by Danish landscape architecture specialists SLA, this green expanse is located in downtown Abu Dhabi. The public park spans. some 27,500 sq m. ‘Al Fay Park is a new type of forest park in Abu Dhabi. Through our extensive research in the region’s flora and fauna, we create a new paradigm for how to think and design public realm in the Middle East. Al Fay Park is a celebration of Abu Dhabi’s native nature and culture and a prime example of how to maximize climate action, increase life-quality, and radically improve the biodiversity of an entire city – all on a former sand site,' says SLA design principal and partner Rasmus Astrup.

Between Heaven and Earth, China 

Created for the Shenzhen Flower show in China, this garden, entitled ‘Between Heaven and Earth', is the brainchild of garden and landscaping outfit McWilliam Studio. The space feels at once delicate and deeply grounded to its site, respectful and expressive. It ‘explores the connections between space and form and the interactions between woodland and water, land and sky,' explain its creators. Combining the water element with paved surfaces, light and textural planting, the design features a series of irregularly placed vertical metal poles, which mirror the surrounding woodland's trees. Some span some 10m high and each carries either a small LED or a misting spray at its top, adding an extra dimension to the installation. With this design, the garden experts scooped the show's Gold Medal.

Hidden Burle Marx Gardens, Brazil

One of Sao Paulo's iconic modernist-inspired office buildings, Condomínio São Luiz was designed by Brazilian architect Marcelo Fragelli in 1984. What many didn't know, is that the development had a Burle Marx designed garden ‘hidden' away in its grounds. Now, a sensitive restoration by Perkins & Will meant the gardens by the iconic landscaping artist could open to the public for the first time in almost 40 years. The architects' retrofit included unifying the workspace's former two receptions into one central hall. This allowed the removal of partitions that surrounded the building, thus creating access into the garden for pedestrians.

The Waiting Room, Somaliland

A small project created and built by architect Rashid Ali Architects with students at Abaarso Tech, the first school of architecture in Somaliland, The Waiting Room is a light, open air, planted structure in the city of Hargeisa. It is also the first structure in the city to be entirely made out of timber. The building sits just outside the city government’s land registry office, within a public courtyard, and offers much needed space for waiting and socialising for both visitors and staff. It connects users with the context and leafy planting in the courtyard. ‘The idea was to design and build a small contemporary building, while also introducing and experimenting with materials and construction techniques that are not familiar locally,' explains the team. ‘Our aim was not just to use such materials just for the sake of it, but to build in a relatively short time from pre-fabricated components and leave possibility for disassembling and for reuse in future.'

Terra Dominicata, Spain

Part of a hotel and winery experience in the Tarragona area, called Terra Dominicata, this expansive terrace and gardens was designed by Spanish architecture and landscaping studio SCOB. Taking its cues from the surrounding Montsant Natural Park, the design included the refurbishment of a set of abandoned, formerly agricultural buildings previously belonging to a monastery, and a series of outdoors spaces, from small courtyards to paved terraces and a swimming pool deck. ‘The materials, the vegetation, the textures and colours, as well as the traditional ways of building are representative of the place together with its historical and cultural heritage,' say the architects. Drawing on the region's planting, the surrounding vineyards and adding climbing frames for wisterias, the team created a green haven, particularly suited for southern gardens with a Mediterranean climate.

scob.es

Samos Garden, Greece

Created to compliment the restoration of a historic villa on the island of Samos in Greece, this garden is the brainchild of Stockholm based architecture studio OOAK. The architects got involved in the scheme to develop a landscaping strategy for the property's grounds, to add a pool and work with the garden in front of the main building and the guesthouse. The team drew inspiration from medieval hortus conclusus (enclosed gardens of the time) and a nearby overgrown space within a fortified monastery. A geometric carpet of recycled brick, gravel and plants was applied, creating a soft, leafy environment. This is contrasted by the sharp, minimalist, black-coloured pool that sits within. OOAK worked with Athens based agriculturist and gardener Marios Virlas, for specialised advice and insights on the horticultural side.

ooakarchitects.com

Brooklyn Heights Garden, New York, USA

NYC-based architecture office Worrell Yeung has led the renovation of a family home's outdoor space in a Historic Landmark District in Brooklyn Heights. The commission consisted of the front and back gardens of a typical brownstone building. The architects also made sure to fine tune existing details to support and enhance the new design; for example, by restoring the historic forged iron fencing and gate details on the front entrance and by enlarging the steel casement openings towards the back, to bring plenty of light into the interiors and better visually connect indoors and outdoors. The project features stone paving, new planters and a new, black custom metal staircase that leads directly into the small rear garden below. ‘This is consistent with a lot of the interior architecture work we do, in which we deploy ‘objects’ within a space. We treated these objects like vitrines, which helped us to organize the cubic hot tub with the plantings, for example,' says co-founder Jejon Yeung.

worrellyeung.com

Guangming OCT Trail, China 

Conceived by international landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm SWA Group, a new circulation route has been installed in China's Guangming District, located north of Shenzhen. The region's picturesque, forested mountain landscapes are a major nature attraction and now, a system of three bridges that float above the undulating terrain allow visitors to take in the rich greenery from a vantage point. Simple, geometric and dynamic, the design is contemporary and invites pedestrians into the tree-filled expanses of the Chinese countryside. What started as a smaller project to expand and finess a regional jogging and biking trail, has now developed into a ‘an iconic destination that adds value for locals and tourists, while supporting goals for healthy living and urbanization, connecting the city of Shenzhen with its surrounding towns and national parklands,' explains the design team.

swagroup.com

Moor Lane Community Garden, London, UK

Bringing nature into the urban heart of the British capital, a new pop-up community garden has been installed in the City of London. Designed by local landscape firm Wayward, with the support of local community and resident groups, the City of London Corporation and its cultural district, Culture Mile, the project is titled Moor Lane Community Garden. The piece – a series of interlocking, leafy planters – features robust, sculptural bases inspired by the character of the nearby Barbican housing estate and London Wall. Created as a temporary project, but in place at least till next summer, the structure offers a breath of fresh air and acts as a testbed for a future landscaping project in Moor Lane.

wayward.co.uk 

ISPACE, Val Calanca National Park, Switzerland

This project, designed by Davide Macullo Architects, is nestled within rich woodland outside the village of Rossa, in the Calanca Valley of Switzerland. Created with the support of the RossArte Foundation, the municipality of Rossa and the Swiss National Park Val Calanca, and titled ISPACE, the small timber structure offers an architectural resting spot within nature for visitors to the park. ‘ISPACE is a project born out of an idea combining art and architecture in the creation of environments that stimulate people to perceive the influence of a space on their moods,' say the architects. ‘It is a re-evaluation of the territory, allowing us to rediscover our bond with nature.' This structure is the first in a series of similar installations in these woods; nine more architectural sculptures are set to appear in this part of the world in the next months. 

macullo.com

The Landroom Observatory, Israel

The majesty of nature spans thick, green forests, more tropical climes, as well as drier, desert environments. French-Israeli architect Ben Gitai has recently completed a striking architectural installation that harnesses the power of the last – the new Landroom Observatory has been designed to overlook the world's largest geological crater: Makhtesh Ramon in the Negev desert. This structure, created as a sculptural star and desert-gazing observatory, is made entirely out of local sandstone and limestone extracted from the ground around it, making it look and feel entirely of-its-place and camouflaged within its surroundings. It provides visitors to the area a shelter from the sun and a spot to sit, relax and take in the magnificent scenery. The boutique piece is designed to accomodate only two people at a time.

gitaiarchitects.com

Dream Within A Dream, China 

Created as a property sales centre with a twist, Dream Within A Dream is a concept by Shanghai-based Wutopia Lab. ‘Shanghai Huijian invited Wutopia Lab to design a welcoming stage in front of the sales’ center of their project in Huzhou,' explain the architects. ‘The only request from the client was to make it different.' The team drew on the power of nature and landscaping to create an environment that challenges the norm about what a ‘modern city' is. The steel construction includes a forest of volumes, perforated screens and bright white surfaces, which house different ‘landscapes', such as caves, hills, streams, rocks, highlands, waterfalls and auditorium formations.

wutopialab.com

Grosvenor Square, London, UK

Architecture studio Tonkin Liu is behind the revamp of one of central London's rare beasts – the garden square. Upon completion, Grosvenor Square, the second largest garden square in the capital, will be formed by four interlocking gardens based on the project's original oval shape. Principles Anna Liu and Mike Tonkin shaped their design through feedback from local residents and Londoners, and input from experts including Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, LSE Cities and the Green Infrastructure Consultancy. The result is a design that promises to increase biodiversity and double the number of trees in the open space. The refreshed square will include corner gardens with ‘options for small dynamic structures welcoming visitors', as well as shaded seating under the canopy of trees, a sense of openness and a secret water garden.

tonkinliu.co.uk

Houston Botanic Gardens, USA

An island in Houston's Bayou system has recently been re-introduced as the American city's very first botanic garden. International landscape firm West 8 is behind the transformation, which includes a collection of tropical, sub-tropical, and arid plants from around the world. Underpinning everything in local flora and fauna, the garden is also set to showcase the area's amazing biodiversity, which the project encourages. ‘The intent of the site design is to seek balance in all aspects, from planting and soils, through to topography and materials – the careful juxtaposition of order and chaos that is at the heart of enduring gardens,' says West 8 New York office's Donna Bridgeman-Rossi. Working to amplify the existing site's qualities and support sustainability and diversity, the project also features elements to make the user experience as comfortable as possible, such as a series of 21 thin shell concrete vaults that line the perimeter of the main global collection garden (pictured); the alcoves offer shaded rest spots for visitors. 

west8.com

Thomas Heatherwick surveys the scene at the new Azabudai Hills district in Tokyo: 'We are sitting, at this moment, just a few metres from the tallest building in Japan. Thousands of square metres of gallery are beneath us. But look – it’s like we’re sitting in a small park. Your emotions change when the landscape becomes three-dimensional.'

The British designer (who brought three-dimensionality to Wallpaper’s 20th anniversary cover back in 2016) is seated at a small table, surrounded by a textured patchwork of nature and architecture. Flowing all around are slopes of greenery, with art installations, plants and citrus trees – all woven into the curved undulations of a grid-like structure, layered with intimate walkways, courtyards and pavilions. This is the multi-dimensional scene that lies at the heart of Azabudai Hills, a major city-in-a-city development that opens its doors this week in central Tokyo after more than three decades of meticulous urban planning.

Azabudai Hills district: conceived as a paradigm for urban living

Aiming to create a new paradigm for contemporary urban living in one of the world’s most densely populated cities, the complex, spanning eight hectares – and the latest in a string of landmark developments by Mori Building – is home to a constellation of elements.

Rising into the skies is a trio of new skyscrapers, with reflective façades by Pelli Clarke & Partners (including Mori JP Tower, now Japan’s highest building at 330m). New office space can accommodate 20,000 workers, while 1,400 residences have also been created, with interiors by Yabu Pushelberg.

Other ingredients include 150 stores (of which 100 open this week), a cutting-edge medical centre, several major galleries (Azabudai Hills Gallery opens with a show by Olafur Eliasson; Pace and teamLab’s new Borderless launch here next year), and new premises for the British School. It even has a new road winding through it – Sakura-asa Dori – lined with ten species of large trees, from maples to white oak, plus a relocated temple.

Yet underpinning its complex DNA is the lower-level architecture and landscaping that threads it all together. More precisely, a connective grid-like network of organic structural curves, elemental materiality and bursts of green – all designed, with a focus on the human-scale, by Heatherwick Studio, for its first major project in Japan.

Showing Wallpaper* around ahead of its opening, Heatherwick says: 'My hope is that no one will call this a shopping centre but can feel it’s a new district. Twenty-four hours a day you will be able to walk through here, the landscape is always open. I hope it just sort of stitches into Tokyo.'

The idea of creating a garden, not a box, was the starting point. Centre stage is a plant-covered lattice-like grid which flows and twists, like a tablecloth, through a 6,000-square metre central green with 320 plant species.

The structure is punctuated by a scattering of pavilions, containing shops or galleries, which push vertically through the surface up towards the sky; as well as openings that drop down into light-flooded courtyards and sunken passageways.

The grid’s organic dynamism is softened further by materials and construction techniques. It’s made of glass reinforced concrete, with warmly tactile surfaces packed with multi-toned aggregates, while shadow-casting curves replace sharp edges and corner lines; and it’s all pulled together through the slot-like connections of its modular components, a modern structural riff on the beauty of nail-free Japanese joinery.

'This notion of creating a net frame, which we could pop these pavilions through – and even towers – is about trying to humanise and soften the site,' explains Heatherwick. 'It could all be flat here – but by breaking down the flatness, it expresses the structure.'

'It’s like a piece of fabric that you can push and pull. Because we’re using a grid, like a warp and a weft, when we take it around the corner, it creates a zigzag. We wanted it to be curved, but also create unexpected articulations.'

Neil Hubbard, group leader and partner at Heatherwick Studio, adds: 'The system visually links the whole district together.' At the same time, each pocket contains something completely different – whether it’s a cake shop, a florist, a canopy for a hotel entrance or a residential entrance. 'It's also three-dimensionally soft. This is how we approach our projects – by exploring how people will feel around them as opposed to what it looks like.'

In the central green area, at the base of the Mori JP Tower, is Heatherwick’s 16m-high canopy dubbed The Cloud, with intricate looping formations inspired by paper quilling, while a pointy white 'forest spirit' – Miss Forest in Tokyo, by artist Yoshitomo Nara – sits on grass nearby.

The façade of Janu Tokyo – the first outpost of Aman’s new hotel brand – also blends into the soft flow of the landscape; and exterior brick tiles on the British School were sourced to exactly match those on the post office which once stood there.

The tile detail is a perfect example of what Heatherwick describes as the 'nutritional value' of structures – as outlined in his recently released book Humanise, which explores the deep imprint that buildings leave on human lives, even through the simple act of walking past them every day.

'If people care about something, they’re more likely to repair or adjust or extend it, rather than knock it down,' says Heatherwick. 'Tokyo is an extreme city. The average age of a commercial building is about 30 years. In the 1980s, it was even less, maybe 20 years. So how do you make something that society might care enough about to say don’t knock it down? Would your grandchild, or someone who none of us know yet, stick up for this when we’re no longer around?'

Exploring the site, Heatherwick walks past a farm, and trees weighed down with paradise-perfect citrus fruits ('They look like they’re hot-glued on – but we checked and they’re real,' he quips), before passing the grid at its highest 15m cantilever, entering passageways and pausing to observe gaps framing Tokyo views.

Stepping inside to survey a fan-vaulted ceiling of white folded steel sheets marking the internal entrance of a supermarket, Heatherwick highlights the craftsmanship, skills – and patience – of his Japanese partners: 'We could only make something like this in Japan, I don’t think it would be possible in the UK, it’s too complicated.'

For all its greenery, the backdrop is resolutely Tokyo, with views of temple rooftops peeking between skyscrapers, the eclectic cityscape harmonising with the project’s layered complexity – a quality relished by Heatherwick.

'One of the things that neuroscience is teaching us is that human brains need complexity. If you don't have it, you’re starving your brain and it starts to go into stress. That also echoes the intuition that many of us have, when people start talking about places feelings sterile and stark. But it’s different when you have shadows and textures and high points of light – which nature automatically does, as nature is incredibly complex.'

Pausing to smile as a couple stops to peer into a courtyard, Heatherwick says: 'There are some big heroic bits but also humbler parts. I like the smaller, lower, humbler parts almost more because of the intimacy. That's the bit that really improves daily life.'

'What's exciting about this project is that it's not one building – it’s a district. Its job is to pull in all the other ingredients that are fascinating in areas that we haven’t designed – and create vistas and views and cherish that.'

The journey of working on this project for close to a decade has also clearly left an imprint on the studio. As Heatherwick explains: 'We’ve learnt many lessons. And we are now even more convinced of the small scale and the importance of the district, rather than the building. This is a line we’re interested in exploring in future projects – trying to find the things that might connect or mean something to people. We have newer clarity about this now.'

heatherwick.com 

Thomas Heatherwick's 'Humanise' is not just a new architecture book; it is a publication that marks the start of a campaign by the acclaimed designer, as he vouches to advocate for joy in architecture and argue against the creation of 'boring' structures within our built environment. The new, thick tome by Penguin launched this month with a presentation and discussion with writer and curator Ekow Eshun (who is behind the ongoing show 'In the Black Fantastic' at nearby Hayward Gallery). 

It is a book that brings up important questions - such as what is an architect, and what role does profit play in our cities and placemaking? - and attempts to answer them, using as its lens the studio's research on our response to architecture and its different styles. The practice's design approach has led to many international commissions such as London's Coal Drops Yard, New York's Little Island, and the soon-to-complete Azabudai Hills in Tokyo.

'Humanise': Thomas Heatherwick's thesis on'boring' buildings

At the launch, the designer began his talk by highlighting that many of us may feel that the concept of 'beautiful' is 'subjective', but, he continued 'perhaps 'boring' isn’t so subjective.' The book - and Heatherwick Studio's research - attempts to define what makes a building 'boring' - and describes it as the intersection of 'monotony, shininess, seriousness, plainness, straightness, and anonymity.' On their own, all these notions can work and produce great results, he explained, but it’s their combination, and repetition, that becomes a problem. 

The book cites studies which have shown that certain buildings, featuring these elements, can create stress reactions to our bodies - so why is there not more done about them, he asks. Heatherwick also refers to Homs based architect and researcher Marwa al-Sabouni, who argues that the way buildings were created, designed and placed in her home country helped create divides and ultimately contributed to the ongoing civil war there. 

The designer also factors into his thesis the additional problems this is causing to the current global climate emergency - and how the amount of 'boring' buildings that are being erected and then quickly torn down have a devastating impact on our carbon emission counts, worsening the construction industry's negative contribution to climate change. 

Modernist architecture: is it to blame?

For Heatherwick, the problems began with the rise of modernist architecture in the 20th century - and key teachings by icons in the field, such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, which were either taken to the extreme or misinterpreted, or simply overused. It was during this time that visual complexity of more traditional or historical styles (works such as La Sagrada Familia or Casa Milà by Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona) were swiftly abandoned - if not condemned - in favour of straight lines, austerity, and a minimalism to a fault that ended up dominating global aesthetics, often hailed as the 'only' way to go. 

The designer added that not all Le Corbusier's designs present the same issues. Going on an 'anti-pilgrimage' with his family to the Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, he recounted, he was completely taken by the particular church's architecture. 'It's one of my top buildings in the world,' he says. 'What a paradox.'

Indeed, it would be worth highlighting that Modernism has many faces and there's a rich plurality within the genre - and many of the problems with its repetition and bad copycats lies in the circumstances related to the ways our cities are financed and built. It is difficult to point to a singular drive or reason behind their creation, as they are living, breathing human habitats of constant activity and immense complexity. There are examples where indeed, a lack of care feels evident, but also others whose presence elevates their users' lives and their surroundings - Modernist or not. 

'A love story to our emotions'

Back in the book, some good points include urging architects to work with our emotions, trying to find ways to scientifically measure our reaction to buildings, factoring in wellbeing, and importantly, bringing the wider public into the conversation as prevalent practice in architecture. Heatherwick stresses that in his studio, they always examine their works in terms of how they appear on a city level, a street level, and a door level - and praises Soane Medal 2022 winner Peter Barber for his works, such as North London's Beechwood Mews social housing complex, which have been widely acclaimed for their human scale, distinct personality, and community friendly design. 

It is not, Heatherwick says, about completely dispelling the classic modernist adage 'form follows function'; it's about accepting that emotion is a function. Untimely, 'a building should be able to hold your attention for the time it takes to pass by,' he concludes. 'The book is a love story to our emotions.'

heatherwick.com 

penguin.co.uk 

Spanning 8.1 hectares in the heart of Tokyo, Azabudai Hills is on track to shake up the sprawling cityscape when it opens this autumn. Made possible by three decades of meticulous planning, research and consultation by the Mori Building Company, the ambitious project aims to create a new human-centric paradigm for urban living.

Even by Tokyo’s cloud-brushing standards, Azabudai Hills is enormous. Currently in the final throes of its construction, this ‘city in a city’ will be home to an entire urban cosmos: 1,400 residences, offices for around 20,000 workers, and 150 shops and restaurants, plus a food market, the British School in Tokyo, a new TeamLab museum, Aman’s Janu Tokyo hotel and 11 floors of Aman Residences. It involves an impressive roster of creatives – Pelli Clarke & Partners has created three sleek skyscrapers; Sou Fujimoto designed the retail spaces; and Heatherwick Studio has dreamt up the organically flowing lower-level architecture, connecting the public area components through abundant greenery.

Heatherwick Studio's Azabudai Hills

Azabudai Hills broke ground in August 2019, with Thomas Heatherwick witnessing the Shinto priest blessings, as is customary at the start of construction projects in Japan – before switching to remote management due to the pandemic. Returning to Tokyo in September 2022 was a revelatory moment – not only in terms of the project’s tangible progression, but also due to the sharp cultural disparities in the construction industry (perhaps best embodied by the workers’ jackets, which have in-built air conditioning).

‘In the UK, we talk about construction work as managing conflict,’ says Heatherwick. ‘So I arrived in Tokyo thinking, what do we have to fight for? And everyone looked at me blankly. They are all endeavouring their absolute best to achieve what we really want within the budget and timescales. It’s one of the smoothest construction projects we have ever worked on.’ He adds: ‘I was inspired years ago by visiting Japanese craftspeople making religious artefacts for Buddhist temples. It’s seeing craft almost as a spiritual ritual. I could not see how that could possibly translate to the large-scale world of messy construction sites. But there was a real relationship between the two. This is the macro of the micro you see in workshops all across Japan.’

Central to Heatherwick’s design at Azabudai Hills is a large pergola-style steel structure, with its grid format manipulated to create an organically curved rooftop, upon which people can walk among undulating expanses of greenery. It was driven by a desire to explore the boundaries of the human scale within a densely packed city. ‘There are more humans than ever, but we are actually similar in size to hundreds or thousands of years ago,’ he says. ‘The challenge is how we can make something that both acknowledges its urban scale of us all coming together, but equally makes space for our human-ness. And so the master plan evolved to build three simple large towers – and between them, a more complex, almost village-like development on a far more human scale. We wanted to put some of the wildness squeezed out of cities back into the heart of the project.’

It’s a big year in Japan for Heatherwick: the construction of Azabudai Hills (his first completed project in the country) coincides with a major new exhibition, at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, highlighting 28 projects around the world. ‘Soulfulness is something we are really missing,’ he says. ‘We need to think about the built world around us in a more emotion-centred way. I am interested in how we look at buildings more with our feelings than our intellect. For me, it’s about how we can avoid soullessness.’  

‘Heatherwick Studio: Building Soulfulness’ is on until 4 June at Mori Art Museum

mori.art.museum 

project.azabudai-hills.com 

heatherwick.com 

A version of this article appears in the May 2023 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Construction has broken ground on Heatherwick Studio's latest project in Asia – a striking, organic, mixed use development featuring within its composition a distinctive green pergola style roof. The scheme, located in Tokyo's Toranomon-Azabudai district, includes the public realm and lower-level podium architecture for a site, which also comprises a 6,000 sq m central landscaped square, office, residential, retail, a school and a temple. 

Working with the Mori Building Company to create ‘an exceptional public district for the city', Heatherwick Studio is effectively working on the redevelopment of the wider area’s accessible public realm, which is expected to be visited by some 25 million people per year, once completed. 

The practice responded to the site’s irregular shape by designing fluid, undulating volumes, which are topped off by a planted roof – this gives a much needed green element to the scheme, while echoing ‘the natural forms of the project’s valley setting', explain the architects. 

‘It’s been very exciting working on the Toranomon-Azabudai project and much of our effort has been focused on designing the public spaces that everyone will experience when they spend time in this new area,’ says Thomas Heatherwick. ‘As many new developments around the world can be harsh and sterile we wondered if we could provide a more human-centred alternative by integrating surprisingly intense quantities of planting and greenery.’

The Toranomon-Azabudai project is Heatherwick Studio’s very first to begin construction in Japan. Completion is due in March 2023.

INFORMATION

heatherwick.com

Before creating large-scale, headline-making landmarks – the Vessel and Little Island in New York, and 1000 Trees in Shanghai amongst them – Thomas Heatherwick established his name with striking, small-scale works, building-sized objects, witty, ingenious and often kinetic. There was 2004’s curling, crowd-pleasing Rolling Bridge in London’s Paddington and The Sitooterie, a hedgehoggy garden seat, created two years earlier in Essex. A new piece of glasshouse architecture at Woolbeding Gardens in West Sussex traces a line back to these early works in its one-good-idea elegance and a kind of Victorian enchantment with the mechanics and engineering of movement. A 15m-tall, ten-sided blossoming jewel, the Woolbeding Glasshouse is the centrepiece of a new garden that, horticulturally, takes the visitor on a winding trip along the Silk Route, from Turkey to China, and, functionally, protects a cluster of subtropical plants. In effect, it does much more than that, coming off like a carefully parked spacecraft for higher-intelligence plant-life pilots.

Woolbeding Glasshouse by Heatherwick Studio

This piece of glasshouse architecture was commissioned by Stewart Grimshaw, partner of the late Simon Sainsbury, who together leased the 1,000-acre Woolbeding estate from the National Trust in the early 1970s. The pair added a number of gardens and contemporary follies to the estate over the years. After a chance meeting with Heatherwick, Grimshaw set on creating something even more remarkable, a lasting legacy of their time in charge of the estate. There had been a large Victorian glasshouse at Woolbeding but it was long gone and Grimshaw mooted the idea of creating a new one, radical in scale and ambition. Heatherwick was, of course, intrigued and signed up for the challenge. 

Heatherwick says he spent research time reading about Joseph Paxton, 19th-century gardener, engineer and designer of the Crystal Palace and the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth House in Oxfordshire. He also thought back to his student days in Manchester. ‘I lived near Fletcher Moss Botanical Gardens and they had a glass orchid house. And I knew the glasshouse at Woolbeding had to have that kind of focus.’

Grimshaw had studied botany and came up with the idea of the Silk Route Garden. Two years in the devising and planting, the garden path now winds through 12 biomes, from Mediterranean Bursa through Anatolian Plateau and Tibetan Meadows and over a sheep-repelling ha-ha to the subtropical glasshouse, creating a kind of teasing theatre along the way. ‘The garden is a kind of maze where you keep thinking you are near the end and at the glasshouse but it keeps pulling you back,’ Heatherwick says. 

Functionally, the glasshouse has to shield umbrella trees, magnolias and bananas against harsh winter winds and rain but be open to the elements when they are calmer and kinder. That demand presented the engineering and aesthetic challenge Heatherwick needed. He wanted to do more than create a frame for open-and-close windows but, rather, to create a structure that fully bloomed on demand, offering its occupants clear blue skies. A series of hydraulic rams lower the triangular petals or sepals in an elegant and all-but-silent four-minute dance. At full stretch, they sit at the same angle as the glass sides of the base, creating a kind of glass crown. 

Heatherwick says the technical challenge was ensuring the building could handle that shifting centre of gravity and that the sepals achieved a weather-proof seal when closed and didn’t get in any kind of tangle in the blossoming process. The final design was realised with the help of specialist engineers Bellapart. 

Leaf-skeleton engravings on ground-level grills and a metal door handle shaped after an actual bamboo add to the glasshouse’s steampunk air. And it makes sense that the building has a retro sci-fi thrust to it. ‘The Victorian glasshouses were these really gorgeous structures and in some way the forerunner of modern buildings and high-tech architecture in the way they used glass and metal.’

For Heatherwick, though, the Woolbeding Glasshouse, funded by The Woolbeding Charity and the National Trust, is a permanent tribute to a particular architectural legacy and an attempt to create something like it. ‘The Georgians and Victorians were such prolific builders and those buildings, in their adaptability, flexibility and their cherish-worthiness, have proved to be arguably the most sustainable buildings in history,’ Heatherwick proposes.

‘Now the average life of a commercial building is 40 years, which is environmentally terrible. But the real terror is that we end up just protecting history and not making new history. I hope that we don’t lose our confidence to make new things that might have some of the qualities and values of the things that we cherish from the past.’ 

INFORMATION

The Woolbeding Glasshouse and the Silk Route Garden are open on Thursdays and Fridays from 28 April to 30 September

nationaltrust.org.uk

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The Google Bay View Campus has opened. Architects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Heatherwick Studio have worked with Google’s own design and engineering teams for the new Silicon Valley campus, the first major campus the company has developed itself.

Spanning a vast 42 acres and located next to Nasa’s Ames Research Center, the campus encompasses 1.1 million square feet and is composed of 20 acres of open space, two office buildings, an events space that can hold up to 1,000 people, and short-term accommodation for 240 employees.

‘The idea of the “office” has been stuck for a long time,’ says Thomas Heatherwick, founder and design director of Heatherwick Studio. ‘Yes, people have done different aesthetic treatments. But there hasn’t been a fundamental questioning of the workplace at this scale. Our approach has centred on the emotions of individuals and the imaginations of teams and how you create a whole different atmosphere of work.’

This aesthetic takes shape in a building that balances the need for space to work with the opportunity for collaborative communication. A focus on greenery and access to natural daylight and views from every desk aims to increase the wellbeing of employees; clerestory windows ensure desks are in direct light, while automated window shades open and shut throughout the day.

A ventilation system, meanwhile, uses only air from outside, ensuring there is no recycled air, while a thorough vetting of products and materials keeps toxins in the environment to a minimum.

‘Our design of the new Google Bay View campus is the result of an incredibly collaborative design process,’ says Bjarke Ingels, founder and creative director of BIG. ‘Working with a client as data-driven as Google has led to an architecture where every single decision is informed by hard information and empirical analysis.

‘The result is a campus where the striking dragonscale solar canopies harvest every photon that hits the buildings; the energy piles store and extract heating and cooling from the ground, and even the naturally beautiful floras are in fact hardworking rootzone gardens that filter and clean the water from the buildings. All in all, it’s a campus where front of house and back of house, technology and architecture, and form and function have been fused into a new and striking hybrid.’

Sustainability is also a key element of the design, with an integrated geothermal pile system – the largest in North America – intended to reduce carbon emissions by approximately half, while the campus is also fully electric. Practical solutions such as above-ground ponds and wind farms will help realise Bay View’s aims of both fully operating on carbon-free energy and replenishing 120 per cent of the water it consumes by 2030.

The local environment also benefits, with over seven acres of natural land, including woodlands and marsh, helping to reestablish habitat in the area, while the public can enjoy access to trails around the Bay.

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The first phase of Heatherwick Studio’s 1000 Trees has finally opened in Shanghai, unsurprisingly a couple of years behind schedule (thanks to the pandemic) but as verdant and striking as the name and early renders suggested. The mixed-use development takes up just part of a 15-acre site bounded to the north by Suzhou Creek and by the M50 art district to the south. From the river, the building is deliberately hard to read, a 60m tall, gently sloping, terraced jumble of horizontally striped stone and towering planters in unapologetically raw and rippled concrete.

For studio founder and head Thomas Heatherwick, 1000 Trees reimagines large-scale urban developments as open, social spaces rather than blank monolithic boxes or towers. ‘Many big buildings just feel cold, sterile and monotonous on the outside,’ he says, ‘so our challenge was to create something engaging on a human scale.’

1000 Trees: the first phase

Based around a 9m grid, the building twists 45 degrees to get maximum river views. The studio’s biggest idea, though, was leaving the development’s giant supporting columns on the outside and turning them into those planted podiums, exposed sections of cliff topped with trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers and climbers. The exoskeleton device allows for more open and lighter space inside but also means, says Heatherwick, that shops, restaurants, galleries, even a kindergarten all have outdoor terraces. The building is also deliberately porous, and accessible from multiple angles with walkways at various levels. Heatherwick likens it to a termite mound.

‘We felt an enormous responsibility to make sure that commerce not be its only atmosphere and to make a community heart,’ he says, ‘that it has a diversity of places to explore and is somewhere that people can just be.’ (The design was, of course, plotted long before the Covid-19 pandemic – Heatherwick nods to the influence of Jan Gehl, the Danish architect, urbanist and author of Life Between Buildings and Public Spaces, Public Life – but that provision of outdoor space now looks beyond prescient.)

1000 Trees, though, has also become a lightning rod for a lively debate in the architectural press about the positives and not-so-positives of ‘urban greening’. Those for verdant buildings argue that their plants and trees increase biodiversity, lower temperatures, suck in CO2 and other pollutants, reduce noise and generally lift the spirits. Critics argue that those benefits are far outweighed by the carbon output of building in concrete and steel, and that maintaining green walls and roofs is resource intensive, though living walls are far more at fault here. Heatherwick Studio says the planting on 1000 Trees is all local, will change with the seasons and has been carefully researched and picked to minimise pruning and maintenance.

Heatherwick and Lisa Finlay, the studio’s group lead on the 1000 Trees project, say another key priority was engaging with the low-level reused warehouses and industrial buildings of the M50 art district on the other side of the development. ‘The planning regulations clearly expected us to build a huge tower on a podium, but that would have made a mockery of the art district,’ says Heatherwick. ‘The most respectful thing we could do was to come to meet it at street level and at its scale, to blur that boundary as much as we could.’

The much less discussed south-facing façade, then, is essentially an angled display space for local art especially commissioned for the building by French street artist and M50 champion Paul Dezio. Local artists have also been invited to create 40m-high murals inside the building’s elevator shafts, visible from glass cars. Heatherwick says the artwork is ‘an acknowledgement that no one designer should be allowed to do projects this big. They need to be diverse. Single brains will create something that is too much of one thing.’

An external glass lift, meanwhile, is housed in a tower of weathered Cor-ten steel blades, a shimmery echo and reimagining (and repositioning) of part of a flour mill that once stood on the site. ‘The city said they wanted to remember that there was a mill there and asked us to rebuild its tower,’ explains Heatherwick. ‘Initially, everyone said “No, we can’t do that. It’s kitsch, it’s ridiculous.” But then we thought, this is an enormous project, the more idiosyncrasy the better, so how do we keep this memory but make it useful?’

For Heatherwick, the steel tower exemplifies the studio’s mission to build the strange and unexpected into its large-scale developments. ‘I deeply believe in not copying the past but I'm really proud of the tower. We're really interested in how we build, in what typically gets eradicated, and not creating sterile dead places. Everyone loves clean lines but clean lines are actually boring. So how do you get dirty lines?’ The entire 1000 Trees plot is bisected by a road, and phase two of the development, another forested urban mountain but this one 100m tall, is now under construction. The new development, which has to work its way around four existing heritage buildings, will include workspace, a cinema, a hotel, as well as a large park and an amphitheatre.

Finlay says the team will now be studying how people use phase one of the development, alert to the fact that the pandemic has permanently shifted behaviour and needs in dense urban areas. ‘We want to do a lot of monitoring over the next year,’ says Finlay, ‘and look at how the terraces and spaces are actually being used. It might be used in completely different ways to what we imagined, so let’s find out.’

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Construction at one of New York's most eagerly anticipated residential completions, Thomas Heatherwick's Lantern House, has been gathering speed. The project, commissioned by Related Companies in 2015, sits in Manhattan's Chelsea, prestigiously close to the green, open spaces of the High Line. Now, the developers have releaved the lush amenity interiors designed by interiors specialists MAWD – adding options to the city's luxury-residential landscape. 

It was crucial for the eye-catching architecture and clever interiors to work together in harmony, explains MAWD co-founder James White. ‘The High Line runs – quite literally – through the space,' he says, ‘bisecting the two towers, [while its] steel beams drive down through the lobby. Anything other than an authentic, layered integration with the surrounding neighbourhood would have been misguided, so we maintained a warm, neutral colour palette across various textures, focusing on quality and character.

‘For example, throughout the amenities we’ve integrated BenchMark mixed-blend bricks matched with the exterior façade, paired with grey polished Eramosa stone flooring in a chevron pattern and custom bronze patinated metals. The result is a layered richness that feels harmonious and cohesive.'

MAWD's other co-founder, Elliot March, adds: ‘Excellent design isn’t about spaces; it’s about people.' The team drew inspiration from the local community – and the residents themselves – rather than specific architectural styles or periods. It was important for the designers to create spaces where people will live, move, work and play – and which they will eventually make their own. 

Combining an urbane, cosmopolitan attitude with a local approach, and the lifestyle and liveliness of the West Chelsea neighbourhood was key to the solution. Flexibility was equally important – as a result, the co-working areas transform into entertaining spaces at night. 

‘Lantern House was always destined to become one of NYC’s most eye-catching buildings,' says March. ‘Our challenge was to translate the iconic exterior into an aesthetically aligned, comfortable interior. We wanted to design timeless, luxurious and comfortable interiors that complement the architect’s vision and the residents’ lifestyles, as well as the setting on the High Line. It is always a privilege to design someone’s home, especially when it’s as unique a project as this one.

INFORMATION

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The Airo EV, a car that thinks it’s a room and is designed by Heatherwick Studio, is not the only surprise from Auto Shanghai 2021, a show that bucks several trends. For a start the event actually happened, after a year of pandemic-induced motor show cancellations that might end up reshaping the industry’s attitude towards the cost and effort of staging quite so many shows a year.

Auto Shanghai also saw a number of credible, interesting and advanced EV models from Chinese firms such as BYD, Xpeng, Hengchi, and Zeekr, highlighting how the country’s motor industry is gaining a march on its older, more established Western counterparts. Nevertheless, there were also several important new electric cars, including the Mercedes-Benz EQB, BMW iX and Genesis Electrified G80, together with near-future concepts like Honda’s e:prototype, Toyota’s bZ4X and the Audi A6 e-tron concept.

The end result is that Shanghai is now the pre-eminent global showcase for new EVs. Add in quirky designs like the Beetle-inspired Punk Cat from Great Wall sub-brand Ora, and Auto Shanghai is also stealing the Tokyo Motor Show’s traditional role as the centre of automotive eccentricity. 

Step inside the Heatherwick Studio Airo EV

Auto Shanghai also saw the world debut of Heatherwick Studio’s new Airo electric car, designed for IM Motors. The latter is yet another Chinese EV brand, a collaboration between SAIC Motor, Zhangjiang Hi-Tech and e-commerce giant Alibaba. IM stands for ‘Intelligence in Motion’, and the company launched with two production cars, the sleek Intelligent Pure Electric Car and, unsurprisingly, an electric SUV. It also highlighted its collaboration with Thomas Heatherwick, whose studio has not only shaped the Airo concept, but also the company’s range of charging stations.

The electric car isn’t Heatherwick Studio’s first mobility project, but it highlights the team’s multidisciplinary, global approach, as well as the way that cars and architecture are starting to come together. The Airo is a compact urban vehicle that ticks all the tech boxes, from its electric powertrain to the inclusion of autonomous drive systems. The added bonus is an integral HEPA (high-efficiency particulate absorbing) filter system that’s designed to suck in local pollution and leave cleaner air in its wake. For smog-swathed megacities like Shanghai, the idea of an air-filtering automobile is perhaps too good to be true, but it points to Heatherwick’s boundless ambition and enthusiasm for design-driven solutions. 

The Airo is more than just a car. The interior layout is completely flexible and can transform from a conventional car into a mobile room, either a place to sit and work or game and watch films, dine around a table or even sleep. Once again, the studio is thinking outside the box, turning the wasted space of an idle car into a benefit; combine this with autonomous driving and the possibilities are endless. However, while Heatherwick describes this approach as a way to ‘simultaneously address the global space shortage’, the downside is that what might seem like a cute and convenient piece of functionality for some is already a low-quality way of life for many others, especially in densely populated cities.

The Airo’s ribbon-like bodywork is unlike any car on the market, wrapped around a compact, curvy and friendly-looking machine with sliding doors that open up onto that spacious interior. Heatherwick Studio has also designed IM Motors’ charging stations, organic, Triffid-like objects that sprout from the pavement to provide easily accessible power while taking up a minimum amount of space. Designed to be ‘part of the urban fabric for decades to come’, they acknowledge that infrastructure has to go hand in hand with new vehicles, even as the vehicles themselves start to blur into the built environment.

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Now numbering 26 in the UK, Maggie's Centres have established their own kind of architectural typology. In these special spaces – that function somewhere between a home, social space and a place of medical care – patients, friends and family of those affected by cancer can receive practical and emotional support. Built primarily within hospital grounds, Maggie’s Centres are renowned for their peaceful architecture and gardens, as much as their exceptional respite.

The late co-founder, designer and writer Maggie Keswick Jencks, drew from her own experiences of having cancer to create this specialised form of care, centred on the belief that people should not lose the joy of living in the fear of dying. Both landscape and spatial design would come to play a crucial role. Her husband, theorist, historian and landscape architect Charles Jencks, who passed away in October 2019, helped devise the network of centres, each created by an architect or studio of note.

Each space has its own aesthetic – Ab Rogers' Royal Marsden Maggie's Centre which completed earlier this year, boasts calculated colour pops to draw attention, while Wilkinson Eyre Architect's space hides in the forested grounds Oxford's Churchill Hospital like a treehouse sanctuary. The newest centre in Leeds – designed by Heatherwick Studio – boasts curving timber beams, plenty of light, and calming wood tones throughout.

‘Our aim was to build a home for people affected by cancer that would be soulful and welcoming, unlike other typical clinical environments,' explains Thomas Heatherwick. ‘By only using natural, sustainable materials and immersing the building in thousands of plants, there was a chance for us to make an extraordinary environment capable of inspiring visitors with hope and perseverance during their difficult health journeys.'

Set across three volumes, the space is designed as a group of large-scale ‘planters' – with foliage sprouting from the roofs – each enclosing a counselling room. These surround a communal kitchen, a library and excercise room. Upholding the belief that great design can help people feel better, the studio encorporated ‘healthy' materials. The use of porous lime plaster, for instance, helps to maintain the internal humidity of the naturally-ventilated building.

As with most Maggie's centres, in line with the late founders' passion for gardening, the cultivated outside space holds particular importance. Head to the roof to discover Balston Aguis' Yorkshire woodlands-inspired landscape. Native English species of plants nestle alongside areas of evergreen to provide warmth in the winter months. Visitors are encouraged to participate in the care of the 23,000 bulbs and 17,000 plants on site.

‘Maggie’s Leeds has been a very special project for me and my team,' Heatherwick continues. ‘We are convinced that there are kinder, more empathic ways to design places that can have powerful impacts on the way that we feel. This is particularly important in the design of healthcare environments, but is so frequently overlooked.'

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On Manhattan’s southwest riverside, strange sculptural concrete shapes appear to be emerging from the depths. While works on site have now, understandably, paused, due to current health developments in New York, standing proud, about half way through construction, Heatherwick Studio's Little Island resembles an artist's mould or a curious industrial prototype, more than a conventional, empty, building site.

The project, won by the London-based studio following a design competition arranged by the Hudson River Park Trust and businessman and philanthropist Barry Diller, looks at creating a new pier, making use of the old wooden piles that stick out of the Hudson River – the structural remains of old piers, now destroyed. 

The new design adds new, concrete piles to create a raised platform that will merge a public space and a flexible, outdoors, performance venue. Rising up from the water, the piles expand, fusing together and forming a brand new topography; a park. In the same space, the project will contain an outdoor theatre for over 700 people, a smaller performance space for 200, a main space for 3,500 and several different pathways and viewing platforms. 

Greenery was an important element in the design and each of the some-280 piles contains a planter at their top. The team researched flora that is local to New York and can survive its hot summers and freezing winters and filled the planters with more than a hundred different species of indigenous trees and plants. 

‘[My team and I] wondered if the identity of our new park and performance space could emerge from the water, just like these structural piles, but without needing to add any slab on top,' says studio founder Thomas Heatherwick. ‘This idea evolved to take the new concrete piles that would be needed to connect to the granite at the base of the river, and to then continue them out of the water, extending skyward to raise sections of a generous green landscape with rich horticulture. Fusing at they meet, these 280 individual piles come together to form the undulating topography of the park, angled perfectly for performance and theatre spaces.'

At a time when open, public areas are more important than ever, Little Island is something to look forward to. At the start of the year, construction was on track for a 2021 opening.

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With his spiky UK pavilion for Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo, Thomas Heatherwick became one of the most sought-after designers in Asia. Mr He-si-wei-ke, as he is known, remains one of only a handful of recognised Western names in China, and his latest project, a spectacular new complex in Shanghai’s Moganshan district, is sure to seal his status as one of the UK’s most innovative architectural ambassadors.

The first phase of this mixed-use development for the Tian An China Investments Company is due for completion in May 2020. Set on a former industrial area in a bend of Suzhou Creek, with the low-level warehouse and factory conversions of the trendy M50 arts district to the south, the site is also home to that rare commodity in Shanghai: a woodland park.

It would have been a relatively simple matter to cram the project’s required 300,000 sq m floor area into a conventional tower. But Heatherwick’s desire to avoid a high-rise development looming over the M50’s converted warehouses demanded more imaginative thinking. The result is a tree-lined ‘mountain’ that wraps itself in the landscape and lifts trees to every level of the building. As Heatherwick describes it, this unique topography ‘knits the new with the old’.

Hundreds of concrete columns were used to distribute the weight of the trees to the ground. Widening at the top to form a huge planter containing one tree and a variety of hanging plants, each of the columns features horizontal ribbing that helps break up its height from a distance; up close, the structures resemble handcrafted pottery. Each column looks as if it is free-floating, but is actually tied back to support the floors and to provide seismic stability. This structural grid creates a stack of boxes that are staggered at each storey height to form multilayered terraces, indoor spaces and sky gardens with the planters rising just above head height to give the illusion of trees floating in mid-air.

Research on the column designs has taken two years; growing and selecting the correct locally sourced tree species (chosen for their hardiness at varying altitudes and wind speeds, but also for their colour variation) has taken even longer. With 60 per cent evergreen species, the mountain will always be lush and verdant, although natural seasonal variation will be reflected in the shape and form of deciduous varieties.

On the riverside elevation, the treescape spreads out at ground level to form a new public park and riverside walkway. On the south side, however, the idea was to cut away the monumental form as if slicing through the hillside, exposing an architectural section of the building. Billboard-size advertising opportunities have been formed in the exposed structural grid, interspersed with original paintings and graffiti art inspired by, and typically carried out by, the M50 creatives. The art continues in the cavernous interior of the building, with local and internationally renowned graffiti artists’ work on display.

A gamechanger for the designer, this project also demonstrates the importance of an enlightened client with a long-term commitment to architecture. The project’s second phase (including a 100m-tall tower) is not due to be completed before 2024, but 1000 Trees has already changed the urban landscape forever. 

As originally featured in the November 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*248) – on newsstands now

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Soon to be shining from 515 West 18th Street in West Chelsea is Heatherwick Studio’s latest project, Lantern House, developed by Related Companies. The studio has been busy in that part of town – recently completing the Vessel and Pier 55 nearby, but this project is their first residential project in NYC.

Joining many starchitect-designed blocks flanking the High Line, Lantern House features two towers – one 10 storeys, the other 21 storeys – connected by a sculptural glass lobby. Instead of looking into the future, the façade is a contemporary take on historical styles seen in in the neighbourhood, with textured grids of bay windows and hand-laid antiqued grey brickwork with industrial metal detailing.

It was the surrounding maritime warehouses that really inspired the architects: ‘The design came from looking at the city’s existing buildings and thinking about which ones you might want to live in, not just look at. It seemed to us that practical, crafted, human-scale details such as shades, mullions, and window sills might have a role to play again in making homes feel comfortable and inviting,’ says Thomas Heatherwick, founder of Heatherwick Studio.

The name ‘Lantern House’ came from the reinterpretation of the modern bay window, designed this time from the inside out and forming a striking lantern shape. ‘Our design for Lantern House, with its distinctive new bay windows, emerged from this thinking and from wondering what could make the interior experience as special as possible for residents

‘These special three-dimensionally-sculpted windows will allow the building’s residents to have light-filled interiors plus exciting new panoramic views and new visual connections to the city beyond,’ says Heatherwick.

The design of the one- to four-bedroom residences that each feature 10 foot high ceilings, responds to the openess of the bay windows, with their many window seats designed for spending time with the skyline. For more immersion into the city, many residences feature private setback terraces. And if you’re wondering, sales of the 181 condominiums will launch in January 2020.

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Project: Savarin
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Status: design development

Heatherwick Studio has revealed a regenerative master plan for Savarin, a 150,000 sq m site in Prague’s Old Town. The project, the firm’s first in the Czech Republic, will see the development of a variety of mixed-use spaces both beneath and above ground. Infrastructural development is also on the agenda, with new public access to Prague Castle’s Riding Hall and its surrounding gardens set to open. The introduction of new retail, office and public venues is sensitively geared to reinvigorate the city’s heart and simultaneously acknowledge the area’s rich history.

Left, Savarin Palace. Right, Savarin Arcade.

Project: 1000 Trees
Location: Shanghai, China
Status: under construction

On a site next to Shanghai’s art district M50, Heatherwick Studio was invited to develop a multi-use complex relating to the nearby park and arts street. Rather than to conceive the project in architectural terms, Heatherwick Studio looked to express the design geographically, adopting a topographical design revolving around two ‘mountain peaks’.

Project: 1000 Trees
Location: Shanghai, China
Status: under construction

The complex occupies a 300,000 sq m plot of land, and is to be constituted of 400 terraces. Emphasising the structural support columns, which would usually be subdued and hidden by the building, Heatherwick Studio will adorn the space with approximately 1,000 trees, perpetuating the concept of a tree-covered mountain range.

Project: 1000 Trees
Location: Shanghai, China
Status: under construction

The building is flanked by a public park and concrete towers, and overlooks a nearby river. Several historic buildings are incorporated into the project, which will be self-contained by the rising concrete topography. Upon completion, the project will develop into a growing 3D forest.

Project: Coal Drops Yard
Location: London, UK
Status: completed late 2018

Known for its mix of wasteland and industrial buildings, many of which remained empty for years, Kings Cross is now undergoing a significant transformation. Coal Drops Yard is a complex of warehouses previously used for storage and light industry. The long complex runs parallel to the existing refurbished building of the Central St Martins School, off Granary Square, and under the new scheme it will be redesigned and extended – while important historic fixtures and fittings will be retained and repaired.

Project: Coal Drops Yard
Location: London, UK
Status: completed late 2018

The new structures are set to host a mix of ‘independent retailers and signature brands’, explains the team behind the project. Spanning some 100,000 sq ft and around 65 units, offerings will also include new restaurants, bars and cafes. A new public area will sit at the heart of the complex.

Project: Coal Drops Yard
Location: London, UK
Status: completed late 2018

Adding an important retail element to Kings Cross’ existing mix of modern offices and residential blocks – some completed, but many more ongoing and coming up – and reinforcing the area’s leisure offerings, Coal Drops Yard is scheduled to be ready for 2018.

Project: Google King’s Cross
Location: London, UK
Status: under construction

Heatherwick Studio and BIG have been commissioned to create the web titan’s new London headquarters in King’s Cross. Designing with the surrounding architectural framework and infrastructure in mind, the team chose to treat the project as a connected point within the urban jungle. Operating out of King’s Cross for over 15 years, Heatherwick Studio was familiar with the context and looked to communicate the historic details of the area in the project’s design.

Project: Google King’s Cross
Location: London, UK
Status: under construction

As opposed to a typical office high rise, the building is 330m long (the same length as The Shard’s height), and the main floors of workspace are presented as single volumes, like the proximate rail sheds. At ground level, the building stretches the length of a pedestrianized concourse, and features space for a host of smaller retail outposts underneath the two floors of Google offices. Meanwhile the panoramic roof garden will give excellent city views, where visitors can engage with the area’s architectural history alongside its latest addition.

Project: Google Charleston East
Location: California, USA
Status: under construction

Adopting a visual aesthetic akin to a giant tent-like fabric, Google Charleston East is a collaboration between Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group for Google’s first purpose-built office development at Mountain View, California. The canopies are in fact power-generating photovoltaic panels, converting sunlight into energy. 

Project: Google Charleston East
Location: California, USA
Status: under construction

In the design brief, Google was keen for the buildings to connect with the local community, offering amenities for both neighbours and employees alike. At the ground level, the development features a number of pavilions that are attached to a ‘green loop’, whilst cafés and shops will bridge the gap between workplace and social destination. The 595,000 sq ft campus will additionally feature a public park and plaza.

Project: 515 West 18th Street
Location: New York, USA
Status: design development

Thomas Heatherwick brings his magic to New York’s residential realm with this Chelsea-based project. The building at 515 West 18th Street is a contemporary reimagining of the area’s warehouse style homes. The 21-storey building complex will feature distinctive rounded glass openings, in a ‘reinterpretation of the bay window’.

Project: 515 West 18th Street
Location: New York, USA
Status: design development

The luxury scheme will house some 180 units of two, three and four bedroom residences. Spreading across two towers, the glass-and-masonry project is designed by Heatherwick Studio for Related real estate. Completion is currently planned for 2020. 

Project: Vessel
Location: New York, USA
Status: completed spring 2019

Hudson Yards is set to be the largest real estate development in New York City since the 22-acre Rockefeller Center was built in the 1930s. Centrepiece to the site is Vessel, Heatherwick Studio’s ‘climbing frame for adults’, a half-building, half-sculptural project comprised of almost 2,500 steps.

Project: Vessel
Location: New York, USA
Status: completed spring 2019

The project draws inspiration from the ancient stepwells of India, and features 80 viewing platforms that provide views across Hudson Yards and Manhattan. It is constructed from a steel framework, featuring polished copper-coloured undersides that reflect the surrounding day-to-day activity of Hudson Yards. 

Project: Vessel
Location: New York, USA
Status: completed spring 2019
Vessel sits among five acres of urban park designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, with input from Heatherwick’s team. The new outdoor space is intended as a seamless continuation of the planting and ethos of the nearby High Line, as well as connecting with the new Hudson Park & Boulevard green space. Planting has been inspired by New York’s distant past as a verdant woodland, with an integral 200 ft water feature and 28,000 plant species in total.

Project: Pier55
Location: New York, US
Status: scheduled completion 2020

A new addition to the southwest riverside in Manhattan, Pier55 is set to be both a public park and world-class outdoor performance space. Conceived as a result of a design competition, Heatherwick Studio has looked to the remains of former piers that occupied the space, wooden support piles leaving a trace of their prior occupation.

Project: Pier55
Location: New York, US
Status: scheduled completion 2020

The pier will be raised out of the water by the aid of 280 concrete piles that will connect like a mosaic to form the topography of the park. More than 100 different species of indigenous trees and plants will be adapted into space, whilst raked seating is shaped into the landscape to provide audience spaces. The pier will be able to hold 700 people in the theatre, 200 in a smaller performance space and 3,500 can make use of the numerous viewing platforms and pathways.

Project: Maggie’s Yorkshire
Location: Leeds, UK
Status: under construction

UK-based cancer support charity Maggie’s charged Heatherwick Studio with the design of its newest centre at the St James’s University Hospital campus in Leeds. Located on one of the few remaining green spaces on the campus, Heatherwick Studio has given special consideration to the natural backdrop, moulding the centre out of a blooming garden space with 10,302 plants growing in and around the building.

Project: Maggie’s Yorkshire
Location: Leeds, UK
Status: under construction

Inside, a library, counselling rooms and various social areas can be found. The base of each planter forms a distinct, enclosed private space for visitors, whilst in-between spaces encourage group conversation and activities.

Bodil Blain: Do you drink coffee?
Thomas Heatherwick: No, but I love the social rituals of sharing.

BB: Collaboration is a very strong element in your work. How do you choose the people you work with?
TH: The most important thing to me is the way someone brings out the best in others. I don’t produce sketches and hand them out to others to develop. Instead, we all talk and think and work together to grow the best solutions to the problems we are given and perceive around us. To me, it’s romantic; to someone looking from the outside, they might see it as a slow and painful process. But when you work well with someone else, it is amazing to find ideas and solutions exponentially growing in front of you.

BB: What projects are in the pipeline?
TH: We have lots going on in Singapore. As well as a new residential building currently under construction, we’re also designing a new terminal at Changi Airport with KPF. It’s a really exciting opportunity to try and break away from the soullessness and sterility that we’ve come to expect from typical airport environments.

BB: Do you miss the physical processes of making things?
TH: I started making things from an early age and, as a result, I feel it is something deep within me. You can’t take it away. It’s like skiing – if you learn to ski but never ski again, you will still know how to ski. You’ve got it in your bones! For the first 30 years of my life, I was making all the time. It was the only way for any of my ideas to happen. Now I’m lucky to have incredible collaborators who help me make and develop ideas.

BB: What would you like to be remembered for?
TH: What I’m trying to do with the studio is to help make places that bring out the best human connections between people. With the phenomenal success of globalised building procurement, so many cities are increasingly becoming more and more sterile and similar to each other. This is a serious issue – and it’s exciting when you feel you can touch people and make a real difference. 

As originally featured in the May 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*242)

INFORMATION

heatherwick.com

The paint has barely dried on Thomas Heatherwick’s The Vessel in New York, and he is already touching down in Singapore to oversee the progress of Eden, his London-based studio’s first residential project in Asia.

Set to complete later this year, the 104.5m tall block rises up 20-stories over Draycott Park, a quiet side street off the main Orchard Road strip. And on every metric, the apartments – a tent-pole project by Hong Kong-based property developer Swire Properties – represent an intriguing discourse on tropical modernity with none of the usual tropes one might expect. For Heatherwick, Eden represents a chance ‘to create something distinct for Singapore to contrast against a skyline already filled with angular steel and glass towers.’

The balconies will be draped with curtains of greenery, lending the tower the look and feel of a vertical garden, but there is also a structural elegance. On that front, the side elevation has a low-key sci-fi element to it, the vertical blades – giant, ash-brown concrete slabs cast from moulds that are imprinted, incredibly, with Singapore’s topography – resemble the fins of a space-ship shuttering open to reveal its pulsing, organic interiors.

In turn, these are lined with a sequence of large seed-shaped balconies, which will eventually brim and overflow with torch ginger, elephant ears, heliconias, split leaf philodendrons, and tree ferns; the result being what Heatherwick describes as a vertical and horizontal blending of nature.

Each floor holds a single 282 sq m apartment, with the first one hovering 23m above the ground. Heatherwick’s stroke of genius was to move the service core to the perimeter and then break the quotidian rectangular floor plan into two quadrants. These split apart like a ladybug’s wings to reveal a large central living space flanked by bedrooms and wrapped by open voids with at least nine doors that slide open to the elements.

By alternating the balcony floor patterns as he stacks up the apartments, Heatherwick creates oversized volumes for double-height plants. ‘Instead of fighting nature, there is a need for balance and to reconnect with it,’ he says.

Visually, Eden has soft echoes of The Learning Hub, Heatherwick’s other Singapore project, which has a similar organic quality. But aesthetics aside, Eden’s spatial configurations allow both natural ventilation without sacrificing privacy, whilst the abundant landscaping from the ground up will significantly temper the ambient tropical heat.

For Heatherwick, who is also at work on Changi airport’s fifth terminal with Kohn Pederson Fox, Eden is a timely case-study in globalised architectural replication and environmentalism, particularly about how to avoid living in hermitically sealed spaces that deny nature. The approach is a reflection of his creed that ‘architecture should solve problems, rather than to express my aesthetic or my philosophy as an architect’.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the Heatherwick Studio website

The plans to transform London Olympia from an exhibition centre to an arts, entertainment, events and creative business quarter has just won planning approval.. The 132-year-old architectural landmark has been due for a refresh and award-winning practices Heatherwick Studio and SPPARC have been collaborating on a striking design that will turn the venue into a unique cultural hub for the London capital.

The large-scale project will consist of two hotels and several restaurants, a 1,000-seat performing arts venue and a separate theatre, a cinema, and state-of-the-art office space – ensuring there's something for everybody. The scheme will also create a striking 2.5 acres of new public space.

‘We’re excited to have the opportunity to work on this important but neglected piece of historic London, transforming Olympia into a revitalised place, not only for exhibitions but also for arts, culture, and entertainment’, says Thomas Heatherwick. ‘Celebrating the original architectural innovation of the 132-year old exhibition halls, our vision aims to enhance the public experience of the site by creating over two acres of new publicly-accessible space for visitors and the local community to enjoy.'

Meanwhile SPARCC principle Trevor Morriss has highlighted how inspiring the project's context and rich history has been to the team, during the design process. ‘[The scheme] will position Olympia London as a thriving hub for creativity and innovation', he adds. 

The ambitious plan is set to begin next year, with the first tenants scheduled to start moving in by 2023.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Heatherwick Studio and the website of SPPARC

Just in time for the annual Christmas shopping season, Thomas Heatherwick’s brand new retail hub for Kings Cross, Coal Drops Yard, has opened its doors in the British capital. The central London district has seen plenty of changes in the past few years, rising from neglected inner city former-industrial neighbourhood to being hailed as a model for urban regeneration, and this latest addition is set to offer a welcome injection of a retail element to the existing commercial and residential blocks on site.

Heatherwick Studio is behind the complex’s striking design – and the twin set of sweeping roof structures that sit lightly upon the project's existing Victorian brick buildings, ‘kissing’ gently at the very top, creating the development’s visual shorthand. Clad in Welsh slate and placed lightly upon the original structure, this roof can even be taken down, if needed, without affecting the old building’s bones in the least, explains Heatherwick.

The architects carefully studied different models within the typology, from shopping malls to vernacular retail districts, such as traditional souks, in order to create the best possible design and overall layout for Coal Drops Yard. As a result, there is a big variety in retail units, each nestled within the site’s existing brick arches. Larger restaurants are joined by medium sized retailers and small, specialist workshops, all hosted under the same roof in creating a vibrant urban experience. ‘Flow is absolutely key in this type of project’, explains Heatherwick. ‘You want someone to almost unthinkingly move through the space, so finding the right shapes and connections was crucial.’

Argent, the Kings Cross site’s developer, paid special attention in selecting the right retailers for this new London destination; offerings include Paul Smith, MHL by Margaret Howell and Aesop, but also COS and Samsung, who now occupy the flagship post under the roof's peak. The most important element in the equation though, is us: ‘Coal Drops Yard is not about the product, even though this is of course important,’ says Craig White, senior project director for retail at Argent. ‘It is about the human experience and Thomas understands this and has done an outstanding job.’

Timelapse of the building of the roof

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Heatherwick Studio website

What do the 1.6m visitors who attend trade fairs at Olympia Exhibition Centre every year make of its ailing Victorian infrastructure, soulless eateries and traffic clogged surroundings? It’s a far cry from the 21st-century image of modernity that the capital wants to project, and a poor relation to venues in other event-focused cities such as Paris and Frankfurt. However, initial designs unveiled today by London’s Heatherwick Studio and SPPARC architects reveal that by around 2023 Olympia will be a top tier event space and a new cultural quarter.

The £700m transformation sees improved links between all four of the 130-year-old exhibition halls, a newly-opened roof area topped with a glass dome and underground parking. More than 55,000 sq m of new co-working and studio space will lure creative workers to this part of west London, and a theatre, music venue and cinema will attract visitors beyond those with trade show tickets. Public spaces buzzing with independent eateries, cafes, bars and hotels will ensure that Olympia becomes a destination in itself.

It is the latest project of British real estate developer John Hitchcox , who joined forces with Deutsche Finance to raise the development funds. Since founding Yoo with Philippe Starck in 1998, Hitchcox has created more than 80 projects across the globe, working with a roster of design stars, from Marcel Wanders to Jade Jagger and Steve Leung. ‘As caretakers of Olympia, we are investing to protect this iconic site and promote it on the global stage as a world-leading destination for the creative industries,’ he says, and with the demolition of nearby Earls Court Exhibition Centre in 2017, he laments a dearth of suitable events venues in London.

Heatherwick and SPPARC are both making their marks elsewhere in the capital too; SPPARC’s Music Box is a cubed-shaped campus in Bankside set to become a new home for the London College of Creative Media, and this autumn, Coal Drops Yard, Heatherwick’s over-9,000 sq m retail quarter in Kings Cross, opens.

Read more about Heatherwick Studio projects here

INFORMATION

For more information visit Heatherwick Studio’s website and SPPARC’s website

The digital revolution has also driven a revolution in design because it has forced architects to create buildings and spaces with enough appeal to make people shut down their computers, leave their homes and go to them, said Thomas Heatherwick, one of the most celebrated designers of buildings and public spaces.

‘You can stay at home and shop for whatever you want, you can even study for a PhD online. So hard-nosed developers have to make places that mean enough to people that they will leave home and go to them,’ Heatherwick told the Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore on Thursday.

And that means that designers and developers have finally begun to speak the same language, said Heatherwick, the founder of London-based Heatherwick Studio, which has a team of over 180 of what he calls ‘problem solvers’ dedicated to making the physical world better for everyone. Most people refer to them as architects and designers, and with Heatherwick at the helm, they have created some most groundbreaking designs of recent years, including Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and New York City’s Pier 55.

‘There was no way these designs would have been accepted during the 1970s and 1980s in Britain,’ Heatherwick said. ‘It seems that we have had it a bit of catastrophe in the last 70 or so years when in terms of making places. There was no “soulfulness” to what was being designed and built,’ he said.

Although Sir Terence Conran has called him ‘the Da Vinci of our time’ and Vanity Fair dubbed him ‘the hottest designer in the world today,’ some regard the spaces he has designed as controversial for the unexpected ways in which they have broken the mould.

But today, Heatherwick said, ‘oddness is okay.’ He describes his designs as ‘art driven by logic.’

Currently designing buildings for Google in London and Mountain View, California, a mixed-use complex in Shanghai, and a commercial space in London’s King’s Cross, Heatherwick said he always looks for where the space will have its heart, and strives to inject soulfulness in every design.

Contrary to what many architects and designers believe, he says city planners today are far more willing to take creative risks. ‘City planners are more ambitious than people think. They are frustrated with what they are being shown,’ he says. The best urban designs, he says, often come from deep conversations with commissioners and planners.

And what those commissioners and planners want are places that will have enough meaning to draw people out of their homes through their unique appeal. ‘We all hanker after places’ that have heart and soul Heatherwick said. When he finds that during the creative process, ‘the design sells itself.’

The Brainstorm Design conference is jointly organised by Fortune, TIME and Wallpaper*, bringing together more than 300 top speakers and delegates from 33 countries. See more here

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Brainstorm design website

British designer Thomas Heatherwick’s restoration and reinterpretation of the old grain silo in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront as the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) was always going to be a head-turner. From afar, its pillowy bubble-wrap façade is a striking contrast to the area’s industrialised silhouette and since its recent opening, it’s been drawing an appreciative audience as much for its soaring cathedral-like interiors as for the views of the surrounds, harbour and the imposing backdrop of Table Mountain.

Rather cleverly, Aleit Swanepoel – founder of the Aleit Group, the country’s leading wedding planner and, therefore, a man who understands a thing or two about making dramatic statements – has been tapped to capitalise on those views, the top floor given over for the new Zeitz Café.

Local design firm K/M2K has resisted the temptation to go off-script, cleaving, instead, to the building’s industrial origins through the use of hard surfaces like steel and polished concrete with lashings of timber for warmth.

Executive chef Christopher Law unfurls a menu of modern bistro-style dishes accented with modern African flavours. To wit – a Reuben sandwich filled with lightly smoked South African beef that’s spiked with kimchi, and seabass flavoured with fennel, saffron and orange.

ADDRESS

Zeitz MOCAA
V&A Waterfront
Silo District
S Arm Road
Cape Town 8001

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Looming over Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront – a mixed-use development bordering the Atlantic and interwoven with colonial structures and contemporary volumes in glass and steel – is a concrete silo. Built in 1921, it was where grain would be gathered, graded and eventually disseminated. This was the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa for half a century, and as such, a defining feature of the city’s skyline. Designed with a view that it would last forever, it nonetheless fell into disuse in 2001, eventually ravaged by floods, plunderers and bird droppings.

This September, however, the silo will receive a new lease of life as it reopens as the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA). Restored and transformed by Heatherwick Studio, with the backing of the Waterfront and German philanthropist Jochen Zeitz, this is the first museum on the continent dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, a long-awaited symbol of cultural prowess, and a towering architectural accomplishment.

The silo’s revival is a tale of determination and ingenuity. Designer Thomas Heatherwick first visited the site in 2005, when he had yet to receive the commission. There was no central space then to walk into, he recalls, just a warren of basement tunnels, above which there were two cellular structures with a total of 116 upright tubes – rectilinear ones in the lift tower (populated with vertical conveyor belts and fireman poles), and cylindrical ones in the bins annex.

It was another six years before the Waterfront decided to redevelop the silo. There was temptation to tear it down, but CEO David Green resisted. ‘The building has real soul and character,’ he explains, ‘I was drawn to the idea of repurposing the industrial architecture, and leaving that for future generations to enjoy.’ Heatherwick, now introduced to Green via Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo, had arrived at a similar conclusion: ‘A gigantic building made from tubes was a pretty strong starting point. We wanted to draw out something that only this building could give.’

They wanted it to house something of civic significance. Spurred on by the dearth of museums of scale in Cape Town, Green approached a number of international institutions with experience in foreign outposts, but ultimately settled on the art collection of Zeitz, a former chairman and CEO of Puma (see W*120). Working with South African curator Mark Coetzee, Zeitz was amassing 21st-century African art and scouring the continent for an appropriate brick-and-mortar venue to show it – so it was natural that he and the Waterfront would pool their resources. He’d already come across Heatherwick’s UK pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, and was keen to work together.

The UK pavilion would come to inform the design of Zeitz MOCAA in another way. In commissioning that structure, the British government had allotted a significantly smaller budget than other Western nations, so Heatherwick decided to make a sixth of the site (the Seed Cathedral) memorable, while minimising expense elsewhere. At Zeitz MOCAA, he was working with a budget of R500m (about £30m), generous by local standards, but paltry in comparison to those of Renzo Piano’s Whitney ($422m) and Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern extension (£260m). His design, therefore, focused on one standout interior element, an atrium, which would join the two structures of the silo into one, and serve as the museum’s primary draw.

The preexisting tubes were regular, says Heatherwick, ‘but cutting through them in a three- dimensionally curving plane, something unexpected happens.’ He would carve out the atrium within these tubes in the same way one would take a hot wire to a block of butter. Eschewing regular geometric shapes, he took a grain of local corn, not unlike the grains that would have been stored in the silo in ages past, and scanned it digitally to obtain an organic, asymmetrical form. This form, cut into the concrete tubes, would produce a void with plenty of sharp angles. ‘It became a destruction project, not a construction project. Our job was more about careful removal than addition.’

Easier said than done. The silo is almost a century old, meaning the original concrete had set to its hardest form. The void was also difficult to visualise in situ, so builders had to rely on GPS and lasers to track progress, and the cylinders had leant against each other for stability, so a new support structure had to be installed while the void was hollowed out. Heatherwick was adamant there shouldn’t be beams and pillars (‘that would distract from the lightness we wanted’), so instead he added a new layer of concrete sleeving to reinforce the remaining parts of each cylinder.

The resulting atrium, which took between two and three million man-hours to complete, is the beating heart of the museum. Its sheer size and swooping curves give the impression of a cathedral, made all the more spectacular by the light that streams in through skylights that now cap the cylinders. The cross section of the original concrete is laid bare, its rougher surface contrasting with the smoothness of the new sleeves. One partially exposed cylinder now contains a spiral staircase; another two have been fitted with glass lifts, their mechanisms embedded into the new concrete sleeve to allow unobstructed views from the lift car. One has to ascend the building and see the atrium from varying heights to experience its full effect.

Other parts of the silo have been entirely excavated to accommodate galleries. Financial constraints and institutional demands (the museum had high expectations for the amount of wall and floor space, and favoured a white cube format) meant that these are mostly nondescript, and on some occasions cramped. But Heatherwick believes that lack of architectural detailing makes the spaces ‘available to disrupt and mess with’, and hopes that, in time, more walls on the periphery of the building could be knocked down to reveal coves of concrete. Happily, original architectural features have been preserved elsewhere. The basement tunnels, which will be used for installations (the first being Angolan artist Edson Chagas’ Luanda, Encyclopedic City, which won the Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Biennale), retain old machinery, signage and even dirt, while the Centre for the Moving Image, on ground level, appropriates the interior surface of the cylinders as screens for video projection.

The silo’s exterior, originally coated in magnolia paint, has been water-jetted to reveal the concrete in its textured glory. On the upper levels (which house the sculpture garden and the Silo Hotel, designed independently of the museum), Heatherwick cut back the façade and installed generously proportioned convex windows. As the budget couldn’t stretch to curved glass, he came up with a faceted design instead, an inspired compromise that ‘steals views from all around’. Depending on the angle of installation, each triangular panel reflects either the skies, the landscapes of Table Mountain, Lion’s Head and Signal Hill, nearby buildings, or the Atlantic waters with Robben Island in the distance. ‘You get this collage of a different kind, which a single plane reflecting from a single angle doesn’t give.’ Illuminated at night, the windows take on a lantern-like appearance, a nod to one of the silo’s original functions as a beacon for incoming ships.

It’s a fitting metaphor for Zeitz MOCAA, a homecoming call for African and diaspora artists, who have mainly shown abroad due to a lack of appropriate venues on the continent, and a shimmering lure for art admirers of all stripes. Whether it can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the world’s top museums is yet to be seen, and will depend on the appeal of its artistic collections and the resolve of its administration. This being South Africa, Heatherwick admits there is inevitably ‘a slightly ragged dimension, an unruliness... the big deal is making it happen at all’. But perhaps he need not be so modest, for the architecture is already making waves within the creative community. The artist Isaac Julien, whose work had turned Zeitz’s interest towards African art years ago, wrote after a preview tour that Zeitz MOCAA was ‘one of the most sensational spaces for art on the continent and in the art world’. One can hardly ask for a better start.

A version of this article originally appeared in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)  

INFORMATION

Zeitz MOCAA opens on 22 September. For more information, visit the website

ADDRESS

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
V&A Waterfront
Silo District
Cape Town 8001

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Architectural practice Carmody Groarke has designed the exhibition environment for Beazley Designs of the Year.

London’s Design Museum has announced the shortlist for the Beazley Designs of the Year, its annual celebration of the most notable design ideas from the past 12 months. On view at the museum from 18 October in an exhibition designed by London architects Carmody Groarke, the annual award is now in its tenth year, and has previously honoured designs such as David Bowie’s Black Star album by Jonathan Barnbrook and Thomas Heatherwick’s Olympic Cauldron. Find out who won in each category and who the overall winner was here.

The 62 nominations span a wide spectrum of disciplines, including architecture, graphics, product design, fashion, transport and digital. The museum tapped an international panel of creative luminaries to select the nominees, with the final shortlist offering a broad view of contemporary design today.

The projects paint a clear picture of the current state of the world, with several entries concerned with refugees and with the political turmoil of the past year. Case in point, Wolfgang Tillmans’ pro-EU, anti-Brexit poster campaign, or the Olympic refugee flag by Yara Said, representing the very first refugee team taking part to an Olympic competition.

A strong focus on socially-driven designs is also evident in nominations such as the Calais Builds Project or Francis Kerè’s project for a secondary school in Burkina Faso, as well, the Pussyhat, which has become an iconic symbol of protest spurred by US President Donald Trump’s controversially sexist remarks.

Of course, more recreational initiatives are included, such as last year’s augmented reality Pokémon Go game, or a new interface for the Premier League’s TV branding experience, by DixonBaxi. New technologies are also featured in the list, as is an innovative use of materials, such as Max Lamb and Really’s recycled textile benches, or Chilean studio gt2P’s lava furniture. As in previous years, the selection bolsters the museum’s position as a global observatory for creative disciplines, and demonstrates the all-encompassing power of design. The winners will be announced in January next year – watch this space.

'Nimuno Loops' tape project by Anine Kirsten, Max Basler and Jaco Kruger on view at the Design Museum.

The set is made up of sculptural cave-like forms.

The angled and curved spaces are covered entirely in the recycled newspaper material, to create display areas for the works.

The sculptures are made from a sprayed paper pulp called Soundcel.

Installation view of the shortlist at the Design Museum.

Architecture nominee: Port House, Antwerp, Belgium, by Zaha Hadid Architects.

Architecture nominee: Il Fondaco Tedeschi, Venice, Italy, by OMA.

Architecture nominee: Sala Beckett Theatre and International Drama Centre, Barcelona, Spain, by Flores Prats.

Architecture nominee: The environmental enhancement of the Five Dragons Temple, Ruicheng, China, by Urbanus.

INFORMATION

The shortlisted Beazley Designs of the Year will is on view until 28 January 2018. For more information, visit the Design Museum website

ADDRESS

Design Museum
224-238 Kensington High Street
London
W8 6AG

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

When it came to designing the packaging for his debut fragrance, Christian Louboutin admits that Thomas Heatherwick was not at the top of his list. ‘I have to be very honest, the first person I thought of was Oscar Niemeyer,’ confesses Louboutin. ‘I had always admired his work but at that point he was 102 years old. So the second person was Thomas. His work fascinates me.’

The brief was simple: to create a striking and unique set of architectural vessels for the three fragrances that they encase  ('Tornade Blonde', a fresh red rose fragrance with notes of violet and cassis by Olivier Cresp; 'Bikini Questa Sera', a warm tuberose and jasmine scent, and 'Trouble in Heaven', a heady mix of iris, patchouli and tonka absolute, both by Pierre Negrin) are the latest additions of Louboutin’s forays into the beauty market, which began in 2014 with a line of nail polishes.

‘I could never understand why beauty packaging was so ugly,’ laments Louboutin. ‘For me, every corner of the object has to be taken in to consideration.’ While his polishes are packaged in angular bottles with towering stiletto-inspired bottle tops, his lipsticks are encased in gold bullet-shaped vials – both of which were designed in-house. For Louboutin, the collaboration with Heatherwick is his first with an outside designer, and for Heatherwick, better known for his ambitious architectural creations, it marks his first ever beauty packaging design.

‘Christian described the architectural way that he’d been thinking about nail varnish and the lipstick packaging and how he thought of all of these bottles like a city,’ recalls Heatherwick of the pair’s first meeting. ’During our first discussions we were like children; it was like  a game of table tennis in the way we were throwing ideas around. Christian was very open and generous to me and allowed me to play with the idea of fragrance and how it could be translated into an object.’

The discussions marked the start of a two-year-long design process (a year longer than originally anticipated) that saw the duo explore a myriad of different design possibilities. ‘Normally we would hide all of our reject ideas from the client, but with Christian it felt like we were on a team together.’

‘It’s been very important to me to work with someone who not only designs in a great way but who is able to make things with their own hands,’ says Louboutin of Heatherwick, who famously made all of his studio’s early projects himself including a  pavilion held together with velcro for his degree project at Manchester Polytechnic. ‘Sometimes with buildings you can lose that tactility,’ adds Heatherwick, ‘and that was the lovely thing about a project of this scale.’

After what Heatherwick describes as a ‘natural selection’ process, they eventually arrived at a rectangular ombre glass bottle design with a split in its centre. Blown into a mould, the glass appears to turn itself inside out to create a sensuous form that fits snugly into the hand.

‘It [the form] was actually inspired by a type of pastry (a Yum Yum) that I used to have as a child – a simple idea that was actually very technically demanding,’ says Heatherwick, who worked with the ‘best bottle manufacturer in the world’ to achieve the perfect result. ’Glass is an extraordinary material that we’ve worked with extensively. This project was about trying to distill everything we’ve learnt about it into one small but exquisite object.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Christian Louboutin website

New York’s post-industrial renaissance continues, driven by land re-use, rising demand for residential, office and commercial property and a warm embrace of multi-level, multi-functional public spaces. Hudson Yards is the city's largest real estate development since the 22-acre Rockefeller Center was built in the 1930s. Located between 10th and 11th Avenues, the site is bisected by the curve of the High Line and ringed by a clutch of new buildings, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro's and Rockwell Group's 'The Shed' culture centre and tapering north and south towers, detailed to glossy perfection by high-rise experts Kohn Pedersen Fox. The tallest of these is around 1,200 ft high, offering up stark and lofty surroundings for a new public space in the heart of the 'Yards'.

Jay Cross is the man overseeing the site’s transition into a new chunk of city. The final brick won’t be laid until 2024, by which time Hudson Yards will accommodate offices, homes, shops, a school and hotel and 14 acres of gardens, walkways and squares. ‘Our objective is to create a great public space, a new crossroads for the city,’ says Cross, ‘and we wanted a central piece that would anchor all these buildings.’ That honour has gone to Heatherwick Studio, and the renders shown here mark the public debut of New York’s most extraordinary piece of infrastructure, dubbed 'Vessel' – part building, part sculpture, all accessible and designed to put Hudson Yards on the map.

Vessel is an extraordinary proposal. 'Our work couldn't be about height in a city where everything is about height, so we became interested in the human dimension – the most successful public spaces have the chemistry of interaction,' says Heatherwick. Drawing on his longstanding fascination with stairs and Indian stepwells, and New Yorkers' relentless emphasis on fitness and movement, Heatherwick and his team shaped a structure that could loosely be described as a 'climbing frame for adults'. Formed from a mesh of 154 individual flights of stairs, 80 landings and endless ribbons of balustrading and balconies, Vessel represents one mile of stairs and walkways winding up and up in a 16-storey steel puzzle, an MC Escher-esque construction that's willfully ambiguous but intended to be totally engaging.

‘Thomas is so ambidextrous as a designer – it’s hard to find someone who could move so easily between these specialities,’ says Cross. ‘The first vignette that he showed us was pretty dazzling and really, from the perspective of the design intent, what we are building is exactly the same.’ Every element of Vessel has been designed to serve the public space it sits in, from the narrow 50 ft base that flares out to 150 ft on the upper level, preserving as much park space as possible, to the reflective stainless steel panels (coated in a special copper finish) that are angled downwards to create dynamic views from the ground.

Vessel sits among five acres of urban park designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, with input from Heatherwick's team. The new outdoor space is intended as a seamless continuation of the planting and ethos of the nearby High Line, as well as connecting with the new Hudson Park & Boulevard green space. Planting has been inspired by New York's distant past as a verdant woodland, with an integral 200 ft water feature and 28,000 plant species in total. Thomas Woltz, Nelson Byrd Woltz's principal, describes the scheme as 'both technologically complex and beautifully natural', a public space 'inspired in part by the grand piazzas of Europe, including Rome’s Piazza del Campidoglio'.

One of the iconic images of New York is Lunch atop a Skyscraper, a vertiginous portrait of steel, modernity and human adventurousness, taken during the building of the Rockefeller Center. In some respects, the Vessel brings the pioneering spirit of the early skyscraper city to life, its 2,500 steps offering ample challenge to those willing to seek out a high-rise view, the mix of raw and treated metal evoking the hidden cores that hold up the modern city.

When Vessel is finally assembled and opened sometime in 2018, it’ll be up to New Yorkers to decide how it’s used (and named, as Heatherwick acknowledges). ‘As far as we’re concerned we want a great public space that people appreciate and adore,’ Cross says, but he admits it’s hard to predict how many visitors will come and what they’ll do. ‘We’re not sure how far people will walk up,’ he says, adding that only when they saw the piece under construction in Italy did they realise how theatrical the space would be. ‘It’s like a theatre in the round – there are a lot of ways to participate and there will be organised and unorganised activities.’  

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Hudson Yards New York website
 
Imagery: Forbes Massie

Some of the largest architecture projects in the world are taking shape in a ground-floor atelier tucked away in London’s King’s Cross. Thomas Heatherwick set up his studio in 1994 after studying at Manchester Polytechnic and the RCA, and over the years he gradually scaled up its output, creating everything from furniture and installations through to buses, bridges, art museums and whole city blocks. Heatherwick now works alongside around 200 designers, 130 of whom have architectural training. The studio output is focused on big buildings. These include one of the largest mixed-use projects in China, a key component of a vast US private development, a California office for a tech colossus, and a new bridge for London, all of which are at various stages of planning and construction.

Despite this mega-structural ambition, every Heatherwick project can be infinitely zoomed into, right down to the smallest design component. This combination of scale and detail comes out of an absolute commitment to process, something that becomes evident the minute you sit down with Heatherwick to talk about his work... Read the interview in full here

In 20 remarkable years we have come across, written about, examined and exhumed a lot of remarkable people. On the following pages are 20 of them. This, though, is not a simple ranking of power and influence. These are stories that resonate, with which we find common purpose and cause.

Here are people who have sometimes stuck bloody-mindedly to a course, sometimes pivoted, re-examined and pushed in new directions, who have defied expectations and even open derision. They have shown courage under fire and grace under pressure.

They have transformed – from girl group popette to one of the fashion industry's smartest operators, for instance – and, over the last 20 years, have had a transformative influence in their field. Here are architects who build with a sense of the immaterial, artists who want to talk to everyone, experimentalists and food engineers, fashion designers who defy fashion and bob and weave like prize fighters, tech titans who have changed the way we do almost everything. One reinvented the hotel industry, another presents it with an existential threat. There is also a man who wants to save the world – or take us all to Mars if that doesn't work out. Either way, we'll be along for the ride.

Victoria Beckham’s transformation from pop celebrity and tabloid icon to the force behind a covetable fashion line is an extraordinary one. Indeed, when the Spice Girls burst onto the cultural landscape in 1996, it would have seemed unlikely that 20 years later she would be presiding over a label now fêted for its sleek, restrained lines.

But to hear Victoria Beckham tell it, she didn’t have ‘any grand expectations’ when making the transition from music to fashion. ‘I was just focused on creating clothes that I felt proud of and passionate about,’ says Beckham of launching her eponymous line in 2008. ‘The fact that the brand has since taken off in the way it has has been very humbling.’

Now, the label boasts its own handsome flagship store on London’s Dover Street, counts Net-A-Porter, Liberty and Barneys among its many stockists, and recorded a turnover of £34m in 2014.

But the signals that Beckham had an affinity for design were there at the start. She was the stylish Spice Girl who stood out amid her flashier bandmates. As her and her husband David’s fame grew, they embraced their roles as fashion plates with a mutual fondness for Gucci and Versace... Read the interview in full here

The year Wallpaper* launched, a 28-year-old Jonathan Ive was appointed as Apple’s design director. ‘Our goal is figuring out how we can bring meaning to objects,’ he told us a year later. He ticked that box. ‘Think of Apple as a product company whose primary goal is to make the very best products we can,’ he told us back in 2010. But six years is a long time in technology, and services, software, apps and interaction arguably play a far greater role in how we use our devices today. The intuitive elegance that has marked Ive’s designs is now harder to achieve...

The year Wallpaper* launched, a 28-year-old Jonathan Ive was appointed as Apple’s design director. ‘Our goal is figuring out how we can bring meaning to objects,’ he told us a year later. He ticked that box. ‘Think of Apple as a product company whose primary goal is to make the very best products we can,’ he told us back in 2010. But six years is a long time in technology, and services, software, apps and interaction arguably play a far greater role in how we use our devices today. The intuitive elegance that has marked Ive’s designs is now harder to achieve.

Hard but not impossible. ‘Far from being mutually exclusive, technology and craft are not at odds,’ he says. Apple knows this like no other, and that’s largely down to Ive’s status as a titan of exceptional user design. ‘Much like beauty and utility,’ he says, ‘[technology and craft are] all the more powerful in combination.’ Ive and Apple are another such supercharged blend

Most people steal things from hotels. Few try to steal an entire hotel. But that’s what happened to Ian Schrager. Just weeks after he opened the Edition in Waikiki, the owner of the building turned up in the middle of the night, changed the locks on the front doors and told the staff they worked for him now, not Schrager’s company. The episode neatly, if rather dramatically, sums up the man who has transformed hotels.

Over the past 30 years, Schrager has reinvented hotels and then reinvented them some more, and each time he has done so, his rivals, big and small, have stolen his ideas wholesale. At Morgans, the Royalton, the Paramount and the Hudson in New York and, along the way, the Delano in Miami, the Clift in San Francisco, the Mondrian in LA, and St Martin’s Lane and the Sanderson in London, he created the boutique hotel. It got the name not because it was small, but because it was curated with a strong attitude and aesthetic, like a fashion boutique.

The key ingredients are the lobby scene, the go-to bar, the must-book restaurant for guests and locals alike, the signature scents, the hot staff with clothes more expensive than the guests’, the cool nightclub, the sense of an urban resort, the CD collection and the baffling taps in the bathrooms. There’s scarcely a hotel on the planet whose design or service has not borrowed some or all of these elements. ‘They pickpocket my ideas,’ Schrager says. ‘I still get annoyed by it, especially when I see things that we laboured and agonised over that have now become standard. The bed with the low headboard with the light behind, it’s everywhere...’ Read the interview in full here

Airbnb confounds for many reasons, though the most obvious one is that its success is based on a business model that ignores one of the first lessons we learn at our mother’s knee: don’t talk to strangers. We can only imagine what the first few investor meetings in 2008 must have been like.

And yet, fast forward nine years and the website – essentially a match-making service between home-owners and visitors looking for an alternative to hotel rooms – has already hosted 123 million nights. It’s also in the midst of seeking additional funding, valuing the company at $30bn – making it the second highest-valued start-up in the US behind Uber.

And like Uber, Airbnb has become a poster-child for the sharing economy, that nebulous but extremely valuable intersection between commerce and human connection. It has recast the idea of privacy, security and personal space. And all because Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, two graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design, found a way to take the components of trust between people who had never met, and design for it. ‘We didn’t come up with anything new,’ says Gebbia, now chief product officer. ‘There were many websites like ours. Why did ours take off? Luck and timing played a part. The 2008 recession led people to consider new ways of earning supplemental income. But I believe the key difference was design...’ Read the interview in full here

Therme Vals was completed in 1996, the same year this magazine was founded. It was clearly a good year. Two decades on, Peter Zumthor’s genre-defining spa in the Swiss canton of Graubünden remains a place of pilgrimage for architecture enthusiasts the world over. And Zumthor is now one of the world’s most sought-after architects.

Zumthor is not your typical internationally-operating, Pritzker Prize-winning architect, even if there is such a thing. He has no offices in London, New York or Zurich, preferring instead to base himself in the tiny Swiss hamlet of Haldenstein, where he has lived and worked for more than 40 years. At his atelier, staff are not found glued to shiny Apple Macs but gathered around physical models of buildings – working prototypes lifted up on stilts to eye level – while beyond those models, breathtaking wraparound views stretch out across the Grisonian Rhine Valley. The practice is small, deliberately limited to around 30 people, making it a necessity to be very choosy about the projects it takes on. Which is what makes it really different.

Looking back over the last 20 years since Therme, the projects Zumthor has designed have been dictated not by commercial opportunity, but by where architecture can make a real difference to the human experience. Where architecture can bring joy, peace, insight or energy. You know you’re in a Zumthor building not because you notice any trademark shapes or materials, but because of how it makes you feel... Read the interview in full here

It is now the norm for fashion designers to dabble in other forms. Hedi Slimane, Rick Owens, Karl Lagerfeld and JW Anderson are all serious, serial dabblers. This is the age of the new polymath, the cross-disciplinary curator, the imperial taste-maker. But there is one designer who has gone much further; who, over the last 20 years, has relocated fashion, pulled it out of its self-referential loops and plugged it into a larger, more powerful network of ideas and influences.

Raf Simons originally trained in industrial and furniture design in Genk, Belgium – the country where he was born and raised and where his eponymous menswear line is based. After interning with Walter Van Beirendonck and then watching a Martin Margiela show in Paris, which Simons has described as nothing short of a revelation, he turned instead to fashion. He founded his own label in 1995.

That unconventional start explains Simons’ mould-breaking approach to designing clothing. ‘I always wanted to find other ways, explore other ways,’ he says. Focusing on menswear, Simons has subtly and insistently proposed new ways of dressing men. His radicalism has not only affected the way entire generations of men dress, but how generations of fashion designers create their clothes. The designs of youthful labels like Hood By Air or Off-White are tied up with ideas Simons has explored over the past 20 years... Read the interview in full here

Alessandro Michele’s Gucci is a harbinger of change in the fashion industry. In barely 18 months, his work has perceptibly moved goalposts and his impact is hard to overstate, certainly when it comes to recent fashion. Indeed, you’d have to dive back to the 1990s to find anything similar. Ironically, if you do so, you’ll find it was once again at Gucci that the status quo shifted, under the tenure of Tom Ford. Exactly 20 years apart, both used the Italian leather goods behemoth to ring in the changes, to provoke, challenge and ultimately seduce. Both have proved, within the space of mere seasons, to be the dominant fashion stories of their respective periods.

Michele and Ford’s visions for Gucci, on the surface, are polar opposites. Indeed, Michele’s obsession is with elaborating his surfaces, in homage to the Italiano eccentrico styles commonly associated with designers like Walter Albini, the interwar couturier Elsa Schiaparelli or the Milanese fashion editor Anna Piaggi. It stands in stark contrast to Ford’s midcentury modern-tinged minimalism, the sartorial equivalent of an Eames lounger, of lean tailoring and jersey evening dresses with insets of metal. Slick was the word most often used to describe Ford’s vision for Gucci, from the shiny polished catwalks of his biannual shows through to the glistening double-G insignias dripping from bags and belts. There’s nothing slick about what Michele does – it’s more sick, a mix of oddball references and strange proportions that have some beauty to them, to hamfistedly paraphrase Sir Francis Bacon... Read the interview in full here

Towering above his employees and most of his guests, with flowing locks and a beard as white as his linen trousers and moccasins, Brazilian mining magnate and modern-day Medici Bernardo Paz looks a little like God as he goes about his mission of building heaven on earth.

In Paz’s contemporary garden of Eden, Inhotim, every detail has been designed to reset the way visitors live their lives. The sprawling utopia, an hour from his home town of Belo Horizonte and designed as a perfect marriage of art, nature and architecture, is much more than a playground for an eccentric millionaire. It’s Paz’s gift to the world – a beautiful, peaceful place from a man whose name means peace. Mines, as the inhabitants of Paz’s home state of Minas Gerais know only too well, are a finite resource, and the Mineiros, as the locals are known, have seen their riches shipped off to the world for nearly two centuries – with all too little to show for it.

Paz has turned the concept of one-off extraction on its head, using the wealth accumulated from gouging iron ore from the mountains that surround Belo Horizonte to plant the seeds of a contemporary crop, one he believes will bear fruit ‘for a thousand years’. The profits – more than $250m – generated from shipping three million tonnes of iron ore a year to mills in Brazil and China, are ploughed into his dream.

‘I want to create a state of mind,’ he says. ‘The hardest thing is to change the way people see the world, but beauty changes people’s lives...’ Read the interview in full here

By the early 1990s, Kazuyo Sejima already had experience at Toyo Ito’s office, her own studio and a Young Architect of the Year award from the Japan Institute of Architects under her belt. But it was after setting up SANAA (with Ryue Nishizawa) in 1995 that her career really took off, upscaling to major cultural commissions which transformed her into an international go-to choice for mesmerisingly barely-there, ethereal architecture.

Her signature style of strong shapes and clean lines that at the same time appear flowing and delicate has helped define 21st-century Japanese architecture. It is all about the experience for Sejima, although priorities have shifted somewhat since her early days in practice. ‘Our designs are not driven by what you can do with architecture itself, but by an interest in the way people experience space as a relationship between programme, city and surrounding landscape,’ she says. ‘In the past, I would try to understand the overall character of a building’s environment and use this abstract idea to develop a design. Today, I try to create spaces that are more precisely adapted to the variable character of a neighbourhood...’ Read the interview in full here

There was a time when Japanese food meant exactly the same thing wherever you were, whatever the occasion and budget: sashimi, teppanyaki, sushi, teriyaki and tempura. In the 1990s, however, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa changed all that when he launched his deliriously inventive spin on classic Japanese tropes layered with nuanced South American influences, Peruvian specifically – yellowtail sashimi jalapeño and tempura eel, for instance.

From the start, a strong stylish streak has run through all of Matsuhisa’s projects. When the first Nobu opened in New York in 1994, he tapped David Rockwell for the interiors. ‘I explained to David the importance of the flow of the kitchen and the connection between the kitchen and the sushi bar. He understood both what I wanted and my style of cooking, and was able to translate my vision into a beautiful restaurant.’

It’s a formula that Matsuhisa has repeated over the years with great success. Within a few months of the first issue of Wallpaper*, he partnered with Robert De Niro, restaurateur Drew Nieporent, and Singaporean hotelier Christina Ong to open his first European outpost in London’s Metropolitan Hotel. Nobu London was the proverbial instant success. Every night, the deliberately austere dining room was mobbed by the city’s beau monde – every table swooning over the celebrated (and much imitated) black cod and miso. Within a year, it owned a Michelin star... Read the interview in full here

Illustration: Eoin Ryan

To paraphrase Sinatra, 1996 was a very good year. Wallpaper* was launched, Richard Geoffroy was promoted to chef de cave at Dom Pérignon and, very appropriately, that year produced an extraordinary vintage that, two decades on, is still talked about. ‘Normally, the great wines come from the fine sunny weather. It was the wind that year,’ Geoffroy explains. ‘It drove the dehydration of the grapes and concentrated the juices to produce something baffling, energised, constrained and infinitely youthful.’

On paper, Geoffroy’s credentials are impressive enough – born into a champagne-making family, he is a trained medical doctor and an influential oenologist. In person, he is articulate, smart, jovial, disciplined and passionate about the art of winemaking.

His extraordinary niceness makes it easy to overlook the fact that Geoffroy is an industry powerhouse. He says his relationship with Dom Pérignon is so intimate a line cannot be drawn. ‘We share the same sense of playfulness, completeness, complexity and serenity. Our fundamental core is one of harmony, which is expressed in the tension between winemaking and blending. But we are not flash or ego-driven...' Read the interview in full here

Co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin, CEO of Alphabet and the man behind Mountain View’s ongoing and relentless diversification into every single stratum of our tech-centric lives, Larry Page can lay claim to some serious data. Google is, of course, named for a number – a very big number – so it’s appropriate that any stats culled from the company’s day-to-day operations are suitably mind-boggling. Here are the facts and figures that prove Page will influence our intelligence for decades to come. The man behind the world’s biggest tech influencer conjures up serious stats. See them here...

It’s not a coincidence that, as Hussein Chalayan was presenting his first collections, the first issue of Wallpaper* was also taking shape in London. The designer has been vocal about the impact the magazine and the city had on him from the start. ‘For me, Wallpaper* was where all the different disciplines and facets of lifestyle merged,’ he says. ‘It was a publication that really gelled that together. My interests already included interiors and furniture, so I understood straight away its role in creating a synergy between fashion, interiors, food and travel. They were more isolated before, and I think the magazine is responsible for creating these bridges.’

London in those days ‘was about different creatives working together; there was a very distinct correlation between music and fashion’. Chalayan often collaborated with the singer Björk, who modelled in one of his early shows and famously wore a piece from the designer’s Airmail collection on the cover of her album, Post. ‘In terms of what inspired me, it was mostly music and cultural history...’ Read the interview in full here

Working with Ai Weiwei was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. Partly because we had barely a year to make a major exhibition at the RA, but mainly because he’s a profound, uncompromising and heroic individual whose humanity and humour are never far away.

Outside his studio in Caochangdi – a kind of artists’ village in Beijing – the street is lined with surveillance cameras, each one festooned with a red Chinese lantern by Weiwei, the most gentle of subversions. A bike was chained to the lamppost outside the main door – and it had a fresh bunch of flowers in its basket every day until he got his passport back. For most of the time we were working together, it seemed unlikely he would be able to come to London. I went to Beijing five times over the year and every trip I’d ask whether there was any change in attitude from the Chinese authorities. ‘I always remain optimistic, but every time I think the police might return my passport I am disappointed. Perhaps I am naive,’ he told me.

I remembered his exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale, soon after his release from prison, where his mother had come instead. Would she, I wondered, be able to come to London if he were unable to travel. ‘She’s too frail now,’ he said. ‘How about your son?’ I asked. ‘I know he’s only six, but maybe he would like to come.’ ‘My son hates London,’ he told me, rather devastatingly. ‘When I was imprisoned I didn’t want him to know details, so he was told Daddy is in London...’ Read the interview in full here

When it comes to supporting the arts, few patrons have made as big a name for themselves as the Miami-based real-estate developer Jorge M Pérez. Founder of the Related Group, part of the property powerhouse behind ambitious urban development projects such as New York’s Hudson Yards, Pérez has not only played a huge part in shaping the modern Miami skyline, but also left his mark on its cultural landscape as well.

In 2013, Pérez’s name became a talking point during the relocation of the Miami Art Museum to a swanky, waterfront home designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Along with its expanded, $220m building, the museum also unveiled a new name: the Pérez Art Museum Miami, an acknowledgement of the $40m donation from the billionaire. Although the naming was unorthodox, PAMM (as it’s affectionately known), has evolved from a municipal-level arts institution to a respected fixture in the international arts scene. Shows have included Ai Weiwei, Julio Le Parc, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes and the New York-based Jamaican artist Nari Ward. Works donated by Pérez, largely by Latin American artists, are also on display... Read the interview in full here

In 1996, Elon Musk – and we realise how quaint this now sounds – did his first million dollar deal. The software company he started in 1995 with $28,000 of his father’s money picked up a $3 million investment and his remarkable career, from software to space via PayPal and sustainable propulsion, was off.

Along the way he has destroyed decades of received wisdom and borrowed business practices and, despite all that, his smartest rivals still think the world of him. As CCO of Aston Martin, Marek Reichman knows a thing or two about building beautiful, cutting-edge cars. It’s thanks to Musk, he says, ‘that our industry is now engaged in a radical rethink of how we create and deliver transportation’... Read the interview in full here

Illustration: Eoin Ryan

Rare now is the fashion brand that doesn’t do art in some way, does not sponsor, show, collaborate or co-mingle with artists and galleries. It can look like a crushing embrace. But one designer has been doing it for longer and with more sophistication and commitment than any other.

Miuccia Prada, who trained as a mime artist before joining the family operation, established the Fondazione Prada in 1993 and began collecting art; seriously and with serious intent. The Rem Koolhaas-designed New York Prada store, or Epicenter, which opened in 2001, was more gallery and performance space than glittering showcase for product. But Prada has been careful to compartmentalise the fashion brand and the Fondazione. It has its permanent curators, commissions as well as collects, and puts on museum-standard shows.

Last year, the Fondazione Prada campus, also designed by OMA, opened in Milan; twice the size of Renzo Piano’s new Whitney in New York and twice the fun. It has redefined what a private gallery can and should be. It’s an engaging new cultural hub for a city known more for commercial thrust and will be Prada’s real legacy... Read the interview in full here

Modesty almost forbids, but only almost. In fact, space doesn’t allow a complete list of our many advances and upshifts, our constant refinements and occasional reinventions over the last 20 years. Here’s just a few to be going on with: establishing the Handmade exhibition as the showcase of contemporary craft and design; creating the perfect pocket-sized travel guide; civilising e-commerce with the W* Store; curating a long-running series of artist-designed covers and back-page artist’s recipes; the encouragement and advancement of wave after wave of young designers and architects; and, of course, smuggling more dubious double entendres onto our covers than any magazine ever.

Some of the largest architecture projects in the world are taking shape in a ground-floor atelier tucked away in London’s King’s Cross. Thomas Heatherwick set up his studio in 1994 after studying at Manchester Polytechnic and the RCA, and over the years he gradually scaled up its output, creating everything from furniture and installations through to buses, bridges, art museums and whole city blocks. Heatherwick now works alongside around 200 designers, 130 of whom have architectural training. The studio output is focused on big buildings. These include one of the largest mixed-use projects in China, a key component of a vast US private development, a California office for a tech colossus, and a new bridge for London, all of which are at various stages of planning and construction. 

Despite this mega-structural ambition, every Heatherwick project can be infinitely zoomed into, right down to the smallest design component. This combination of scale and detail comes out of an absolute commitment to process, something that becomes evident the minute you sit down with Heatherwick to talk about his work.

A mock-up of this issue’s cover, handmade with brass fasteners and cut card to illustrate the concertina-like mechanism within, is a textbook example of Heatherwick’s approach: a low-tech but delightful piece of paper engineering to create a simple but effective transformation. One of the inspirations behind the piece was a prototype circular table, fabricated from compressed and glued paper. Concealed within the ribs is a mechanism that allows the table to be expanded into a long oval in one smooth movement. 

Like so many of the studio’s projects, it represents the intersection of engineering, design and making. Heatherwick used to believe he was originally misrepresented as a sculptor, frustrating when he always wanted to move towards architecture. ‘I didn’t see any separation – it was clear to me from very early on that everything was designed. My first thesis at Manchester, 25 years ago, looked at the role of making in the design of buildings,’ he says. ‘I had a hunch that it was something that was not finding its place.’ His very first structure, a pavilion to which he dedicated his final year at Manchester, was completed in collaboration with Aran Chadwick (now of Atelier One structural engineers). ‘I thought I’d risk the first two years of my degree to gamble my third year on making an actual building – I knew that you didn’t learn by just making a card model.’ 

In addition to the many models and mock-ups of their own work, the King’s Cross studio space is a treasure trove of objects, mostly bold and sculptural, often taken far out of context and detached from their original purpose. This is industrial design’s guilty little secret – that unintended abstraction tends to aestheticise objects in ways their makers couldn’t possibly have conceived. ‘My initial response was that the balance between thinking and doing was disconnected,’ he says of his student years. ‘Why couldn’t the physical environment meet that expectation?’ What sets Heatherwick apart is his innate understanding of how to reinvigorate this separation. 

In Cape Town, work continues on the conversion of a towering waterside grain silo into the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. The 57m-high structure on the city’s Victoria & Albert Waterfront is set to become a new urban destination, with a hotel above and 6,000 sq m of galleries below. Founded by former Puma CEO Jochen Zeitz to house the collection of contemporary African art he began in 2002, MOCAA is due to open in spring 2017. The original building is dramatic enough, but rather than advocate full-on, Bilbao-style intensity, Heatherwick took the curator’s suggestion of creating interior drama – all the better to draw people inside and hence be more likely to view the collection. Heatherwick has spent many hours on-site, helping oversee what will become the collection’s signature space – a vast internal atrium carved from the concrete silos (‘We could either fight a building made of concrete tubes or enjoy its tubeyness,’ he wrote). The abstract, organic form is cut out from what is already there. ‘The quality we’re looking for is that it must look and feel like a hot wire has run through it,’ Heatherwick explains, although the reality is considerably harder and dustier as the decades-old concrete is hammered, smashed, grinded and polished into shape. ‘I have been training the guys [on site] to feel by hand when it was right,’ says Heatherwick, always able to boil the most heavyweight industrial process down to skill and feel.

‘Our projects are an interplay between the ordinary and the exciting,’ says Heatherwick, mindful of the importance of background elements, whether it’s method or materials, space or form, deliberately allowed to lie fallow while our magpie minds fixate on the shiny and new. Partly this is down to the rapid change and evolution of visual culture, in an era when even the most sophisticated architectural project can be compressed into a single visual soundbite for dissemination, posting, liking and sharing. It’s a temptation Heatherwick cleverly accommodates. At Bombay Sapphire’s new distillery in Hampshire, he points out that the studio dealt with ‘49 historic buildings, as well as widening a river. We actually only built two things. And they fit in the photograph.’ This afterthought is telling, as much of the studio’s success is down to an understanding of the importance of these photogenic moments. 

Heatherwick also cites the UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, a scaled-up version of his original ‘Sitooterie’ from 1999, only with each strand of ‘hair’ created from a 7.5m piece of optical fibre, with a unique seed embedded at its tip. The 20m-high 'Seed Cathedral' was one of the stars of the entire exhibition, yet as Heatherwick recalls, it had barely half the budget of its rivals, even though the brief explicitly called for it to receive the top five visitor numbers out of some 250 pavilions on the vast site. ‘That drove the strategy,’ he says, ‘so we designed five-sixths of the site to be ordinary.’ Although the pavilion itself is what everyone remembers, it was set on a plinth that the designer says was intended to be ‘deliberately unmemorable’.

Many of the studio’s architectural projects get their expressive, expansive qualities from clever replication and duplication of carefully designed elements. The Learning Hub building at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University is a case in point. ‘It cost less than a multi-storey car park,’ the designer says, explaining how a universal mould was used to shape various poured concrete components. Along Shanghai’s Moganshan Road, the city’s long-established art district, another mega structure is emerging. Occupying a 15-acre site, the new mixed-use development is described by the studio as a ‘piece of topography’, an urban mountain range in the middle of Shanghai’s cityscape. The greenery consists of 1,000 mature trees, including indigenous Chinese pines, set among tree-like poured concrete columns, which in turn form 200 outdoor terraces. ‘Nothing is small in China,’ Heatherwick comments.

Big projects can spark controversy, though. London’s Garden Bridge, although signed off, approved and partly fabricated, still seems to be hanging by a thread. ‘Our job is to hold up the garden and get out of the way,’ Heatherwick says. ‘It was not about making a massive thing, although it has to work from many dimensions.’ For the most part, the designer steers an apolitical and pragmatic path, but issues like the evolution of urban space into collaborations between the public and private sector, and the dominance of the latter, inevitably surface. At times, he seems almost pained by the negativity. ‘We all want to do something special and wonderful – we’re just trying to harness people’s passions,’ he says. ‘Humans underestimate humans all the time. We extrapolate problems to an enormous extent, but when pushed, humans are also brilliant problem solvers.’

At the same time, he notes that ‘it’s depressing when something hasn’t got the confidence to be ordinary’. He adds, ‘The role of designer has become disproportionately exalted. It’s unfortunate – the glory of making has been lost.’ Pragmatism and optimism rarely come together as credibly as this. ‘The projects I enjoy most are the ones that are unexpected, and the public realm is the best place to find those unexpected qualities,’ says Heatherwick. ‘It’s frustrating when people think our projects are expensive.’

As you fold, squash and stretch your Wallpaper* Friction Cover, consider that you’re holding one of the smallest and most intricate projects to come out of the Heatherwick Studio for many years, a true return to the surprise and delight conjured up by the earliest works. Scaling up this level of focus is hard work. ‘You need endurance and perseverance for these big projects. The world underestimates how hard it is to design and build buildings,’ he says. Nonetheless, the major works keep on coming, including a new retail space in the revitalised goods yards of King’s Cross and a new football stand at Fulham FC. ‘In 20 years, we’ve gone from two to 200 people,’ Heatherwick says. ‘I picked up my student manifesto the other day, and what we do now is a spooky manifestation of what I’d written. Right now I feel like we’ve only just got going.’

Thomas Heatherwick is one of our 20 Game-Changers. Read about the other 19 here

As featured in the October 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*211)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Heatherwick Studio website

The cover of our 20th anniversary issue is rather special, even if we do say so ourselves…. After all, we don't do 'normal' at Wallpaper*. To mark the momentous occasion we decided to ask one standout game-changer, Thomas Heatherwick, to do something truly outstanding with us. His cover design is a textbook example of the Heatherwick approach: a low-tech but joyous piece of paper engineering to create a simple but total transformation.

As you fold, squash and stretch your Wallpaper* Friction Cover, consider that you’re holding one of the smallest and most intricate projects to come out of the Heatherwick Studio. He thinks it’s a true return to the surprise and delight conjured up by his earliest works back in 1996; we think it represents the intersection of engineering, design and making.

Speaking of making, first you will need to order the kit required to create this kinetic cover by emailing makeyourowncover@wallpaper.com. Once it arrives, return to this page to follow the simple instructions below…

Now you're all done, why not share a picture of your finished kinetic cover with us? Send us a snap of your Wallpaper* collection (or your most prized edition) using #SubscriberSince and tagging @wallpapermag on Twitter and/or Instagram

When Thomas Heatherwick released the first image of his concept for Coal Drops Yard at Kings Cross in late 2015, we knew the area was about to get something really special. And with works in the Argent-led central London territory progressing fast since, the landscape around the old warehouses that will become its home have started to take shape.

Occupying a mix of what was previously a neglected complex of storage and industrial buildings parallel to Central St Martins, many of which remained empty for years, the Coal Drops Yard was conceived as the area’s brand new retail hub.

Set to provide a much needed market element to the fast-growing neighbourhood, Heatherwick’s proposal is sensitive to its historical context of low brick buildings and arches, restoring original elements where and when needed. And yet, it doesn’t lack ambition. A set of new roofs appear ‘kissing’ where two parallel rows of brick structures meet, providing the complex with its signature architectural gesture.

The tenants will be a vibrant and carefully selected mix of independent retailers and well known brands, as well as amenities that will make this hub truly come alive, developing organically into an essential part of its quarter. Offerings will include restaurants, bars and cafes, and a new public area, sitting at the project’s heart.

And while Coal Drops Yard won’t be ready for shoppers until 2018, Kings Cross visitors can now get a taste of what spending more leisure time in the area will feel like. Everyman Cinemas, set to open an outpost at the base of Kings Cross' R7 building in 2017, has just opened a pop-up screen on the base of the David Morley-designed Plimsoll Building, right around the corner from the future retail complex’s site. Everyman on the Corner, designed by Fusion DNA, is now open for business.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Kings Cross website

Works in the fast-changing landscape of Kings Cross in central London are about the gather pace. The area's developers, Argent, teamed up with Heatherwick Studio earlier in the year, and submitted plans for the latest stage in the formerly neglected neighbourhood's redevelopment, Coal Drops Yard. And today, the team has received the green light to go ahead.

Known for its mix of wasteland and industrial buildings, many of which remained empty for years, Kings Cross is now undergoing a significant transformation. Coal Drops Yard is a complex of warehouses previously used for storage and light industry. The long complex runs parallel to the existing refurbished building of the Central St Martins School, off Granary Square, and under the new scheme it will be redesigned and extended - while important historic fixtures and fittings will be retained and repaired. 

The new structures are set to host a mix of 'independent retailers and signature brands', explains the team behind the project. Spanning some 100,000 sq ft and around 65 units, offerings will also include new restaurants, bars and cafes. A new public area will sit at the heart of the complex.

Adding an important retail element to Kings Cross' existing mix of modern offices and residential blocks – some completed, but many more ongoing and coming up – and reinforcing the area's leisure offerings, Coal Drops Yard is scheduled to be ready for 2018. Construction is due to begin in early 2016.

INFORMATION
For more information on Heatherwick Studio visit the website

The swirling grey waters of the Thames are about to be disrupted for the first time in over a decade. This Spring, work begins on two piers between Waterloo Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge, the foundations for the newest and perhaps boldest Thames crossing to date. We spoke to the Garden Bridge's designer, Thomas Heatherwick, about the current state of the project. 

'It's at a very exciting stage,' says the designer from his Kings Cross studio. 'We've completed the first full-size mock up section at the factory outside Venice. Now we can inspect the welds and shadow gaps and see how everything meets up.' The first section is a part of a mighty metal jigsaw, forged from roll-bonded copper-nickel, a hard-wearing material suggested by the Arups, the consulting engineers on the project. 'The South Bank is known for concrete, and the north bank for brick and stone,' Heatherwick explains, 'the bridge had to be agnostic. But it's also a harsh context in a salty river with a 6-7m tide.' 

The brief called for a structure that's elegant but tough. 'We need a substantial amount of concrete inside to withstand a ship hitting a pier, for example, but we felt raw concrete was just too harsh,' Heatherwick says. Metal was felt to be a complementary solution, but regular shipbuilding steel would have to be regularly repainted. 'That's a big maintenance liability, so a metal that doesn't need painting seemed obvious,' he says, 'stainless steel was a candidate, but it has a cold colouration. Copper-nickel is used in making oilrigs and ship's propellers - it's a bronze-like alloy that doesn't go dark, but it still has a warmth. It's important that the bridge is beautiful from the underside as well as the side. We want something that can take the bashing of the decades with a patina that emerges.' 

As the supports fan out from the river to the bank they will taper away to a slender section in the middle, where the planting will be lowest and the views will be best. 'It's really just two planters, their foundations sprouting from the river bed,' the designer explains, 'placed in the only two places the Thames Harbour Master would allow. In a way they're like two ships. They'll be brought by sea from Venice up to Tilbury and then floated down the Thames into place, where they'll be attached to the foundations and then filled with concrete.' On top of the 366m span will go 2500 square metres of planting area, the essential layer that will sustain the garden above, at depths of between 40cm and 2 feet (the High Line, in comparison, has a maximum depth of 45cm).

Heatherwick is adamant that the new structure is a garden first and foremost. 'We're designing it for Dan Pearson's planting,' he explains, 'the hero of a garden bridge is the garden, not the bridge. My studio's job is to hold up the garden.' Pearson has been on board since the beginning and will bring his romantic, wild but structured style to the new garden. 'We felt strongly about the naturalistic dimension,' says Heatherwick, 'there are plenty of formal gardens in London, but this one is intensely naturalistic. People misunderstand it - it's not like a park. Everything has been about having a horticultural element.' 

Over the years the planting will evolve, as well as change over the seasons, with the tallest trees eventually topping out at around 15m high. 'We want it to frame London, not create a giant leylandii hedge,' says Heatherwick. As well as the shape and construction of the structure itself, his studio has been closely involved with Arups in planning the four different circulation routes across the bridge, which will be used by an estimated 9,000 commuters a day. 'It's a transformational experience to cross the bridge,' he enthuses, 'your experience will depend on your route, the season and the maturity of the garden. It should be different every time you cross it. I think it will be sensational.'  

If the court of public opinion held sway over city planning, it would be a miracle if anything were built in London at all. So far, criticism of the £175m project has focused on the apparent creation of a great slab of corporate space over the Thames, to the possible exclusion of the general public, as well as high profile broadsides against the need for a new bridge at all, particularly in this spot. Heatherwick acknowledges the bridge is largely privately funded, but stresses that the Garden Bridge Trust 'doesn't want it to have an agenda… it's not a royal project or commemorating anything. It's not being branded or named.' Instead, it's a structure engineered for a lifespan of a millennium, designed to evolve and change over the decades. 'It's a platform for Londoners,' he says, 'the project is about the human scale. It's a link, but it's also a place to meet and the best place to see London from.' In 2018, we'll have a chance to discover it for ourselves. 

INFORMATION

For more information on Heatherwick Studio visit the website

Heatherwick Studio’s Coal Drops Yard in London’s Kings Cross will open on 26 October 2018. Heatherwick Studio has reinvented two heritage rail buildings into a much-anticipated commercial and retail development that is the new home for over 50 stores, restaurants and cafés.

‘My studio has been based in King’s Cross for over 17 years, so it’s been an enormous privilege to reinvent such a locally significant site. These extraordinary buildings were first built in 1850 and have lived an unusually rich past, first serving as infrastructure, then warehousing and offices. To most people, they are famous for having hosted nightclubs for over a decade. We believed there was an opportunity to celebrate the heritage of the existing structures rather than destroy them,’ says Thomas Heatherwick.

Coal Drops Yard runs parallel to the existing refurbished building of the Central St Martins School, just off Granary Square and is the latest addition to the area's transformation. Kings Cross is one of the fastest-changing areas in central London. A part of town that used to be formed by neglected, industrial buildings, is now swiftly becoming a buzzing hub for modern offices and state-of-the-art residential blocks, courtesy of its developers, Argent, and a wealth of leading architects and designers, such as Tom Dixon.

A key piece in the Kings Cross development, the scheme for Coal Drops Yards secures the long-term future of the historic Coal Drops buildings in King's Cross, London, which were built in the 1850s to receive freight arriving from the north of England by train; it also provides the large-scale estate with a much needed commercial and retail element. 

The existing structure’s previous use was in warehousing and light industry. Now, the revamped Coal Drops Yard will include public space and retail spanning some 9290 square metres, with varied uses from shopping, eating and drinking, and events space.

But to the science. This year we have restricted the core top 100 list strictly to product designers. And employing complex algorithms, ‘big data’ and the purest subjectivity, we have ranked them according to influence, market value, quality and quantity of output, reputational shift and that more mysterious sense of momentum, of rightness for right now. Those who have had a good year will find themselves risen up the ranks; others may get that sinking feeling. We have also added extra lists: of architects who turn their pencils to product design; of CEOs and other corporate chiefs who have matched vision and ambition with surefootedness; of graphic designers who snap our grid; of interior designers who create and compose the most seductive of spaces; and of designers yet to hit 40 but already making an impact. Or course our rankings are a provocation, but they are also a mapping of power and influence, of larger shifts and forces.

Let the debate begin...

Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, has changed behaviours and created ‘needs’ we never knew we had, turning technology’s cult underdog into the world’s most valuable company. With Steve Jobs gone, and everyone alert to the slightest Apple miss-step, Ive is now facing greater public scrutiny. The many and various permutations of the Apple Watch and strap, and the offer of a high-end version – a shift from Apple’s usual policy of limiting choice and upgrades to under-the-bonnet performance enhancements – are seen as Ive’s innovations. And rumours and counter-rumours about the Apple Watch’s success, or lack of, continue to swirl. The latest chatter is that Apple is working on a self-driving car, currently being tested in California.  

Outside of Ive, Marc Newson is the world’s highest-profile industrial designer. The pair are also long time pals. Little surprise then that Ive recruited Newson to help out with the design of Apple Watch. He has no official title at Apple but Newson says that 60 per cent of his time is now spent on Apple business and he makes monthly trips to Cupertino. Newson already had watch experience, launching the Ikepod line in the 1990s. He has also designed concept cars for Ford so it seems a relatively safe bet that Newson is currently at work on the Apple Car. And if the last year wasn’t eventful enough for Newson, this May one of his ‘Lockheed Lounge’ chairs sold at auction at Phillips in London for £2.4m, the highest price yet paid for the work of a living designer.

London-based designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have had a breathtaking year, capped by the publication of a monograph celebrating their work, and the award of the 2015 London Design Medal in September. This supremely versatile and gifted pair have been on an unstoppable tear ever since their universally lauded design for the Olympic torch in 2012 lifted them into truly rarified air. The pair now helm three studios, each founded to expand the range of projects they can take on, ranging this year from an understated shower control for Axor to the contract to design interiors, exteriors and livery for the new London Crossrail line.

An Eindhoven Design Academy alumnus, Jongerius’ career began with the Droog-infused Dutch design renaissance of the early 1990s. Always one of the most influential and intelligent voices in design, she made waves in 2015 with a call for restraint in the design world’s ceaseless quest for the novel. ‘It’s time to rid ourselves of the obsession with the new.’ She practised what she preached, too, finally unveiling the long-awaited fruits of a four-year process of revisions to her iconic ‘Polder’ sofa for Vitra, and revealing subtle tweaks to the design and scale of the collection, while remaining true to its groundbreaking aesthetic.

Oki Sato took Milan by storm in April with an audacious retrospective of his work over a single year, showcasing his impressive range and attention to detail in collaborations with companies ranging from Glas Italia and Moroso to Chocolatexture and Tod’s. In fact, he designed more than 100 different products over the year, and routinely works on more than 400 designs at any one time. This year, Sato, who initially set up Nendo ten years ago with five fellow architecture graduates, also received the crown for Maison & Objet’s Designer of the Year, opened a Milan office, and shifted into large scale architectural projects for the first time, winning commissions for a shopping centre in Bangkok and a station and leisure complex in Kyoto.

Ronan and Erwan’s stellar mid-career status was highlighted last year with the award of the 2014 London Design Medal. Subsequently, France’s most influential industrial designers revealed the ‘Kaari’ table collection, their first collaboration with Artek, and the ‘Palissade’ range of outdoor furniture for Hay, alongside strong new work for Vitra and Glas Italia. Next up is their first electronic product, the Serif TV for Samsung, which is intended to integrate the television completely into the sphere of domestic design.

A product launch seen by 4.8 billion TV viewers, a first solo retrospective at the V&A, commissions everywhere; to say Heatherwick has had a good few years is an understatement. The British designer’s King’s Cross atelier is a global creative hub, responsible for everything from London buses to gin distilleries. Heatherwick is the quintessential contemporary creator, an architect, engineer and designer rolled into one, with an obsessive attention to detail and a delight in materials.

From health-tracking wristbands to app-controlled thermostats, Béhar is the designer for our perma-connected age. Last year, Chinese conglomerate BlueFocus Communication Group acquired a majority stake in his firm Fuseproject. His XO laptops for One Laptop Per Child are now distributed in 60 countries.

This year Morrison, whose career began in the 1980s, curated the prestigious ‘80!Molteni’ exhibition in Milan and added a collection of mobile phones to his well-respected Punkt collaboration, but he will always be the ultimate Super Normal guy, with a cool shop, transforming the everyday into desirable objects, including this cafetiere for Rowenta from W*068

Our joint Wallpaper* Designer of the Year, the work of German design superstar Grcic combines analytical rigour, formal discipline and a twist of humour. Recent projects include chairs for Plank and Magis, sanitaryware for Laufen, and branding and interiors for the Hugo Boss IMOCA 60 racing yacht.

A graduate of Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and London’s Architectural Association, Arad is working on Tel Aviv’s tallest building, a show for the Royal Academy, and St Pancras’ sought-after Terrace Wires installation. He remains the design and architecture world’s great iconoclast

Despite his work for IDEO and the Muji CD player, Fukasawa’s sublime understanding of Japanese craft sensibility has few better expressions than last year’s ‘Cha’ tea kettle for Alessi, his ‘Roundish’ sofa for Maruni Wood Industries, this year’s kitchen appliances for Muji and his sleek smartphone model for KDDI.

Dixon remains one of Britain’s best-known design names, even outside the design community. His studio has been busy this year: working on apartments at Greenwich Peninsula and the Multiplex department store at Selfridges, and he has also just been secured by Caesarstone to work on a major collaboration

Hayon has long been revered for his radical embrace of colour, decoration and cartoon-figure curves. His recent highlights include a large ‘Urban Perspectives’ installation for Mini, sports-style pieces for Galerie Kreo, and a redesigned Room 506 at Arne Jacobsen’s SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen.

Collaborator Bruno Borrione finally got his name on the door last year as he and Starck formed a ‘new’ design agency, S++B. Since then, Stark has revealed a 2018 hotel design for Centre Pompidou Metz, created a prototype home for PATH and had various Milan launches with Kartell, Flos, Glas Italia, Axor, Magis and Tog

Humberto and Fernando’s creative upcycling and design improvisation – influenced by the street life of Santa Cecilia, the area of São Paulo where they have their studio – has been the basis of a string of bestsellers for Edra, as well as big-ticket edition pieces. The pair also work with local NGOs and workers’ co-ops.

The Spaniard is constantly proving she is at the top of her game with her hugely covetable creations. Not only is she our reigning Wallpaper* Designer of the Year, but she has formalised her ongoing collaboration with the Poltrona Frau group, heading up its design sector and becoming art director of Cassina.

Windows for Prada and a collection and installation for luxury leather maker Valextra helped demonstrate the versatility of Gamper, who made his name in 2007 with the found-object speed-design project ‘100 Chairs in 100 Days’. Milan gallery Nilufar then commissioned him to do similar with discarded Giò Ponti pieces.

Milan-based Giovannoni is as adept at futuristic furniture as at cartoonish homewares. His ‘Bombo’ stool for Magis, with its swivelling plastic seat and adjustable chrome-steel base, is widely copied, and his ‘Girotondo’ tableware for Alessi has sold over ten million units. He is now opening an office in Shenzhen.

Born in 1932, Munich-based designer Maurer designed his first light fitting in 1966 after a life-changing trip to New York, where he encountered the pop art movement. Simply called ‘Bulb’, his debut design was a brilliantly witty take on what a lamp could be and marked the start of a legendary career

This year, industrial designer Lovegrove - pictured here in W*101 - has applied his ergonomic forms to photorealistic rug designs for Moooi, while 2014 saw him produce 3D-printed gold jewellery for the Louisa Guinness Gallery. Material science, form and technology dominate, as with Liquidkristal, an architectural glass designed for Lasvit

Following Charpin’s takeover of Apartment 50 in Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille last year, he has now commandeered the Robert Mallet-Stevens-designed Villa Noailles in Hyères for a new show. Last month also saw the opening of an exhibition of his tables and ceramic vases at Galerie Kreo’s London outpost.

This year’s Wallpaper* Design Awards judges, Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu combine city block-sized projects with more delicate small-scale work, garnering design awards and commissions from Camper, De La Espada and Le Méridien, as well as creating a clutch of boutique hotels, flagship offices and private dwellings

Häberli credits his motivation to his Argentine upbringing, and his problem-solving abilities to his Swiss heritage. He became a star for his ‘Origo’ dinner service for Iittala in 1999, and has gone on to work for brands such as Moroso and Georg Jensen. This year, he was chosen by BMW to design its annual Milan installation.

Hays is the driving force behind luxury American furniture label BDDW. Based in Philadelphia, he is as much an entrepreneur as he is a designer, having built the company up from a small Brooklyn start-up to a respected handmade furniture empire, with a Milan outpost and its own general store, within ten years

The soft, rounded forms of Dutch designer Bakker’s everyday objects are carefully crafted in metal, wood, glass and ceramic, often the result of painstaking production processes. His delicate forms found the limelight in Amsterdam this summer with a solo exhibition, ‘Containing Content’, focusing on his pourers (pictured)

Twins Nikolai and Simon began life as Texan builders with a Hollywood twist, but their skill and experimental approach saw them branch out into design at the turn of the decade. Now based in LA, the brothers’ new surrealist style graces spaces like the city’s Ace Hotel and the Guerlain store in Paris.

Pictured: Beast stool.

An alumnus of the Alchymia, Cavart and Memphis movements, De Lucchi is an Italian design legend whose work graces museums across the globe. He is responsible for bestsellers like the ‘Tolomeo’ lamp for Artemide, and the ‘First’ chair for Memphis. His new coffee maker for Alessi looks set to join that pantheon

From Peckham bottle recycler to Design Miami jury member, designer Boontje, known for his craft-inspired ideas, has come a long way, and his ‘Garland’ light shades are now a modern classic. He recently developed a jewellery collection for the Van Gogh Museum. Next up is an exciting commission for PostNL.

Pictured: Boontje's 'Chamber of Wonder' exhibition, at Swarovski Crystal World in Wattens, Austria

British artist Anthea Hamilton made international news last month with an installation inspired by a 1972 model by Pesce. Now 75, the Venetian designer’s career spans over half a century, and he has always ensured that his colourful, often otherworldly designs go beyond function and aesthetics

Milanese architect Dordoni has spent his career designing and providing art direction for some of the biggest players in Italian design – Artemide, Cappellini, Minotti and Foscarini have all benefited from his creative input. More recently, he set up Dordoni Architetti to focus on his architectural projects.

London-based design duo Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd have become the go-to practice for public-realm design, with past projects including innovative healthcare furniture for the NHS and street furniture for the city of Bath. Recent projects include a contemporary workplace furniture collection for Teknion

Renowned for his refined designs and forthright opinions, the godfather of Italian design has had a consistent and influential presence in the industry for over 50 years. A steadfast supporter of sustainable, open-source design and small-scale, local production, Mari’s principles have always been years ahead of their time.

Pictured: W*090

Belgian-Dutch duo Nynke Tynagel and Job Smeets continue to explore the boundaries between art and design. From a roller disco inside Buenos Aires’ Faena Art Centre (pictured) to the irreverent ‘Banana Show’ lights at Belgium’s Samuel Vanhoegaerden Gallery, the pair’s refreshing maximalism was prominently on display

Last year, Lissoni secured a major commission from Ritz-Carlton to create a waterfront complex in Miami and a minimalist setting for a Renaissance art show in Milan. This year, he presented ‘1:1 Piero Lissoni’, an exhibition held in a vast New York loft in collaboration with a host of Brooklyn design studios

Branzi’s ‘Heretical Design’ show at Italy’s MARCA museum reminded commentators of the designer’s astonishing breadth and fecundity. He is a frequent collaborator with architectural magazines such as Domus and Casabella, and his shelving systems continue to attract the plaudits of a younger generation

De Cotiis’ work ranges from interiors for T’a bistrot in Milan, and the Upper Hills development in Shenzhen, to furniture for Ceccotti and his own label Progetto Domestico. Last year, he opened a gallery in Milan, and launched a limited-edition series inspired by Beirut in collaboration with Carwan Gallery

Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel formed Troika in 2003. Their installations blend techno-longing with video and interactive elements, and grace spaces from Heathrow’s T5 to major galleries. Recent work, like Dark Matter and Limits of a Known Territory (pictured), show a more brooding, sculptural side

The London-based Cypriot has taken his first proper dip into furniture this year, designing a sofa for SCP. Boasting a similar geometrical characteristic to his captivating lighting objects for Flos, the long-time Wallpaper* collaborator has shown he can master both delicate precision and a sturdy framework.

Woodgate has brought his pared-down sophistication to the likes of Cappellini and SCP. He drew international attention in 2008 with his ‘Surface’ table for Established & Sons, and in 2014 he crowdfunded his lighting brand to produce a collection optimised for LEDs, including the ‘Core’ pendant in translucent marble

Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings epitomise Dutch design diversity, creating fabrics and furnishings in an eclectic array of forms and colours for the likes of Hay and Moooi. This year they have released their first book, Reproducing Scholten & Baijings (pictured), which takes us on a journey of their creative development

A graduate of Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Gilad is one of those rare designers able to work with ease across varying scales of output, from limited editions to mass production. He even managed to reinvent the showroom with an inspired and witty conversion for Molteni & C in Brianza.

Sam Hecht and Kim Colin founded their London studio in 2002 and have since turned conceiving the beautifully useful into an art form. Their reputation rests on creating a few simple product designs, with a twist, each year for the likes of Muji, Droog, Herman Miller, Issey Miyake, and Established & Sons

Tokyo-based interior designer Katayama is head of Japanese firm Wonderwall, which strides across the globe from one hi-tech Uniqlo store to another, creating art-cum-retail projects like Ginza’s Comme des Garçons store, and a chocolate-bar ceiling for the café at Meiji, Japan’s largest chocolate company, along the way

The enfant terrible of Italian product design is never happier than when he is pushing the boundaries of taste. Recent work includes a hyper-masculine headquarters for his beloved AC Milan football team (pictured) and a much instagrammed, model-kit installation for Tommy Hilfiger at Milan’s La Rinascente store.

Wanders’ work ranges from breakfast pieces for Alessi to upscale interiors for the Mondrian South Beach hotel. The studio recently opened an appointment-only gallery space at its HQ in Westerstraat, housing the Dutchman’s collectable designs (which will set you back the best part of $40,000 at auction)

Baas has parlayed a winning way with colour-impregnated clay into a design empire, under his own name and, since 2012, as part of the entity DH PH. Despite this, he’s not too kooky to win awards, create iPhone apps or see his ‘Grandfather Clock Veneer’ sold by Phillips de Pury & Company New York for over $134,000

Focusing on sustainability, and characterised by robust raw materials and expressive lines, Motta’s furniture celebrates the exuberant energy of his native Brazil, and speaks to his passion for surfing, yoga and nature. This autumn he marks the 40th year of his career with a retrospective at New York gallery Espasso.

Pictured with Leandro Massarelli, June 2010, W*135. 

Tokyo-based designer Yoshioka creates installations exploring balance and transparency for clients like Swarovski and Cartier, while products for Glas Italia and boutiques for Issey Miyake (pictured) take more substantial forms. This year he held his first solo exhibition in Kyushu, at the newly renovated Saga Prefectural Museum

Born in Israel, educated in Switzerland and based in Paris, Levy’s vast resumé of work spans lighting, jewellery, graphic design, furniture and packaging. This year he added something new to the list, working with bentwood for the first time in a collection produced for Salone for the Czech company TON. 

Pictured: W*109

An apprentice of Michele De Lucchi for more than 11 years, Nigro is barely 40 but has already won the Designer of the Year award at Maison & Objet and designed collections for the likes of Ligne Roset, De Padova and Hermès (pictured). For this year’s Salone he created the scenography for Japanese car company Lexus

From traditional cabinetmaker to sought-after product designer, Diez’s career ranges from hi-tech manufacturing all the way through to contemporary kit furniture. The German designer - pictured W*158 -  has created products for Thonet, Moroso, Established & Sons, Hay and Emu, all of which share his trademark pared-down precision

Italian architect and designer Thun’s progressive, sustainably luxurious interiors are taking over the civilised world. This year saw the launch of Matteo Thun Atelier, devoted to handcrafted design, with a collection in glass and ceramic, as well as an island resort in Venice for Marriott, designed inside and out by Thun, pictured here

For more than a decade, New York-based designer Burks has pursued his ongoing fascination with the transformative potential of design in emerging economies. This plus stellar work with brands such as Roche Bobois, Dedon, Ligne Roset, Boffi and Swarovski saw him rewarded with a prestigious Cooper Hewitt National Design Award this year

Navone spent her early career working with Italian design doyens such as Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini. Her dedication to the craft of design is reflected in her lively work for brands ranging from Gervasoni and Crate & Barrel to Ercol, with whom she launched a seating collection this year, pictured here

A graduate of industrial design school ENSCI, Sempé - pictured here W*151 - is known for her versatility and lightness of touch. Since opening her studio in 2000, she has established long-term relationships with firms such as Ligne Roset and Wästberg. Her first cutlery collection, Collo-alto for Alessi, launched in Paris this year to rave reviews

Since his breakthrough in 2002 with the outlandish interiors for London restaurant Sketch, Duchaufour-Lawrance’s work has included identities for Air France and Yves Saint Laurent cosmetics, as well as furniture for Bernhardt Design and Ceccotti Collezioni, and lighting for Baccarat and Gaia & Gino.

Wired from the outset thanks to early chandelier collaborations with Ron Arad, Hussein Chalayan and Zaha Hadid, Waldemeyer’s work has tracked the LED’s rise as a source of entertainment. His technical background helps keep him on the cutting edge, with installations ranging from the wearable to the truly immersive

His latest monograph features a preface by Tom Ford and a forward by Zaha Hadid, but with a career that spans more than 60 years, the German-born Kagan has plenty of famous admirers to call upon. A prolific midcentury furniture designer with a sinuous style, this year he added a must-read blog to his many talents

Kitchen-design genius Wangen first turned heads with Boffi’s ‘K2’ monoblock, with a steel top that concealed the cooking system and slid out to become a dining table. He is currently reviving this own line with the minimalist ‘Forever’ kitchen, and he co-designed The Flushing Meadows Hotel & Bar, opened in Munich last year.

Hong Kong-based since 2006, Young has successfully married Chinese manufacturing capacity to his refined Old World design aesthetic. This combination is seen to best effect in his watch ranges, in his re-engineered Moke beach buggy and this year’s James Irvine-inspired ‘Chelsea Boy’ glass for WonderGlass.

Increasingly, the success of Jouin’s interior design agency JouinMankin is pulling him away from product design. His two-year refurbishment of a Saint-Lazare priory was shortlisted for a Wallpaper* Design Award, while the latest incarnation of his Rivea restaurant for Alain Ducasse opens in Las Vegas next month

Another year, another Red Dot award for Massaud, for a work chair and ottoman series for Coalesse. In recent years, the French designer has also completed some ambitious architectural projects and, for this year’s Salone, his first perfume as part of Brera’s Garden of Wonders exhibition (pictured)

The designs of Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard sit in foyers, museums, stores, restaurants, hotels and private collections around the world, a sensuous fusion of form and rigour. At this year’s London Design Festival, the duo marked ten years since their first major collection with new pieces for David Gill Gallery, pictured here

The husband-and-wife team celebrated 21 years of their design partnership Palomba Serafini this year. The pair turn their hand to everything from lamps and bathtubs to super yachts, and recently completed the first standalone Kartell by Laufen showroom, in Milan, in part to showcase their own collection

Texan designer Hunt founded her eponymous company in 1984, and it went on to become one of America’s finest design brands, collaborating with the likes of Lindsey Adelman and Christian Astuguevieille. In 2014, Knoll acquired Holly Hunt enterprises for $95m, starting a new chapter in the history of the brand.

Pictured: 'Angelika’ sofa

Hutten set up his studio in 1991, joining the Droog collective two years later. His work follows a ‘no sign of design’ notion, making for functional objects permeated by a playful, conceptual attitude, and features in the permanent collections of museums such as the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Vitra Design Museum

Having worked as a model and bag designer for Raf Simons, Verheyden veered into home accessories in 2009 with his wife, Saartje Vereecke. His simple forms allow his rich materials to speak for themselves, and encourage users to appreciate the rituals of daily life. Collaborators include Joseph Dirand and Rick Owens.

Anglo-Indian duo Jonathan Levien and Nipa Doshi draw inspiration globally. Standout pieces include a cabinet for BD Barcelona that nods to the corrugated roofs of shanty dwellings and an armchair for Hay structured like a Japanese hand fan. They also rebranded cosmetics label Madina.

Pillet honed his skills with Michele de Lucchi and Philippe Starck before setting up his own studio. Along with curvaceous furnishings for the likes of Modus, Porro and Tacchini, he has also created sumptuous spaces for hotels in France (pictured is his makeover of Hotel Pullman Paris Eiffel Tower) and Morocco, and transformed Lancel’s retail presence around the world

Industrial designer Rasmussen is brand director at Neal Feay, which specialises in anodised aluminium creations. The firm has collaborated with the likes of Louis Vuitton, Dior and Design Miami, and most recently produced a digitalised ocean wave for this year’s London Design Festival at Somerset House, pictured

Working under the studio name Ora ïto, Ito Morabito has amassed a portfolio as substantive as that of any French designer. His re-imagining of the rooftop gym of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse into art space MAMO made him the natural choice to design Cassina’s beautiful LC50 tribute to the architect for D’Days 2015 in Paris.

Having given Dutch Design capital letters, Droog has grown into a mini-empire. Co-founder Renny Ramakers opened the one-bedroom Hotel Droog concept in Amsterdam in 2012, a store and gallery in Hong Kong in 2013 and published an anthology last year. In 2015, her mini hardware store concept turned heads at Salone

Furniture is rarely as refined as that created by Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen, with their rigorously austere pieces evolving naturally out of their creative backgrounds (his in sculpture, hers in photography). A colourful furniture and lighting collection for London’s Viaduct gallery this year hinted at a future direction.

Grawunder worked with Ettore Sottsass before going solo in 2001. She designs installations, interiors and objects, as well as pieces for the likes of Glas Italia and Boffi. She has a light installation at Robert, at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and has had solo shows at Paris’ Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

Gitta Gschwendtner’s ‘Chair Bench’, which unites six iconic chairs from different eras and matches up their tops and bottoms randomly, is emblematic of her experimental approach to furniture. She has also designed exhibitions and is contributing to a new cancer centre for Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London

Parisian legend Pergay (sitting on the far left) continues to create in her eighties. She defined hi-luxe design before the current generation was even born (Dior, Hermès, Pierre Cardin and Fendi were all early adopters), and her vast back catalogue of curvaceous stainless steel designs has never been more coveted on the international auction circuit

Founded in 2006, the studio of Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn creates poetic works that tap into technology and nature. The duo’s Shylight installation at the Rijksmuseum, pictured, is shortlisted for a Dutch Design Award, while their kinetic glass installation for this year’s Venice Art Biennale explored human’s desire to fly

A furniture collection for Arflex Japan saw the quintessentially luxe designer experimenting with high-tech modelling systems to elegant effect. A former head of visual communications for Louis Vuitton, he set up his studio in 2000, creating crisply detailed interiors for the likes of Tacchini, Glas Italia and Ethimo

The line-up might change more often than a 1970s prog rock band (the studio started as a foursome in 2004, became a trio in 2009, and turned duo in 2014) but the work continues to intrigue. They bring a strong playful sensibility to their designs, creating products for the likes of Moooi, Thonet, Kartell, Moroso and Porro

The radical oeuvre of Israeli-born Benshetrit includes the shattered and reassembled ‘Vase of Phases’ for Rosenthal, and the brilliantly plumed ‘Peacock Chair’ for Cappellini. He also created an island of luxury residences in Abu Dhabi, the chic SoHo Synagogue in Manhattan, and is venturing into skyscraper design

Craig Bassam and Scott Fellows are masters of understated luxury. Their eponymous furniture line unites modernist architectural principles and artisanal production, and they have also collaborated with Bally, Herman Miller and Geiger. The duo launched a lifestyle gallery in Milan last year, and recently introduced a clothing collection, pictured

Stylist and designer Toogood imagined two opposite set-ups at this year’s London Design Festival – a cloakroom containing 150 compressed foam coats at the V&A, pictured, and a redrafted drawing room at Somerset House. Her client list includes Hermès, Tom Dixon and Comme des Garçons

Crafted in copper, hand-blown glass, brass and knotted rope, Adelman’s lighting designs have evoked everything from celestial bodies to sea creatures. The Manhattanite takes a hands-on approach and this summer created a music video to showcase her latest collection

The Brazilian designer spent his formative years working with Sergio Rodrigues before opening his studio in 2011. Recently named Maison & Objet Americas Designer of the Year 2015, he works mainly in wood and metal, producing furniture for his eponymous brand. This year saw new pieces in wood for Espasso (pictured) and his first monograph

Chan set up lighting design studio Isometrix in 1984. With a rare grasp of lighting technology, he has enhanced spaces such as Georges at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Wolseley in London, The Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, pictured, and The Upper House in Hong Kong. Among his collaborators are Jean Nouvel and Zaha Hadid.

Borrowing from a medieval armour-making technique, RCA graduate Hasan developed an acclaimed furniture range in hardened leather, which then translated into a Wallpaper* Handmade project with Poltrona Frau and a mannequin project for Fendi. He has also collaborated with Kvadrat and British interiors brand Linley

French designer Matali Crasset’s showstopping offering at this year’s Salone was the mobile ‘Self-made’ seat for Campeggi, which reimagined the sofa as a series of individual modules that could be carried like suitcases. She followed that up with a tabletop set that included impossibly understated, sycamore plates

A pioneer in the integration of technology and domestic design, French designer Lehanneur was this year appointed head of the Paris-based Aesthetics Research Centre of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer. A 20-sided wireless speaker for Binauric was another 2015 coup.

Pictured: an otherworldly set for Audemars Piguet at Art Basel 2014

Making everyday objects special, Bergne’s hits include his ‘Dizzy’ glass, with a conical base that gives a spinning effect, and the stackable and infinitely adaptable ‘Square’ chair for Tog. His broad output also includes a hot milk service for culinary think-tank Milk Factory, and the torch for 2015’s first ever European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan

Alonso’s work (stackable steel cutlery for Italesse, reclaimed wood chairs for the V&A and folding tables for Cos and Hay) belie his intellectual design process. He creates products that are understated, poetic and functional, and was one of the winners of this year’s Swarovski Designers of the Future Award.

Midwesterner Bernett’s foray into design began with a chance encounter with Le Corbusier’s ‘LC4’. His ‘Metropolitan’ and ‘Tulip’ for B&B Italia, pictured, which pay homage to Ejnar Larsen and Eero Saarinen, are among the best selling chairs in the US. He has also worked for Cappellini, Ligne Roset and Design Within Reach

Marigold is best known for artfully awry shelves assembled from branches and crates, and metal homewares that take on wooden patterns. His eclectic client list ranges from Oyuna to Paul Smith and Sony, and recent work includes bowls and cups for Meissen, and galvanised steel shelving for SCP.

Pictured: Split series, 2007

Azambourg has put himself at the forefront of material technology with fibre-optic lamps for Galerie Kreo, a leather-and-foam briefcase for Hermès weighing only 700g, and seating for Cappellini created with the same techniques as Bugatti racing cars. He recently launched his own label, Auto-Edition

Bracher trained in New York and Copenhagen, led Tom Dixon’s design studio and was then creative director for Georg Jensen. Cindy Crawford’s beauty mark informed his ‘Tod’ table for Zanotta. Having lent his talents to Herman Miller, Humanscale and 3M, he is now lauded as the future of American design

Slovenian product and interior designer Zupanc’s work is witty, visually delightful and pristine. Her commissions include Moooi and Moroso, and her ongoing collaboration with Sè was unveiled in Milan last year and expanded with new pieces in 2015. She also has her own brand of precious and whimsical furniture

Willenz, who founded his Brussels studio in 2004, has an industrial, minimalist style, making him a favourite of Established & Sons, Cappellini and Hay. This year he worked with marble brand Retegui on a series of mirrors (pictured), shelves and accessories, and created bold, geometric rugs for Ligne Roset, Menu and Nodus

Vivid colour is the signature of Italian designer Lenti, who founded her eponymous company in 1994 after training in graphics. Cheerful forms and high-tech fabrics (often designed in-house) have made her one of the most sought-after names in garden furniture. She has just released a line of rugs with Maharam

De la Fontaine trained with Richard Sapper and worked with Piero Lissoni and Patricia Urquiola before founding design collective Dante-Goods and Bads with his wife Aylin Langreuter in 2012 (pictured is a table from the brand). He has also worked for Rosenthal, among others, for whom his timeless ‘Format’ collection remains a best seller

Stockholm-based Italian designer Nichetto has worked for a host of major brands. His impressive 2015 output includes the ‘Nick’ bed for Molteni & C (pictured), the ‘Plass’ light for Foscarini and silvered-glass side tables for Verreum, all shown in Milan, plus an installation of new lamps for Swedish company Hem at the London Design Festival

Park’s poetic pieces are crafted from slabs of translucent resin, tinged in block colours and seamlessly joined, providing a thoughtful meditation on purity and ambiguity. The South Korean designer splits his time between Rotterdam and Paris, where he recently had a solo show at Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery, pictured

If ever proof was needed that good design and architecture can aid the healing process, the respite centres built across the UK by pioneering cancer charity Maggie's are it. With 18 centres already in place, the charity have been granted planning permission for its 19th location – an idyllic centre designed by Heatherwick Studio for the grounds of St James’s University Hospital in Leeds.

Working previously with leading architecture practices – Wilkinson Eyre Architects, Cullinan Studio and OMA among them – Maggie's have created a network of welcoming, calm and uplifting buildings built within the grounds of specialist NHS cancer hospitals, where patients, friends and the families of those affected by cancer can receive practical and emotional support.

The new centre is slated for opening in 2017 and designed to be built next to the hospital's oncology unit, the centre is designed around a series of contained gardens – masterminded by the award-winning landscape designer Marie-Louise Agius of Balston Agius – that soften the rigid formality of the surrounding hospital buildings and harness the therapeutic capabilities of plant life.

The building itself functions a little like a collection of stepped planters, each containing its own slice of Eden that spills over the walls. 'The building will combine the qualities of a garden with shared and private spaces,' says Heatherwick, who has cleverly tucked the centre's interior spaces in and around the gardens.

Ever since he set up his own shingles in 1994, the London-based designer Thomas Heatherwick has been creating one startling silhouette after the other. Indeed, a joyful strand of DNA runs through his rather varied catalogue of work, whether a dramatic starburst of illuminated tubes for the UK Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo, a zippered handbag, or the sinuous curls of Google's new California HQ (designed together with BIG).

Now add to this playful mix his new Learning Hub, an audacious deconstruction of the traditional lecture room that's one of the key salvos of a £360m campus masterplan for Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. Three years in the making, the eight-storey building's silhouette - a low-slung cluster of twelve towers comprising 56 rough-hewn concrete pods - is a striking addition to the leafy, but somewhat staid, campus landscape.

Heatherwick's extraordinarily sculptural design - already nicknamed the Dim Sum by school wags for its resemblance to dim-sum baskets - is, however, more than just a quirky whimsy. The brief was to create a new learning experience for students, one that mentally and physically abandons the traditional model of passive learning.

As Heatherwick points out, the Learning Hub is 'an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the traditional university building. In the information age, the most important commodity on a campus is social space to meet and bump into and learn from each other.' Achieving this commodity has meant eschewing sterile corridors, closed-up halls, and rectangular rooms. In their place is a series of circular, glass-fronted modular pods - each a classroom - that opens into an internal, naturally-ventilated atrium that offers unobstructed views from any angle up to the sky and down to the plaza.

There are almost no straight edges, whether in the undulating concrete walls that are cast with almost Aztec-like designs of plants and animals; the bronzed lift doors; the slanted, load-bearing pillars that resemble giant tree logs; the garden spaces on the upper floors; or the curved white boards in the tutorial rooms that allow lecturers to move about and constantly shift a student's perspective.

'It was an unconventional brief,' says the local project leader, Vivien Leong of CPG Consultants. 'Managing this project was no mean feat as we had to work hard to retain the integrity of the original design, and the vision of the university.'

ADDRESS

52 Nanyang Avenue
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore

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The literature related to the Hammer Museum exhibition 'Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio' singles out the firm’s 'astonishing range.' For one time in the history of press packets, this is a profound understatement.

As the show illustrates, the brilliant, mercurial office’s portfolio is perhaps the most eclectic in existence. It includes, but is not limited to, spinning chairs, extruded metallic sofas, and transformable tables, and scales up to Olympic cauldrons, buses, bridges, buildings, and city plans.

Like Heatherwick’s creations, the meandering exhibition, curated by Brooke Hodge with coordinating curator Aram Moshayedi, has no hierarchy, although it does lean more heavily on recent work, much of it in the public realm, which Heatherwick acknowledges is his passion.

Projects are grouped into what show designer Neil Hubbard calls 'organised chaos,' informal clusters that allow viewers to make their own connections and conclusions. The emphasis is on the studio’s process, which, as the exhibit title suggests, starts with a question and leads to hands-on, ruthlessly logical responses.

Each object is accompanied with a query, like 'How can a seaside building relate to the sea?' (the wavy, layered East Beach Café in Sussex, England), and 'Can a building stand up on the architectural equivalent of matchsticks?' (the porcupine-like Belsay Sitooterie in Northumberland, England). The show is light on renderings and heavy on models, mock ups, and test elements, making it refreshingly tactile and reinforcing the image of a firm that follows through on its intricate and brash, yet very accessible, proposals.

'The workshop is the heart and soul of the studio,' said Hodge, who also curated Provocations’ iteration at the Nasher in Dallas last fall, and will direct the show at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York this summer. 'The ingenuity is so mind boggling to me. It’s fresh because they’re never doing the same thing.'

For those who question Heatherwick’s transition to buildings and infrastructure, the answer is in the spectacular results— such as the lushly planted Garden Bridge in London, the hive of textured, cylindrical columns at the Learning Hub in Singapore, and a contemporary art museum in Cape Town built into forty two vertical concrete tubes—which rethink what’s possible in a way that only someone who insists on being what Heatherwick calls 'an expert at not being an expert' can.

To such naysayers Hodge asks, 'Why not? Does he have to keep making handbags and chairs?'

'There’s always some friction in change. It would be weird if there weren’t,' adds Heatherwick. 

ADDRESS

Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90024

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Laverstoke Mill, Bombay Sapphire's new home in Hampshire, is an architectural project of many firsts. It is the first project of its scale and complexity in the UK by its celebrated London-based designer, Thomas Heatherwick. It is also Heatherwick Studio's first conservation project, as well as its first design for a production facility, something Heatherwick is passionate about. Finally, Laverstoke Mill is the first project of either type - refurbishment or distillery - ever to receive the prestigious Outstanding BREEAM rating for environmental assessment.

When the leading gin brand began searching for its new home in England five years ago, the derelict paper mill in Laverstoke (which, in its heyday, printed banknotes for the Bank of England, no less) stood out as the ideal renovation project. Heatherwick led the transformation of this historical complex in the English countryside into a state-of-the-art gin-production facility. The results do not disappoint.

While the human experience was central to his proposal for the old mill, Heatherwick also focused on the site's water component. Years of development had nearly obliterated the bank of the River Test, which runs through the Hampshire site, and led to an architectural complex that felt overcrowded and uneven. The team set out to amend this. '[One of the challenges was], how do we take this cacophony and make it make sense, and turn it into a place of manufacture - only for gin instead of paper,' says Heatherwick.

Placing the riverbank at the design's heart and opening up the site, the team meticulously cleaned up, lovingly restored, upgraded and added to the complex, paying special attention to public spaces. 'It was the first time we'd worked with so many heritage buildings,' says Heatherwick, who now has projects in various stages in South Africa and the UK. The Laverstoke undertaking included the delicate handling of three Grade II-listed buildings, as well as a strong sustainability requirement.

The other crucial element leading the design was, of course, the distillation, which is on full display to visitors at key stages of the process. Without a doubt, the key attraction, however, is the distinct and cleverly designed pair of glasshouses. The bulbous structures 'float' on the river and house the brand's valuable collection of Mediterranean and tropical gin-making plants. They also highlight the project's sustainability credentials, making strategic use of the by-products of distillation.

'There was all this excess heat from the distillation process, so we thought, "Could we use that heat to create the growing conditions for the tropical and Mediterranean plants?"' says Heatherwick. 'We felt there was an opportunity for modern glasshouses.' Ivano Tonutti, Bombay's Master of Botanicals, agrees this project made a big difference to his work. 'It is important to have something to show and touch,' he explains. 'We are very passionate [about what we do] and this place makes us even more proud.'

Laverstoke Mill distillery has been up and running for about six months, finessing its new home before the grand opening on 1 October. Marking the occasion, the spirit will also be available in a special-edition 'Bombay Sapphire Distillery, Laverstoke Mill Limited Edition' bottle. 'And there will be more surprises to come,' hints Tonutti. Watch this space. 

INFORMATION

Bombay Sapphire Distillery
Laverstoke Mill
London Road
Laverstoke
Whitchurch
Hampshire RG28 7NR

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With Cape Town’s World Design Capital programme in full swing, last week the city unveiled its plans for the new Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MoCAA). Opening in 2016 in a former grain silo complex on the V&A Waterfront, the 9,500 sq m space is being created by British designer Thomas Heatherwick and curated by Capetonian Mark Coetzee, former director of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.
 
Forty-two concrete cylinders make up the heart of the 1920s silo building. Heatherwick plans to carve eight of them out to create a central light-filled atrium that will host monumental art commissions and site-specific works. German collector Jochen Zeitz, who is funding much of the institution, is donating works from his private collection and acquiring new ones. A dragon sculpture created by the South African artist Nicholas Hlobo for the 2013 Venice Biennale, will be installed in the atrium.

Coetzee’s remit is to fill the museum with post-2000 works by artists from Africa and its diaspora, but heavyweights such as Steve McQueen, Yinka Shonibare and William Kentridge will also be present.

Heatherwick is retaining the industrial machinery that was fully operational until the silo closed in the mid 1990s, and its labyrinth of underground tunnels will be re-engineered to create education and site-specific spaces. A restaurant and rooftop sculpture garden will occupy the upper levels of the nine-floor building, and the remaining cylinders will be shaved down and transformed into 80 gallery spaces, for both Zeitz’s collection and temporary exhibitions.   

We caught up with Heatherwick in Cape Town to find out more about the project...

W: How did you come to be involved?
Thomas Heatherwick: Nine years ago, I gave a talk at Design Indaba and crawled all around the inside of the abandoned silo. It stuck in my brain, and when new owners of The V&A Waterfront faced the problem of what to do with this idiosyncratic building made of tubes and no floors, they asked me to put together a proposal.

It's your first art gallery, so tell us about the design.
Billions of grains were collected and sorted in the silo. It was part of a collective system and other silos existed around South Africa. We are taking one grain, supersizing it and carving it out of the central columns. Today we did a concrete cutting test, to try and get it silky - like butter, but with a raw edge. It's a heritage site, so rather a bold thing to do.  

What about the location?
What excites me about this project is that it's next to a working shipyard, offices and living space. It's really mixed and is the most visited precinct in Africa. New buildings so rarely have any soulfulness, and often cities make the mistake of creating a ghetto of culture. To me culture is everything, from the toilets to the buses.

How do you think Zeitz MOCAA will impact on the city?
There is no major world-class institution in Africa, and our brief is to create one. It has hit us straight in the face. There will be incredible pieces on show, because, until now, there hasn't been a conservation grade, environmentally controlled exhibition space on the continent, so artists, galleries and collectors haven't been able to lend significant pieces. The South Africans I have spoken to predict that the centre of gravity for the art world will shift from Johannesburg to Cape Town. 

Heatherwick will retain the industrial machinery that was fully operational until the silo closed in the mid 1990s, and its labyrinth of underground tunnels will be re-engineered to create education and site-specific spaces

German collector Jochen Zeitz, who is funding much of the institution, is donating works from his private collection and acquiring new ones. Curator Mark Coetzee's remit is to fill the museum with post-2000 works by artists from Africa and its diaspora. Pictured, is 'Emabutfo', by Nandipha Mntambo, 2009, from the existing collection.

The rise of Thomas Heatherwick says a great deal about the fragmented state of visual culture, as well as our collective understanding of the way architecture and design gets commissioned, constructed and publicised.

To the general population, Heatherwick is now best known as the man behind the new London bus and the UK's pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. This breadth of ability implies that the studio is similar in scope to any number of big design agencies, as adept at branding, strategy and marketing as the actual art of design. But in truth, Heatherwick Studio has grown out of a very hands-on tradition, that of the artist-maker, the craftsman, the master builder and the artisan. In a world where creativity is predominantly a digital process, Thomas Heatherwick has injected an analogue sensibility.

The designer's earliest projects from his days at Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art explored the limits of everyday materials, twisting wood, sculpted clay, bent metal, combining hand and machine processes to produce baroque, ornate forms that were still structurally sound and efficient in their use of materials. Gradually, the work evolved from furniture to shop fittings, public art installation and exhibition design all the way up to whole buildings, vehicles and more.

Signature pieces, such as the Harvey Nichols installation of 1997, the Rolling Bridge of 2002 and the ill-fated B of the Bang sculpture are paired with quirky Christmas cards and elaborate but unbuilt projects. Along the way, Heatherwick Studio has functioned as a think tank, often setting itself probing questions or complex tasks and then seeing what technical innovations are needed to solve them.

In 2001 Heatherwick took part in the now-defunct Conran Foundation Collection show at London's Design Museum, in which a sole guest 'collector' was given £30,000 to assemble a gallery's worth of inspirational objects. The designer responded by assembling 1000 things, drawn from all spheres of life and corners of the globe, but all demonstrating an evolutionary quirk or visual eccentricity that transformed them from the familiar into the useful and unusual.

'Designing the Extraordinary' doesn't come close to replicating that earlier show's innate strangeness but it has a certain chaos all of its own. Housed in the V&A's Porter Gallery, immediately adjacent the main entrance, the show is a wunderkammer of engineering experiments.

As Heatherwick himself noted at the opening, most of the pieces on display have been taken directly from his Kings Cross studio, from full-scale components to quick and dirty maquettes. 'When you put 8mm acrylic around something, it transforms it,' he said dryly at the private view and the end result is akin to a Renaissance capricci, a staggered, tumbling peripatetic cityscape of things stacked deep against the tall walls of the gallery. Wind a crank to receive a gallery guide from the Heath Robinson-esque contraption by the gallery doors and you set off on a grand tour, soaking up projects realised and waylaid, all brought together in a mad jumble of ideas and materials.

Heatherwick has succeeded because he combines so many disciplines in an era of cross-disciplinary chaos; he is, in the words of many media profiles, a 'Renaissance Man' in the mode of Leonardo or Buckminster Fuller, a polymath whose talent and curiosity lead him to constantly push for fresh new solutions that make the rest of the world look staid and reactionary.

There's a faint whiff of sour grapes from the architectural community, who grumble about commissions for buildings going to someone who is manifestly not an architect. We suspect this is because Heatherwick has almost single-handedly reclaimed the 'designer-as-hero' narrative from the architectural profession, and architects miss the reflected glory.

Heatherwick is undeniably talented and engaging, but there's also a strong vein of humour running throughout, a quality almost entirely absent from the design profession as a whole. Heatherwick and his team never descend into whimsy or the clumsy 'quoting' of Post Modernism. Instead, ideas are allowed to evolve, taking the technical expertise of the studio along for the ride.

This is perhaps his most important legacy - the reintroduction of the atelier. Heatherwick Studio brings together some 80 professionals, including architects, designers, technicians and writers, and their approach is unified and coherent. Of course, cross-disciplinary studios are a mainstay of modern practice, but few designers can lay claim to such a broad spectrum of experience. For this reason, Heatherwick is a tough act to imitate, let alone follow, leaving one of Britain's brightest - and still youngest - design talents with the world at his feet.

ADDRESS

V&A South Kensington
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

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The Danish Pavilion: 'Wellfairytale' by Big architects
The Danish have decided to move their Little Mermaid statue, along with a supertanker full of water from the harbour, to Shanghai. 'It is more efficient to move the Little Mermaid to China than to move 1.3b Chinese to Copenhagen,' remarked BIG architects and the 2+1 Ideas Agency. The statue will sit at the base of a swirling velodrome, where 1,500 Danish bicycles will carry visitors through the exhibits. Meanwhile, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei will design a temporary sculpture to fill the space left by the mermaid.

For this year's Shanghai Expo, countries around the globe have been locked in battle to produce the most show-stopping pavilion and secure the attention of all-important Chinese businesses.

In our May issue (W*134), we showed Thomas Heatherwick's playful and subversive design for brand Britain, dubbed 'The Hairy Cube', and discovered the architect's thinking behind its conception. But now it's time to give other nations a chance. Here, we show some of the most arresting pavilions for the forthcoming Expo, whose theme this year is: 'Better City, Better Life.

The Dutch Pavilion: 'Happy Street’ by John Kormeling

 'I love the fact that one country has turned their Expo site into a fairground,' said one rival Expo pavilion director about the Dutch effort. The upbeat pavilion is a Dutch street that has been looped into a figure of eight (a lucky number in China) and raised into the sky. Each of the 26 houses along the curving street is dedicated to a different topic, from energy conservation to the way the Dutch have mastered the use of space. At the end of the loop sits a giant yellow tulip-shaped crown, which, fittingly, is the VIP room.

The Chinese Pavilion: 'Oriental Crown' by He Jingtang 

The Chinese pavilion is the biggest, tallest and most expensive building on the Expo site. Built from interlaced red beams locked together with traditional Chinese dougong brackets, the inverted ziggurat is visible from miles around. But then, having spent almost £40bn on the Expo (roughly twice the budget of the Beijing Olympics), the Chinese were determined to make an impressive pavilion. Visitors will get a 40-minute tour that will include a trip in a cable car. A vision of China's future low-carbon cities is also promised.

The Japanese Pavilion: 'Purple Silkworm' by Yutaka Hikosaka

 Also known as Purple Silkworm Island, this is the biggest and most expensive pavilion that Japan has built for a World Expo. The cocoon-shaped pavilion is made from the world's first 'pillow membrane', built from amorphous solar cells. Collected rainwater will be sprayed over the membrane to keep it cool as it powers the displays. Once inside, visitors can tread on electricity-generating floorboards, test-drive Toyota's one-person transport pod, and listen to violin-playing robots. Canon is also set to unveil its new 3D camera.

The Macau Pavilion: 'Rabbit Lantern' by Carlos Marreiros 

No, it's not a bunny girl from one of Macau's swankiest casinos, but a giant silver rabbit lantern, the kind Macau-born architect Carlos Marreiros remembers playing with as a child. The mega-structure is a glass case lit by colour-shifting LED lights powered by solar panels, while its head and tail are detachable balloons. Marreiros says it can be recycled when its six months are up. The 19.99m-tall rabbit marks the year (1999) when the former Portuguese colony was handed back to China. Visitors will find it sitting just a bunny hop away from the Chinese pavilion.

The Mascot: 'Haibao' by Wu Yongjian 

You can barely walk a block in Shanghai without coming across the smiley, quiff-haired blue Expo mascot, Haibao. He pops up in topiary form, in wicker, in plastic and on dominos. His creator, Wu Yongjian, spent over a month working on the waving mascot, which was picked from almost 27,000 entries. 'Haibao is inspired by Chinese calligraphy and represents the cultural uniqueness of Shanghai,' says Wu. The mascot, which looks like the Chinese character for 'people', has already learned to talk with a clipped British accent for the Expo's website.

British designer Thomas Heatherwick is to open an exhibition of new work at London's Haunch of Venison Gallery this week.

Following on from last year's 'Extrusions' show - which featured a series of benches made from ribbons of extruded aluminum - Heatherwick's latest offering, 'Spun', will showcase a series of five, extra-terrestrial-style chairs.

Shown in both brushed and mirror-polished steel and copper, the chairs - all of which resemble gigantic spinning tops -- are formed from a single profile, rotated 360º.

Constructed from six separate cylindrical forms - made with metal spinning techniques, most commonly used to produce industrial kitchen equipment and timpani drums - Heatherwick then welds the component parts to create the spiralling volumes.

Part alien seating unit, part oversized plaything - the chairs can be angled to spin freely around the space. The peripheral edges of Heatherwick's chairs are cleverly rimmed with soft leather, to prevent damage to the floor.

ADDRESS

Haunch of Venison
6 Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3ET

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