Thomas　Heatherwick

Thomas Heatherwick

Born in London in 1971, Thomas Heatherwick was trained as a designer at Manchester Metropolitan University and at the Royal College of Art, London. He is an honorary fellow of the RIBA, a Royal Designer for Industry, a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art and has honorary doctorates from Sheffield Hallam, Manchester Metropolitan, Brighton and Dundee Universities. He founded his own studio in 1994, and won the title “Royal Designer for Industry” (RDI) in 2004.

Thomas Heatherwick was in Shanghai recently to see his design transform into a real building. Through design, he hoped to convey a brand-new image of the UK to the world, no longer represented by a conventional gentleman with hat, stick and cigar, but a person with humor and sensibility under a composed look, just like the designer himself.

Though he was viewed as a “modern Leonardo da Vinci” by his fellow countrymen by the time he was in his early thirties, Thomas was not widely known in China until he won the final design of UK Pavilion over big architectural names including Zaha Hadid.

His prizes include “Royal Designer for Industry”, the highest honor in industry design and the “Prince Philip Award”, the “Oscar Award” of civil engineering.

Thomas always gets inspired from breakthroughs in convention. Characterized by freshness and boldness, his projects surprise visitors with unimaginable material and creative layout that touch the boundary of imagination. New materials are seen everywhere in his work, such as metals, textiles and stones in irregular forms and sizes.

His renowned projects include “B of the Bang”- a monument for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, “Floating Staircase” in Longchamp Store in the SoHo District of New York City, and the world-famous “Rolling Bridge” in London, etc. However his creativity can be traced back to as early as his time in school.

Thomas studied 3D design at college. He was interested in architecture and was good at discovering intrinsic relations between the two. Afterwards he became the first engaged in architecture in the classroom. With a craze for architecture, he surprised the world with designs consisting of unique architectural symbols soon after.

Adopting at UK Pavilion a kind of “spirit”- seeds, Thomas liberated people’s minds again!

Rendering of UK Pavilion

Interior rendering of UK Pavilion

Why seeds?

“Nothing has more potential than seeds.” In the designer’s eye, the seed is the origin of everything. When asked what else is there to see in the future UK Pavilion, he replied in astonishment, “Isn’t 60,000 seeds enough for you?”

The next question was how to incorporate an ordinary seed with the pavilion.

The UK team borrowed 60,000 seeds from the Kew Millennium Seed Bank. Inspired by the amber wraped mosquito in “Jurassic Park”, the final design of the pavilion includes acrylic rods to pack those seeds.

The six-storey cubic structure will have 60,000, seven-meter-long transparent acrylic rods, each with a seed inside, extending outward and quivering in the breeze. Visitors can get a close view of them. In the daytime, each rod will draw daylight to illuminate the interior of “Palace of Seeds”; at night, light sources in the rods will allow the whole structure to glow. Outside the main building, there will be a football-pitch-sized open area in the unique form of “an unfolded packing sheet”, symbolizing that the palace is a gift from the United Kingdom to Expo 2010 Shanghai China.

“Stepping into the ‘Palace of Seeds’, you will have a dignified feeling of religion.” Thomas longs for the moment when Expo 2010 will have the opportunity to respond to the detail and imagination of it all.

Rendering of UK Pavilion