Thomas Heatherwick doesn’t drink coffee. And as for coffee tables, well, he thinks they’re a bit naff. But that didn’t stop one he designed, simply entitled Plank – which emerged from a brief during his MA at the Royal College of Art (RCA) – being included in the Design Council’s Great Expectations international touring exhibition, as an example of innovative British design.
‘I suppose that was my departure gate in furniture, given a brief to make a coffee table!’ admits Heatherwick, who has gone on to design city squares, bridges, a Buddhist temple and the largest outdoor sculpture in the UK. Oh… and handbags, too. But we can’t talk about that yet – although the 32-year old designer reveals they are for ‘a French manufacturer’.
‘I think a coffee table is quite a comic piece of furniture, and quite naff,’ he remarks. Heatherwick, who admits to finding furniture design a bit ‘fussy’, decided to keep his coffee table brief simple. ‘I tend to make models instead of drawings when I start a project, so I started by folding some bits of paper and came up with the idea of a coffee table that folds back into its original form.’ The Plank is exactly as its name suggests – a straight wooden plank with four joints that fold out, turning the whole into a bench or coffee table.
But it is through site-specific designs, rather than furniture, that Heatherwick has made a name for himself. Graduating from the RCA in 1994, he went on to establish the Thomas Heatherwick Studio, a multi-disciplinary practice employing professionals from the fields of architecture, 3D design, landscape architecture, product design and structural engineering.
In 1998, his studio won a British Design and Art Direction (D&AD) Gold Award for an extraordinary window display created for Harvey Nichols as part of London Fashion Week. The 200-metre-long piece wove in and out of the shop’s front windows, climbed up the façade and then swept back into the interior window spaces.
Heatherwick’s latest project, although yet to go into production, is already making national headlines. B of the Bang will be a 56-metre-high sculpture – the largest in the UK – adjacent to the City of Manchester Stadium. Comprising of 180 steel spikes inclined on a 30 degree angle, the piece was commissioned by New East Manchester after winning an international competition to mark the success of the Commonwealth Games (the stadium will now be home to Manchester City Football Club). The title of the work is based on a remark made by Olympic Gold Medallist, Linford Christie, who commented he started one of his races on the ‘B of the Bang.’
Heatherwick explains that he wanted to create a structure that matched the full height of the stadium, which towers over smaller buildings in the area. ‘And so, that’s why this idea came up to build something as tall as the stadium, to give it “a little friend”,’ he chuckles. Like Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, rising above the A1 at the entrance to Tyneside, and Heatherwick’s own A13 roundabout designs, B of the Bang is similar in terms of ‘landmarking’ a busy hub. ‘It’s actually more of a gateway, because it straddles a main junction. Also, it’s on a main pedestrian route, so everyone who walks into a football match will walk through the legs of it.’
In the nature of true controversy only major public artworks seem to attract, critics have already pointed out the cost of the piece has doubled to £1.5 million. The burgeoning arts scene in England’s north is never far from the media’s critical eye, and site-specific artworks are a popular matter for public opinion, as proven by sculptures like the Angel of the North.
It’s not the first time one of Heatherwick’s designs have sparked significant public interest. This time last year, Newcastle inhabitants were umm-ing and ahh-ing over the transformation of a dilapidated pedestrian route in the city, into the Blue Carpet Square. The ‘blue carpet’ is in fact an innovative alternative to dull paving – created from plastic and fragments of blue-coloured glass. The project threw up all sorts of challenges, in the form of health and safety, but more specifically, designing a completely new material from scratch – a process which took four years to perfect, Heatherwick recalls.
‘I’m interested in designing extraordinary things using extraordinary materials, and this [project] was very much dependent on the material,’ he says. Although the square is often labelled as an artwork, for Heatherwick it was more about finding a solution to a problem. It’s a philosophy he continues to apply to public art commissions, including one of his biggest projects to date, which has seen Heatherwick turn his hand to town planning. As lead artist in a programme to redevelop Milton Keynes, one of the UK’s youngest cities, Heatherwick is advising city planners on realising a vision to take the city into the next 20 to 30 years. For this reason, Heatherwick is loathe to pigeon-hole himself as an ‘artist’.
‘When it’s called ‘public art’, everyone thinks: “Art! Art!”’, he exclaims. ‘I resist these things being called art, very much. Because I don’t consider myself an artist, I consider myself a designer. Which means I am trying to solve problems, and hopefully, do that in a special way.’
