Thomas Heatherwick
The inventive designer.
Thomas Heatherwick makes everything from buses and bridges to the Olympic cauldron for London 2012. His studio blends design, architecture and engineering.
Thomas Heatherwick was born in London in 1970. His mother worked with beads and jewellery, and his grandmother was a textile designer. He studied three-dimensional design in Manchester and at the Royal College of Art in London. There he met the designer Terence Conran, who encouraged him. In 1994 he founded Heatherwick Studio in London.
The studio became known for inventive projects that move between design, sculpture and architecture. The Rolling Bridge at Paddington Basin in London, from 2004, is a footbridge that curls itself up. The UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, known as the Seed Cathedral, consisted of some 60,000 acrylic rods with seeds inside. He also designed a new version of the London double-decker bus, which entered service in 2012.
For the 2012 London Olympics he created the Olympic cauldron, in which 204 copper petals, one for each participating nation, rose and came together to form a single flame. Larger buildings followed, such as the Zeitz MOCAA art museum in a former grain silo in Cape Town, from 2017, with vaults carved out of the silos, and the Coal Drops Yard shopping district in London.
In New York the studio created the staircase sculpture Vessel at Hudson Yards, from 2019, and Little Island, a park on piles in the Hudson River. Vessel was closed after several suicides and reopened with raised barriers. The planned Garden Bridge across the Thames was abandoned in 2017 after heavy costs and political criticism.
Heatherwick now runs a large studio with hundreds of staff. He has campaigned against what he calls boring buildings and for a more human architecture, notably in his 2023 book Humanise. He is seen as one of the most celebrated and most debated designers of our time.