Thomas Heatherwick, Architecture's Showman

Thomas Heatherwick, Architecture’s Showman His giant new structure aims to be an Eiffel Tower for New York. Is it genius or folly? February 26, 2018 | By IAN PARKER Stephen Ross, the seventy-seven-year-old billionaire property developer and the owner of the Miami Dolphins, has a winningly informal, old-school conversational style. On a recent morning in Manhattan, he spoke of the moment, several years ago, when he decided that the plaza of one of his projects, Hudson Yards—a Doha-like cluster of towers on Manhattan’s West Side—needed a magnificent object at its center. He recalled telling himself, “It has to be big. It has to be monumental.” He went on, “Then I said, ‘O.K. Who are the great sculptors?’ ” (Ross pronounced the word “sculptures.”) Before long, he met with Thomas Heatherwick, the acclaimed British designer of ingenious, if sometimes unworkable, things. Ross told me that there was a presentation, and that he was very impressed by Heatherwick’s “what do you call it—Television? Internet?” An adviser softly said, “PowerPoint?” Ross was in a meeting room at the Time Warner Center, which his company, Related, built and partly owns, and where he lives and works. We had a view of Columbus Circle and Central Park. The room was filled with models of Hudson Yards, which is a mile and a half southwest, between Thirtieth and Thirty-third Streets, and between Tenth Avenue and the West Side Highway. There, Related and its partner, Oxford Properties Group, are partway through erecting the complex, which includes residential space, office space, and a mall—with such stores as Neiman Marcus, Cartier, and Urban Decay, and a Thomas Keller restaurant designed to evoke “Mad Men”—most of it on a platform built over active rail lines. Ross refers to the project, which will yield eigh- teen million square feet in sixteen buildings on twenty-eight acres, and cost about twenty-five billion dollars, as the largest private-sector real-estate development in American history. Ross looked down on a model of the plaza, which featured a miniature version of the structure commissioned from Heatherwick: a copper-colored, urn-shaped lattice of a hundred and fifty-four staircases and eighty land- ings. It looked like scaffolding that had been readied for the construction of a hundred-and-fifty-foot head of Ozymandias. Ross called it “my baby.” For the moment, it’s known as the Vessel—or, officially, as Vessel. (Ross longs for the public to give it an affectionate nickname.) One can think of it as a compressed extension of the High Line, or as the site of a perpetual evacuation drill; it’s a proposed future venue for downhill moun- tain-bike races. Starting sometime next year, it will be open to the public, via free, timed-entry tickets. Ross’s evident delight in the piece—even as some of his associates wonder about its size and purpose, and its cost, which exceeds a hundred and fifty million dollars—derives partly from his confidence that, in time, it will be- come “the icon for New York,” just as the Eiffel Tower is for Paris. The Vessel is about as wide as it is tall, and will fit nicely into an Instagram photograph. Ross recalled a work of art that, in the late nineteen-nineties, was incorporated into the façade of a Related development on the south side of Union Square. To his regret, his company took the advice of the Public Art Fund and the Municipal Art Society. “It was a disaster,” he said. “That thing where the smoke comes out? Whatever the hell it is.” He was talking about Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel’s “The Metronome,” an unloved combination of elements: a string of L.E.D. numbers displaying both the time of day and the amount of time left in the day; puffs of steam emitted from a large hole; a protruding human hand. Ross said, sadly, “I wanted to put a Frank Stella there. He wanted to do a great thing.” (Ross regularly attends Art Basel Miami Beach, and his collection of modern painting and sculpture includes works by Fernando Botero, Jim Dine, and Niki de Saint Phalle.) For Hudson Yards, Ross told himself, “I’m not giving this to anyone else.” He made the plaza’s centerpiece a personal project, and started with the wise observation that “every visitor, and every New Yorker, wants to go to Rockefeller Center during Christmas season, to see the tree.” He continued, “So I said, ‘I need a three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day tree, O.K.?’ ” He began to ask artists for proposals. In the fall of 2012, on a bye week for the Dolphins, when his wife was away in Paris, Ross visited Storm King, the upstate museum of large outdoor art works. He was joined by Jay Cross, the Related executive in charge of Hudson Yards. Cross brought along a monograph that had been published in advance of a Heatherwick retro- spective, “Designing the Extraordinary,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. Ross leafed through the book as they drove up the Hudson Valley. He saw a bench, made from extruded aluminum, with an alluringly rippled surface; a motorized pedestrian bridge that can curl up into a ball, like a wood louse, on one side of a waterway in London. And Cross reminded Ross of the work that Heatherwick had revealed a few months ear- lier, at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. Two hundred and four copper cones attached to long stalks—one for each nation—came together, in a mechanical flourish, to create a cauldron. Ross said, “Bring him in.” Joanna Lumley, the British actress who starred in “Absolutely Fabulous,” is a friend of Heatherwick’s, and often refers to him, fondly, as a child. She has said that, after his early successes, Londoners began asking, “What can this brilliant boy do next?” Speaking on a panel in 2014, she called him an “extraordinary and brilliant boy.” Heatherwick is forty-eight, employs nearly two hundred people, and has two children. (He is separated from their mother.) But he projects an air of otherworldliness and innocence. His hair is worn tousled—with a curl or two dangling over his forehead—and his wardrobe is oriented toward very loose pants, baggy white shirts, and vests. He gives the impression of a child apprentice in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. His firm, Heatherwick Studio, is on a busy street in King’s Cross, in a red brick Edwardian building that the company shares with a two-star chain hotel. The studio, reached through a courtyard, first presents a visitor with a view of shelves holding dozens of design oddities, such as might be displayed in a Victorian museum or a Paul Smith menswear store. These include a Japanese mechanical lucky cat, spoons with unusually long handles, an engine part, and perfume bottles designed by the studio for Christian Louboutin. Heatherwick Studio’s Rolling Bridge. The curling, thirty-nine-foot bridge was installed in central London in 2004. | Photographs courtesy Steve Speller Heatherwick has an earnest, expressive way of talking: wide eyes, little shakes of the head. He seems to be forever making the discovery that he has said something delightfully apt. After the Olympics, there was a brief period of optimism in British civic life—a wave of national amazement that the event hadn’t ended in disaster and humiliation. Heatherwick helped to create that moment, and then came to represent it. In 2013, he became a Commander of the British Empire. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London between 2008 and 2016, and now the British Foreign Secretary, compared him to Michelangelo and invited him to join a trade delegation to China. British GQ included him on its annual list of the country’s best-dressed men. He was praised for his inventiveness, across a range of scales, using a range of materials. Heatherwick has a gift for discovering, in a commission for an object, the opportunity for an event: movement, spectacle, play. Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect, who has collaborated with him, recently said that, unlike many designers, “Thomas is focussed on the jaw-dropping centerpiece—the ‘wow’ moment.” Heatherwick tends to achieve ef- fect more through texture than through form—by, say, stitching or layering a multitude of near-identical parts to make a highly conspicuous whole. His sculpture for an atrium at the Wellcome Trust, in London, is made of a hundred and forty thousand suspended glass spheres, each the size of a plum, arranged into cloudlike forms. He has proposed building a footbridge entirely from a welded cluster of stainless-steel disks. His U.K. Pavil- ion for Expo 2010, in Shanghai, was a rounded cube formed from sixty thousand translucent acrylic rods that waved in the wind like bullrushes. The design was widely considered a triumph. Rowan Moore, the architecture critic of the London Observer, called it “outstandingly memorable,” noting that “we expect buildings neither to be hairy nor in motion.” Heatherwick Studio employs architects, but Heatherwick is not an architect. His work could be described as a celebration of never having absorbed, in a formal architectural education, dogma about designing things to be flush and taut. “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work,” Ingels said. “An element of steampunk, almost.” Heatherwick largely avoids self-deprecation. Last year, he wrote in the Evening Standard that his scheme for a tree-covered “Garden Bridge” over the Thames, in central London, was “extraordinary.” He has been known to sign his name with an exclamation point, and puts effort into couching even a passing thought as a design insight.

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