CP Loves... Thomas Heatherwick

by Jessica Hazel.

Chances are, anyone reading this was one of the worldwide audience of 4 billion, glued to the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony on Friday night. It was described by TV commentator Hazel Irving as "breathtaking in its beauty and ambition". Even the hardest of critics will have found it hard to remain unimpressed at several poignant moments in the evening, the climax of which being the lighting of the Olympic caldron, a spectacle awarded to those who sat through hours and hours of literally every country under the sun parading out.




The brains behind this amazing feat of design were those of Thomas Heatherwick or more specifically, the Heatherwick studio which is recognised for its work in urban infrastructure, architecture, sculpture, furniture design and strategic thinking. The studio was established in 1994 by Thomas Heatherwick and its team members come from a multitude of disciplines including product design, model making, fabrication, architecture, fine art and landscape design.



Thomas is an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA and a Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from four British universities - Sheffield Hallam, Brighton, Dundee and Manchester Metropolitan. He has won the Prince Philip Designers Prize and in 2006, was the youngest practitioner to be appointed a Royal Designer for Industry.

Heatherwick Studio's Associate Directors include the former Director of Regeneration and Environment of the London Borough of Southwark, Fred Manson, who commissioned Tate Modern, Peckham Library and the Millennium Bridge; and the structural engineer Ron Packman.



Heatherwick Studio operates from premises in Kings Cross, central London. Part of the studio has always been a workshop for making models, experimental pieces and prototypes. Previous projects have included using an electron microscope for designing a building, producing a new bus for London which used less fuel, edible business cards, a new mosque, a meadow in the centre of a city and generating the form of a building in less than a minute. All sounds very impressive but it is the magnificent Olympic cauldron which will make Heatherwick a household name across the globe.

The cauldron consisted of 204 polished copper petals, all unique to one another and inscribed with the name of each of the competing countries. A representative from each country was seen carrying a petal as the international teams paraded into the stadium. They then attached their petals, one by one, to a giant flower developing in the middle of the stadium, surrounded by a crowd of ever-growing athletes. Once all the artifacts were in position, a few petals were lit by torch-bearing competitors, sparking a chain reaction which eventually had all of the cauldrons aflame. Once the last petal was alight, the first petal to be lit rose up silently on its long, fine stem, slowly followed by all the others until all 204 petals were alight in a great unity of flame, symbolising the coming together of all nations in peace. It was a powerful moment which will stick in people's memories for a long time to come. At the closing ceremony, the cauldron will once again open and divide and each country will collect their petal and take it home with them as a trophy. It's like a flower which will only bloom for the duration of the competition and then will cease to exist, a beautiful, delicate and jaw-droppingly impressive feat of design and engineering.



Heatherwick Studio's other clients include: property developers, publicly limited companies, sovereign wealth funds, religious communities, the British government, local authorities, charitable trusts, a school, a hospital, a luggage company, landed estates, museums and private individuals.

The studio's first book Thomas Heatherwick: Making by Thomas Heatherwick and Maisie Rowe was published by Thames & Hudson in May 2012.

Jessica Hazel is a writer, blogger and director of Smoking Gun Vintage