Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/496780
154 CULTURED "I've tried not to have an overarching aesthetic or singular style." —Thomas Heatherwick E very now and again, there comes into architecture a mad genius—a tinkerer-polymath who seems determined to engage, or at least dabble, in all the varied aspects of the building trade. And at 45, still a babe in arms in architectural years, Thomas Heatherwick has already established himself as the current claimant to the title. Since founding his own office in 1994, Heatherwick has completed a suite of projects that have made his reputation both in his native England and around the world. For the 2012 London Olympics, his studio provided the official cauldron, a branched candelabrum whose mobile arms, fitted with copper petals, folded up into a single blazing torch at the opening of the games. In 2010, at the Shanghai Expo, his UK Pavilion stole the show, its 60,000 acrylic rods projecting in an uncanny cloud-like array. Even as hordes of designers grope toward ever more spectacular and iconic forms, Heatherwick seems to be working from the opposite end—not searching for new forms themselves, but retooling the basic assumptions concerning how forms get put together in the first place. Minutely reverse-engineering each individual project, Heatherwick hasn't had the time or inclination to consider his practice as a whole. "It's hard for me to be fully objective about my studio's work," says the architect. "From my point of view, I've tried to see each commission as its own thing, tried to hunt down solutions or outcomes one by one." But this season, he's beginning to take the broader view: A new retrospective, now open at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, shows the long sweep of his work over the last two decades, encompassing everything from handbags to neighborhoods; at the same time, a newly announced commission for an ambitious riverfront park in New York City will bring Heatherwick, and his unique design approach, under the microscope as never before. Born and raised in London, Heatherwick studied at the Royal College of Art, where he entered the sphere of designer, entrepreneur and all-around gadfly Terence Conran, who instantly hailed the young architect as the "Leonardo da Vinci of our times." A more apt comparison perhaps would be to Sir Christopher Wren, the 17th-century scientist-architect, who created St. Paul's Cathedral and its famous dome: like Wren, Heatherwick's intellectual formation has been startlingly diverse—he even trained with a silversmith as an undergraduate, an experience that years later would yield his spool-like rotation- molded Spun chairs. And like Wren, Heatherwick