Last Sunday went down to London and managed to drag my brother down for two hours at Thomas Heatherwick's new exhibition at the V&A.
Thomas Heatherwick is not actually a qualified architect, but started designing buildings as part of his three dimensional design degree at Manchester Polytechnic. He concentrates a lot of his effort into the real process of making buildings and doesn't just leave the knowledge and skill for the workman. As a result most of his designing involves working with materials to scale and developing new ways to work with it that can be applied commercially. As a result his work is even more interesting and individual as well as inspiring.
A lot of attention and care was put into the end and preliminary work too which was interesting. Got me wondering if I shroud invest some more time in furthering my craft skills and join a joiners - which obviously I should. Next holiday I'm definitely going to have to find some work at a joiners, furniture makers or silk screen printers. Just anything which will help me develop some more 3D skills.
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| cone canopy outside v&a. didn't do much for the rain though... |
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| the cool pamphlet dispenser outside exhibition designed by the studio was broken that day. sadness. |
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outside
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| added bonuses; marvel at the beautiful V&A and crepe |
Inside the actual exhibition we weren't actually allowed to take photos so I'm relying on
itsnicethat.com/ and Thomas Heatherwick's site. The projects were all set out in their own little corners, I'm not sure what the order was though, but essentially they all involved talking around themes like the design process or involvement of other people (like Mary Portas!) and displayed the final model and many process models. It was really exciting recognising projects that I'd seen on his website right when I'd started reading Architecture and then seeing the small models for projects like Paperhouse, East Beach Cafe, UK Pavillion at Chinese Expo (which my housemate insists looks like a cats bum) and the rolling bridge, whose model was brilliant.
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| rolling bridge |
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| UK Pavillion |
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| Paper House |
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| East Beach Cafe |
But the process models were probably the most useful and insightful pieces. Things like the rolling wheel which created the membrane for the Creative Business Units, the cloth model for the temple and the modelling for the Harvey Nichols Shop display (which is probably my favourite of his products).
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| Harvey Nichols Installation |
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| foam cloth modeling |
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| Rolling wheel at the top |
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| London Buses and Crazy Abu Dhabi development |
