A tiny canal bridge in London doesn’t just open for boat traffic, it curls up like a caterpillar. A suave redesign of London’s familiar double-decker bus invites passengers to the upper deck with a curving ribbon window that follows a winding staircase. An exposition building in Shanghai is covered in what look like porcupine quills. A pier in the Hudson is reimagined as a miniature island park with an amphitheater nestled within Lilliputian hills.
All are the work of Thomas Heatherwick, a polymath British designer of sculpture, furniture and architecture who leaps boundaries few artists and designers dare to cross.
Trained in art and design, he has applied his talent to handbags, piers and a newsstand made of paper. “I was always interested in ideas and innovations,” said Mr. Heatherwick, a wiry 45-year-old whose face is framed by ringlets. He was interviewed in New York for the opening of his first major American exhibition, “Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio” (through Jan. 3). It fills the third-floor gallery of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum with models and photographs of some projects that have confounded expectations.
They include the enormously popular British pavilion for Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo, colloquially called the Seed Cathedral; the structure comprised 66,000 thin, waving acrylic “quills” into which were cast 250,000 seeds that had been collected worldwide. With its single, powerful idea, the pavilion won the Expo’s top prize for design, and drew eight million visitors.
Another work was a spectacular cauldron for London’s 2012 Olympics that drew together 204 flaming petals — “surely one of the most enduring images of London 2012,” The Guardian wrote, “for its symbolism as well as its technical grace.” Those cemented Mr. Heatherwick’s reputation as someone who could pull a crowd-pleasing architectural rabbit out of a hat.
That has brought him large public projects that he and his clients think will transform neighborhoods, and even cities. Rich companies and wealthy philanthropists hope the Heatherwick allure will melt skepticism about projects that appear to advance their patrons’ agendas, especially when they involve public funds.
His latest project for the Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan may become a new city landmark; for now it remains shrouded in secrecy. Stephen M. Ross, chairman of Related Companies, a Hudson Yards developer, compared it to the Eiffel Tower in Fortune magazine two years ago, but one person who saw the design at that time described a concept much more grandiose than the developers’ original idea for a sculpture on a plaza fronting Hudson Yards’ vertical mall. Mr. Heatherwick envisioned a “vessel” that could occupy a large part of the plaza, shot through with dozens of stairways. Shaped like a chalice, it would rise higher than the adjacent, cavernous Culture Shed, the 100-foot-high international arts center also planned for Hudson Yards. Related and the co-developer, Oxford Properties, refuse to discuss Mr. Heatherwick’s design.
If it has not been trimmed back, Mr. Heatherwick’s vessel may prove to be an extraordinary work of public art — or some may take it as an overscaled theme-park attraction that litters yet another public space. Mr. Heatherwick offered no details, at the request of his clients, promising only “something that engages the city, not something you just stand back and look at.”
Because the developers bought the rights to build over the West Side rail yards, Mr. Heatherwick’s work, said to be in construction, does not require public review.
The Hudson Yards project comes after Mr. Heatherwick thrust himself into the contentious politics and faltering finances of Hudson River Park when he was named in 2012 to design a replacement for the crumbling Pier 54. He proposed a 2.7-acre park island, called Pier 55, atop pilings capped with giant flower pots that would support a densely planted, intricately picturesque landscape.
Madelyn Wils, president and chief executive of the Hudson River Park Trust, wanted to improve on a 2005 design for the pier. Needing private financing, she invited Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, with headquarters nearby. “I was interested if it could be more ambitious both architecturally and as a performance space,” Mr. Diller explained. They were smitten with the Heatherwick Shanghai pavilion. (Mr. Diller called it “the most incredible thing I had ever seen.”) Though they considered Santiago Calatrava and Bjarke Ingels, of the Copenhagen and New York firm BIG, Ms. Wils and Mr. Diller hired Mr. Heatherwick after hearing him discuss ideas. “It was clear the project was going to be his,” Mr. Diller said. “That’s what begat something more than a pier with shrubs.”
Mr. Heatherwick drew a topographically complex island, far more elaborate than public financing could support. A 62-foot-high hillock tops a grassy bowl that opens to vistas of the city. Fissures in the landscape frame river views from intimate passageways, one of which can host spontaneous performances. A 700-seat amphitheater replaces Pier 54’s scaffolded stage.
The City of New York has agreed to contribute $17 million to the project. Mr. Diller, with his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, will cover the remaining expense — “whatever it costs,” Mr. Diller said. (The latest estimate is $130 million.) Mr. Diller has also promised to maintain Pier 55 and run the amphitheater for 20 years. The Hudson River Park Trust plans to complete construction in 2018, but civic groups asked a court in June to halt construction until the project undergoes a new environmental review and is approved by the Legislature.
Steps away from the High Line, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Ms. von Furstenberg’s fashion company headquarters, the pier is likely to further fuel the district’s transformation into an enclave catering to wealthy shoppers, tourists and residents.
“Why are we, the public, so often the audience and not the client?” asked the design critic Alexandra Lange on the real estate website Curbed. “Why can’t we set the agenda?” She would like to see more philanthropists “use narcissism for good,” by spreading their millions to catalyze development and investment in needier parts of the city (as the cash raised by Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project does with community parks and gardens).
Mr. Heatherwick’s London Garden Bridge design has come under similar criticism for seeking to add a $272-million Thames River crossing in a part of central London that is already packed with amenities. Almost 300 full-grown trees and 2,000 shrubs would sprout from the 1,200-foot-long span that proposes to link the South Bank just east of the national theaters to the Temple tube stop on the northern embankment. The pedestrian garden bridge was the brainchild of the activist and actress Joanna Lumley (“Absolutely Fabulous”), who lobbied the London mayor, Boris Johnson, whom she has known since he was four, to build it, but Transport for London is reviewing alleged irregularities in Mr. Heatherwick’s selection.
The man at the center of these controversies has shown a relentless curiosity since childhood, an entertainment DNA, some might call it.
Mr. Heatherwick’s grandmother was a textile designer, his mother a jewelry maker. A grandfather’s home was filled with engineering books and gadgets. That wonder at the possibility of invention drives his projects; no signature style is discernible among the 43 works at the Cooper Hewitt exhibition. His 2011 Spun Chair, looking like an oversized top, is both elegant sculpture and functional toy.
“He’s always looking for a way to create the unexpected out of the everyday,” said Brooke Hodge, the Cooper Hewitt’s deputy director, who organized the traveling exhibition for the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
As Mr. Heatherwick’s projects have grown larger, and entangle private wealth with government financing, they present the public with a quandary: Should communities accept the unasked-for gift of a design perhaps more ambitious than what might result from limited public funds, developed in a public process?
Certainly private philanthropy, allied with great art, design and architecture, has given most cities great landmarks: parks that were once private gardens, universities built with private wealth, and museum collections made magnificent through private munificence.
With public participation now seen as necessary, how far should city officials push to achieve community goals when the gift’s withdrawal is at risk? The prodigious imagination of Thomas Heatherwick does not make those decisions easy.