MOST PEOPLE WHO show up at Heatherwick Studio, on the ground floor of a nondescript concrete building in London’s King’s Cross, probably haven’t seen a topographical map since grade school. But here’s a whole wall of them, patchworked across an open-plan meeting area—spiky, ice-capped mountains, placid turquoise seas and hollowed-out plains abutting each other as in some dystopian classroom lesson on climate change. Sitting at a conference table beneath them, in cargo pants and a billowing white linen shirt, is the designer Thomas Heatherwick, studying the contours of Spain and musing about the unexpected, often profound ways people are influenced by their surroundings.  “It’s amazing how 3-D changes your understanding of a country,” he says. “It almost helps you to understand how people feel in different areas, and why some places have a character and identity that’s been literally shaped by the land—not just by the local minerals or food grown and consumed, for instance.” The designer is in his element. “I’ve got a lot more than this,” he says, glancing around the maps’ jagged perimeter, “but we need places to show our own projects. I started thinking, Should I put them up on the ceiling?”  Welcome to the bumpy, nonconforming world of Thomas Heatherwick, whose drive to invent singularly alluring objects, buildings and places has propelled him into architecture’s first rank—and landed Heatherwick Studio some of the most talked-about commissions of the past decade. His design for the Olympic cauldron at the 2012 London Games, which choreographed 204 copper torches into a single flaming vessel, was a crowd-pleasing tour de force. The following year, he was awarded a CBE from the queen. His prize-winning U.K. Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo enticed more than eight million visitors to venture inside what looked like a five-story dandelion puffball to witness an exhibition on seeds and biodiversity. In New York, his vision for an undulating park and performance center hovering over the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side has drawn comparisons to Avatar. And the corporate headquarters he’s creating for 10,000 Google employees in Mountain View, California—a collaboration with Danish architect Bjarke Ingels ’s firm, BIG—features a skein of glass roofs tented over a leafy and endlessly mutable campus. Despite recent regulatory setbacks that may ultimately scale back its size, the project is expected to mark a leap forward for the workplace, with robots and permeable photovoltaic glass membranes figuring into its construction, as well as lightweight ramps allowing employees to scooter between work stations.  Heatherwick, 45, is slight and birdlike, with a high-pitched voice and a style that suggests a rumpled grad student more than plumed starchitect. His unprepossessing manner plays well among a workforce (housed at three locations, spread over a few city blocks) that now numbers about 180; when a staffer distractedly trips over a chair—one of the studio’s toplike Spun series, designed in 2007—on her way to the office kitchen, he’s quick to jump up and help.  Since launching his own studio in 1994, fresh out of the Royal College of Art, Heatherwick has sought out colleagues who share his interest in solving design problems at any scale and getting hands dirty in the process—still the foundation of the practice as it juggles more than 20 active projects on four continents, from the studio’s annual Christmas card to London’s Garden Bridge to a new financial center on the Bund in Shanghai. The staff includes photographers, textile designers, model makers and landscape designers alongside digital technologists, engineers and some 100 trained architects. (Also family: Heatherwick’s father, an educator, advises three days a week on organizational matters, and his eight-year-old twins stop by often—he is separated from their mother, a landscape designer.)  “The thing about Thomas is that every project seems to come out of a completely different burst of imagination,” says media mogul Barry Diller, who first encountered the designer’s work at Shanghai Expo and is working with him on Manhattan’s Pier 55 Park, which Diller and his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, are helping to fund. “Nothing looks similar—there’s no linkage. I think he’s the most creative, interesting architect—other than Frank Gehry, whom I adore—alive. They share a kind of genius for imagination in its purest form.”  That gift for freestyle invention is palpable in the Pier 55 commission, which began, as most of Heatherwick’s projects do, with exhaustive field research. Immediately obvious to the design team was how marginalized the building zone was by the adjacent West Side Highway; to distance itself, the new pier could rise up high over the water like a ship’s deck, a practical solution in post–Hurricane Sandy New York. It could also express structure through its components, a Heatherwick hallmark that lends human scale to a large project. As a boy, the designer had visited a great aunt in Manhattan and seen the West Side’s decrepit piers, their tops peeled away to expose battered pilings. He remembered being mesmerized by “these fingers reaching up, these hands reaching out—your mind starts to whir. In some ways this project is a love poem to those piling fields.” The final plan, now in regulatory review and expected to debut in 2019, shows each of the 280 pilings bearing a large vessel of landscaped earth skyward, like a chorus of raised palms, and connecting with its neighbors to form a rippling whole.  Many of Heatherwick’s most spectacular creations—such as the Rolling Bridge in London that curls up like a seahorse’s tail—convey an improbability that’s almost Seussian. There’s no question the designer enjoys playing to a broad audience. This eagerness to connect, along with a passion for experimentation, has made him a hero to some young architects, for whom standard architectural discourse is increasingly irrelevant. Heatherwick’s outlook celebrates the nobility of a single idea rather than a formal belief system or even a personal style. In his view, “There’s been something evangelical at work in architecture—‘This is the answer! This is it!’—but I think that there isn’t one answer. Each project is its own answer.” He denies any formal influence—or even, despite the tendril-like organic and twisted shapes that permeate his work, a predisposition to curves over straight lines. “The world is full of postwar boxes,” he observes. “If the world were full of curved things, I’d probably be the very first one to say, ‘No, let’s do something square.’ To me, form making is a response to what’s around.”  Although the designer’s lack of a signature style was an early career challenge, canny marketing, in the form of a hefty monograph and several traveling exhibitions, and some extraordinary public commissions have propelled him forward. “Thomas’s projects captivate the public imagination on a very deep level,” says his friend Amanda Levete, of the London-based architecture firm AL_A. “They are inventive, and invention is a very British thing—in the history of British design and engineering back to Victorian times, it has been perceived as a British attribute. And Thomas amplifies that. He is a very beguiling character.”  Heatherwick grew up in north London surrounded by creative role models. His mother was an artist and an expert in bead craft who kept a shop on Portobello Road; his father was an educator and a pianist who by age 14 had won a prestigious national award for young musicians. One grandmother was a textile designer, the other a housemaid at Windsor Castle. Tagging along with his parents to crafts fairs and other places where making was in progress left an indelible mark on him, and by the age of 9, he recalls, his bedroom was a maelstrom of “junk and tests and projects.” He studied 3-D design at Manchester Polytechnic because it allowed him the latitude to experiment with materials and hands-on construction, from jewelry making to the fabrication of a garden pavilion, his senior thesis project. He built another structure for his master’s degree program in product design at the Royal College of Art.  Heatherwick’s architectural ambitions were clear, but somewhere along the educational road, he’d noticed that architecture seemed to be about “white paper, white desks and dull computer screens” and that the makers were having all the fun. “It felt slightly like the emperor’s new clothes,” the designer says, twisting around in his chair as if to address a crowd. “ ‘Can anyone else not see this?’ ” He also began to draw conclusions about the two-dimensional world that architects worked in and the flatness of the built landscape. “It had nothing to do with classical versus modern detailing,” he says. “People were not understanding how light falls on surfaces, and what gives the necessary interest to make a large-scale object, such as a building, have a human scale that makes you feel comfortable around it. The aspiration I’d often seen was toward perfection, which actually isn’t in our human nature. We tend to like people who have quirks and tics and peculiarities.” His almost folksy anthropomorphizing implies that the built world owes much more to us than modernism and its progeny have delivered. Without a degree in architecture, but with a newly discovered calling, Heatherwick opened his own practice. Multidimensional design at a human scale has been the primary focus of his work ever since.  Both qualities emerge with audacity in the Aberystwyth artists’ studios in Wales, a series of work spaces for 18 artists and arts organizations that Heatherwick completed in 2008, a time when building from the ground up was a rare opportunity for his young firm. The tiny budget precluded formal pyrotechnics, which meant the facades would have to single-handedly deliver a memorable sense of place. Materials research is often a conceptual starting point for Heatherwick, and in this case his team began analyzing off-the-shelf cladding systems and cheap sheet metals—“looking for the logic that would lead to an idea,” he explains. Steel was the most durable product, but it was affordable only in paper-thin sheets that buckled almost instantly. Still, everyone was intrigued. Crinkled steel, it turned out from their workshop experiments, had the pleasing familiarity of kitchen tinfoil, with irregularities that seemed almost handmade. Maybe the answer lay in embracing the dents and dings instead of seeing them as deficiencies? Team members invented a crank-operated roller that could uniformly mangle the steel; they also clad the buildings themselves on site to save labor costs. In the misty coastal light of Aberystwyth, the buildings look buoyant, almost like a clutch of silvery party balloons.  Delivering such routine encounters with beauty has put Heatherwick Studio on the radar of deep-pocketed developers worldwide, which has challenged the firm to be clear about the work it wants most. Strategic planning, urban infrastructure and public service buildings, like a new cancer-care center in Leeds due to open in 2017, are all in the foreground. And after two decades of standing under the figurative lightbulb, Heatherwick is eager to let the light shine on other members of his team. “We’re very romantic about the cultural individual,” he says with some resignation. “I feel like I disappoint people one by one when I say, ‘No, we had these ideas all of us together, analyzing, refining and throwing out the bad ones and just refining down.’ The lens we were looking at to judge was the important thing.”  That lens is now widening to invite collaboration with outside firms, notably Foster + Partners, on the Shanghai financial center, and the Bjarke Ingels Group in Silicon Valley. “It was actually my suggestion,” says Heatherwick of his partnership with Ingels on the new Googleplex. “They narrowed it down to a small handful of us. Bjarke I knew from a number of years ago, when we’d worked together on a project in Leeds, Leeds Eastgate. So I gave him a call and he said yes. I can’t go into all the details. We decided to collaborate 50-50. We initially were doing the master plan together, and that went so well, we just said, ‘Let’s keep going. Let’s do the buildings together.’ ”  Ingels, one of the most openly ambitious architects in the world, enjoys a friendly rivalry with Heatherwick, four years his senior, but praises his friend’s alternative mind-set. “Thomas comes from a world of craft and artisanship—and has created some incredibly ingenious and artful objects,” says Ingels. “What is particularly exciting to see right now is how he has been able to apply that care and sensibility to bigger urban and architectural projects.”  By all accounts they are enjoying the process. “You’re praised together and you’re blamed together,” Heatherwick explains. “You don’t have one place where the ideas come from—on that basic level, you’re just saying, ‘What can we do?’ ” Practically speaking, doubling the brainpower on a project of Google’s gargantuan size makes sense. Though the scale of the campus is currently in limbo (Google’s latest proposal is for one building of almost 600,000 square feet—likely a first step, as the original plan had been for four buildings and 2.5 million square feet), the combined team meets regularly to move the design and its attendant technological innovations forward in anticipation of approval.  In addition to Google and Pier 55, Heatherwick is busy with a public monument for Manhattan’s Hudson Yards development and a residential building on the High Line, both for Related Companies. In each instance, he’s been impressed by the American appetite to get things done, which he feels has dissipated in Britain. “Ambition is a form of creativity,” he says. “To have the courage to think that something is possible, and what its real implications are, is another vast aspect of imaginative attention. Realizing that is stretching me—I’ve felt creatively stretched in America.”  Ultimately, Heatherwick’s drive to invent is anchored in empathy. “How do you make a building perform in the best possible way but not detract from people’s lives?” he asks. For him, the answer lies in making it relatable on the most intimate terms. People deserve nothing less than magic every time—and that sense of belonging. “Because the place you really value is your own place,” he says. “It sounds so basic. But that’s what we’ve tried to do.”
With high-profile commissions from Google and Diane von Frustenberg, Thomas Heatherwick, WSJ. Magazine’s 2015 Design Innovator, is having a breakout moment—and applying his imaginative vision to projects of vast scope and ambition.