If you think you have a pretty good idea of all that an architect can do, take a look at the work of British designer Thomas Heatherwick. Consider the project that put him on the map in 2002: a pedestrian bridge in London that curls up like a millipede.
His inexpensive artists’ studios in Wales are made from crinkled stainless-steel sheets and recall inflated Jiffy Pop containers; a roto-molded chair spools like a giant top. The U.K. pavilion for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai is only one of multiple so-called hairy structures that Heatherwick has designed. A six-story cube, the pavilion bristles with 60,000 acrylic prongs—each tip embedded with seeds from Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank. It was the undisputed sensation of the Expo.
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“Provocation” is organized neither chronologically nor thematically, aiming instead to capture a sense of the creative matrix that is the designer’s London studio. While the installation feels slightly random, even a tad gimmicky, there is much to see and experience. At the entrance, a towering mechanical device that you crank by hand churns out a few project descriptions, and there’s a daily demonstration at a model of a larger version of Mr. Heatherwick’s Rolling Bridge showing how it uses cables, gravity and an electric winch to curl up. A roomful of inspirational artifacts from his office purport to describe the design process but fall short of providing insight, as do the brief and sometimes coy descriptive texts. One ends: “the mayor exclaimed, ‘Ooh la la!’”
If anything, this traveling exhibition overplays the whimsy while underserving the wider scope of Mr. Heatherwick’s achievements. For instance, a model and some glossy photographs of a billowing, neo-Edwardian glass conservatory addition do not capture the full complexity and intelligence that Heatherwick Studio brought to bear on the conversion of an old paper mill into a sustainable production facility, including a reclaimed riverfront, for a new gin distillery. (A splendid and detailed monograph, “Thomas Heatherwick: Making,” tells a more complete story and is on sale in the gift shop.)
