London, 1994.

Heatherwick Studio carries the surname of its founder, the English designer Thomas Heatherwick, and the word “studio” rather than “architects” or “partners”. Wikipedia says he founded the practice in 1994, after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, where he had studied furniture design after three-dimensional design at Manchester Polytechnic. The Guardian, in a profile published on 18 May 2012, described the studio as one he had run for 18 years, which points back to the same year.

The start came through a single structure. The Guardian said that as a student Heatherwick met Terence Conran, who saw his plan for a gazebo made of two curved stacks of birch plywood and made its construction possible by inviting him to build it at his country home. Wikipedia adds that Conran then asked him to make an interior display for the Conran Shop, and that this led to a window display for Harvey Nichols during London Fashion Week in 1997, commissioned by Mary Portas. The Guardian described that window as a long ribbon of illuminated wood that ran between the store and the street.

Objects came early in the studio’s work. The Guardian listed a bag made in 2000 for the French company Longchamp, made almost entirely of a zip that let it double in size. Wikipedia dates the Rolling Bridge at Paddington Basin in London to 2002, a canal bridge that opens by curling into a circle.

Heatherwick has described the studio’s work as one discipline rather than several. The Guardian quoted Heatherwick’s introduction to Making, a book about the practice published by Thames & Hudson to coincide with a retrospective of his work at the V&A: he wrote that he wanted to consider all design in three dimensions, “not as multidisciplinary design, but as a single discipline: three dimensional design.” The same profile said the studio combines engineers, architects, product designers, landscape designers, sculptors, photographers, stage designers and urban planners.

King’s Cross, models and a workshop.

The studio’s premises are part of how it presents itself. Wikipedia says Heatherwick works from his studio in King’s Cross, London. The Guardian’s 2012 profile described the King’s Cross premises as tucked behind a Travelodge, and compared a visit to walking through a high-tech research lab, an art school campus and a workshop at once. The writer described assemblages of twisted and shaped metal, wood, plastic and glass, and models in various stages of completion showing furniture, bridges and whole districts of Chinese cities.

The Guardian said the design process, in Heatherwick’s own words, was “more like solving a crime”, a matter of research that eliminates options until one answer remains.

The neighbourhood later became one of the studio’s own projects. Dezeen reported on 18 December 2015 that Heatherwick had won planning permission from Camden Council to convert a Victorian coal yard in King’s Cross into a canal-side shopping district called Coal Drops Yard. The project renovated two buildings from the 1850s next to the Central Saint Martins campus, which had been used to store coal arriving from the north of England. The studio planned to bend the gabled roofs of the two structures towards each other until they met. Dezeen said the work was commissioned by the developer Argent and was due to complete in autumn 2018.

In the same article Heatherwick explained the roof idea: rather than adding an entirely new structure to connect the old buildings, the studio chose to “bend and stitch the two roofs together”, creating another level underneath and sheltering a new public space. Dezeen also reported that Heatherwick Studio was believed to be working on designs for Google’s new London headquarters in the same development.

A surname, a studio and a workshop.

An architecture practice’s identity usually begins with a name, and that name is often a list of founders’ surnames joined by commas and ampersands. Over time those lists tend to compress into initials or a single surname, and the shortened form becomes the working mark on letterheads, drawing sheets and websites. Other studios choose a single word or the name of one designer, which shifts the identity from a partnership to a studio.

Much of a practice’s visual identity lives on working documents rather than in advertising. Title blocks on drawings, the lettering on presentation boards, competition panels and the hoardings that wrap a construction site all carry the practice name, and each sets a typeface, a weight and a placement rule that repeats across projects. Monographs, exhibition catalogues and project books extend the same typography into print.

Physical spaces act as brand surfaces too. A studio’s own office, its reception and the model shop where physical models are built and photographed shape how clients and visitors meet the firm. For a design guide, the useful lesson is restraint: a short name, one typeface used with discipline, and a consistent way of presenting drawings, models and photographs.

Shanghai, London and New York.

Abroad, the studio designed the UK Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. Dezeen reported on 30 June 2010 that the pavilion by Heatherwick Studio was named the “Seed Cathedral” and was built from slender acrylic-tipped rods suspended in a timber frame, which sat on a landscaped area designed to look like a creased piece of paper.

Two London commissions followed in 2012. One was a bus. Dezeen reported on 3 January 2017 that Heatherwick’s design, called the New Bus for London and referred to by Dezeen as the Routemaster, was unveiled in 2010 and introduced to the network in 2012, with two staircases, three doors and a hop-on-hop-off platform at the back. The same report said Transport for London’s 2017 business plan ended further purchases of the bus. The other was the Olympic cauldron. BBC News reported on 28 July 2012 that the cauldron for the London 2012 opening ceremony was made of copper petal-like bowls mounted on stems, which were lit and then raised to merge into one flame, and that each competing nation would be given its petal at the end of the Games. Heatherwick told the BBC he had worked with the ceremony’s director, Danny Boyle.

In New York, the studio designed Vessel, a public structure of interlinking stairs at the Hudson Yards development. ArchDaily reported on 7 December 2017 that Vessel had topped out after its prefabricated steel pieces were made in Monfalcone, Italy, by the fabricator Cimolai and shipped across the Atlantic, and that it was due to open in early 2019; the surrounding landscape was designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz with the studio.

The Garden Bridge, a tree-covered crossing of the Thames that Wikipedia lists among Heatherwick’s cancelled projects, was abandoned by the Garden Bridge Trust in August 2017, BBC News reported on 14 August 2017.

For a design guide, Heatherwick Studio shows how a founder’s surname and the plain word “studio” can front a practice that defines itself through workshops, models and materials. Compare Foster + Partners, another London practice built around its founder’s name, and Gensler, an American practice named after its founder. For this guide we use copper, weathered bronze and walnut with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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