Building the Seed Cathedral Thomas Heatherwick

hello my name is Thomas Heather wick I’m

I have a studio in London that has a

particular approach to designing

buildings when I was growing up I was

exposed to making and craft and

materials and invention on a small scale

and I was there looking at the largest

scale of buildings and finding that the

buildings that were around me and that

were being designed and that were there

in all in the publications that I was

seeing was felt soulless and cold and

there on smallest scale at the scale of

an earring or a ceramic pot or a musical

instrument was a materiality and a

soulfulness and this influenced me the

first building I built was 20 years ago

and since in the last 20 years I’ve

developed a studio in London and so this

is my mother by the way in her shop bead

shop in London I spend a lot of time

counting beads and things like that I’m

just going to show for people who don’t

know my Studios work a few projects that

we’ve worked on this is a hospital

building this is a shop for a bag

company

this is studios for artists this is a

sculpture made from a million yards of

wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of

a golf ball and this is a window display

and this is a pair of cooling towers for

an electricity substation next to some

Paul’s Cathedral in London and this is a

temple in Japan for a Buddhist monk and

this is a cafe by the sea in Britain and

just very quickly out something we’ve

been working on very recently is we were

commissioned by the Mayor of London to

design a new bus

that gave the passenger their freedom

again because the original Routemaster

bus that some of you may be familiar

with which had this open platform at the

back in fact I think all our route

masters are here in California now

actually but they aren’t in London and

so you’re you’re stuck on a bus and that

if the bus is going to stop and it’s

three yards away from the bus stop

you’re just a prisoner but the the Mayor

of London wanted to reintroduce buses

with this open platform so we’ve been

working with Transport for London and

that organization hasn’t actually been

responsible as as a client for a new bus

for 50 years and so we’ve been very

lucky to have a chance to work the brief

is that the bus should use 40 percent

less energy so it’s got hybrid Drive and

we’ve been working to try to improve it

working for everything from the fabric

to the formatting and structure and

aesthetics I was going to show four main

projects and this is a project for a

bridge and so we were commissioned to

design a bridge that would open and

opening seemed I mean everyone loves

opening bridges but it’s quite a a kind

of basic thing I mean I think we also

stand and watch but the the bridges that

we saw that opened and closed it I don’t

know if this is I’m slightly squeamish

but the you I once saw a photograph of a

footballer who was diving for a ball and

as he was diving someone had stamped on

his knee and it had broken like this and

the and then we looked at these kinds of

bridges and just couldn’t help feeling

but that there was a beautiful thing

that had broken and so this is in

Paddington in London and it’s a very

boring bridge as you can see it’s it’s

just steel and timber and but instead of

what it is our focus was on the way the

way it worked

so we like the idea that the two

furthest bits of it would end up kissing

each other

we actually had to have it speed because

everyone was too scared when we first

did it so that’s a speeded up a project

that we’ve been working on very recently

is to design a new biomass power station

so a power station that uses organic

waste material in the news the subject

of where our future water is going to

come from and where our future power is

going to come from is in all the papers

all the time and we used to be quite

proud of the way we generated power but

recently any annual report of a power

company has doesn’t have a power station

on it it has a child running through a

field or something like that and so we

were when we were the consortium of

engineers approached us and asked us to

work with them on this power station our

condition was that we would work with

them and that whatever we did we were

not going to just kind of decorate a

normal power station and instead we had

to learn we foot kind of forced them to

teach us and so we’ve spent time

traveling with them and learning about

all the different elements and finding

that the work plenty of inefficiencies

that weren’t being capitalized on that

just taking a field and banging all

these things out there isn’t necessarily

the most efficient way that they could

work so we looked at how we could

compose all those elements instead of

just litter create one composition and

what we found was I mean this this area

is one of the poorest parts of Britain

it was voted the worst place in Britain

to live and there are 2,000 new homes

being built next to this power station

so it felt this has a social dimension

it has a symbolic importance and we

should be proud of where our power is

coming from rather than something that

we are necessarily ashamed of so we were

looking at how we could make a power

station that instead of keeping people

out and having a big fence around the

outside could be a place that pulls you

in and it’s a it has to be 80-foot I’m

trying to get my 250 foot high and so it

felt that what we could try to do is it

make a power Park and actually bring the

whole area in and using the spare soil

that’s there on the side

we could make a power station that was

silent as well because just that soil

could make the acoustic difference and

we also found that we could make a more

efficient structure and a cost-effective

way of making a structure to do this so

that the finished project is meant to be

more than just a power station it has a

space where you could have a bar mitzva

at the top and it’s but it’s it’s a it’s

a power part so people can come and

really experience this and also look out

all around the area and use that height

that we have to have for its function in

Shanghai we were invited to build the

where we weren’t invited what am I

talking about we won the competition and

it was painful to get there yeah

so - so we won the competition to build

the UK pavilion and an expo is is a

totally bonkers thing there’s 250

pavilions it’s the world’s biggest ever

Expo that had ever happened so there are

up to million people there every day and

250 countries all competing and the

British government saying you need to be

in the top five and so that that became

our earth that the gut the governmental

goal is how do you stand out in this

chaos of which is an expo visual

stimulus and so we asked sense was that

we had to do one thing and and that only

one thing instead of trying to have

everything so what we also felt was that

whatever we did we couldn’t do a cheesy

advert for Britain but the thing that

was true the expo is about the future of

cities and particularly the Victorians

pioneered integrating nature into cities

and the world’s first public park of

modern times was in Britain and the

world’s first major botanical

institution was is in London and they

have this extraordinary project where

they’ve been collecting 25 percent of

all the world’s plant species so we

suddenly realized that there was this

thing and everyone agrees that trees are

beautiful and I’ve never met anyone who

says I don’t like trees and the same

with flowers and never

anyone who says that there aren’t

flowers but that we realize that seeds

there’s this been this very serious

project happening and that seeds at

these major Botanical Gardens there in

seeds aren’t on show and you just have

you have to go to garden center and

they’re in little paper packets but this

this phenomenal project has been

happening so we realized we had to make

a project that would be seeds or some

kind of seed Cathedral but how could we

show these teeny-weeny things and the

film Jurassic Park actually really

helped us because the DNA of the

dinosaur that was trapped in the amber

gave us some kind of clue that these

tiny things could be trapped and be made

to seem precious rather than looking

like nuts so the challenge was how are

we going to bring the light and expose

these things we didn’t want to make a

separate building and have separate

content so we’re trying to think how

could we make a whole whole thing ma oh

by the way we had half the budget of the

other Western nations so that was also

in the mix with a site the size of a

football pitch and so there was one

particular toy that gave us a clue

no montage on

okay you get the idea that so the idea

was to take the sixty-six thousand seeds

that they agreed to give us and to take

each seed and trap it into this precious

optical hair and and grow that through

through this box very simple box element

and make a building that could move in

the wind so the whole thing gently can

move when the wind blows and inside the

daylight it’s each one is an optic and

that brings light into the center and by

night artificial light in each one

emanates and comes out to the outside

and to make the project affordable we

focused our energy instead of building a

big building as big as the football

pitch we focused it on this one element

and the government agreed to do that and

and not do anything else and focus our

energy on that so the rest of the site

was a public space and with that million

people there a day just felt like

offering some public space that and we

worked with an astroturf manufacturer to

develop a mini-me version of the of the

seed Cathedral so that even if you’re

partially sighted that it was kind of

crunchy floor and soft that piece of

landscape that you see there and then

you know when you go when people when a

pet has an operation and they shave out

a bit of the skin and get rid of the fur

they in order to get you to go into the

seed Cathedral in effect we’ve shaved it

and inside there’s there’s nothing

there’s no famous actor’s voice there’s

no projections there’s no televisions

and there’s no color changing there’s

just silence

and a cool temperature and if you if a

cloud goes past you can see a cloud on

this tips whether it’s letting the light

through this is the only project that

we’ve done where the finished thing

looked more like a rendering than our

renderings

a key thing was how people would

interact I mean in a way it was the most

serious thing you could possibly do at

the expo and I just wanted to show you I

mean the British government I mean any

government is potentially the worst

client in the world you could ever

possibly want to have and there was a

lot of terror and but there was a kind

of underlying support and that’s and so

there was a moment when suddenly and the

actually the next thing this this is the

head of UK Trade and Investment who is

our clients work with the Chinese

children using the landscape

so I’m sorry about my stupid voice there

the so finally a texture is something in

the projects we’ve been working on these

kind of slick buildings where they might

be a fancy shape but the materiality

feels the same is something that we’ve

been trying to research really and

explore alternatives and the the project

that we’re building in Malaysia is

apartment buildings for a property

developer and it’s in a piece of land

it’s this this site and that the mayor

of Kuala lumper said that if this

developer would give something that gave

something back to the city they would

give them more gross floor area

buildable so there was an incentive for

the developer to really try to think

about what would be better for the city

and the conventional thing with

apartment buildings in this part of the

world is that you you have your tower

and you squeeze a few trees around the

edge and you’d see cars parked it’s

actually only the first couple of flaws

that you really experience and the rest

is just for postcards the lowest value

is actually the bottom part of a tower

like this so if we could chop that away

and give a building a small bottom we

could take that bit and put it at the

top where the greater commercial value

is for a property developer and by

linking these together we could have 90%

of the sites as a rainforest instead of

only 10% of scrubby trees and bits of

Road around buildings and so

so we’re building these these buildings

there they’re actually identical so it’s

quite cost-effective they’re just

chopped at different heights but the key

part is trying to give back an

extraordinary piece of landscape rather

than engulf it and that’s my final slide

so thank you thank you Thomas you’re a

delight since we have an extra minute

here

fat perhaps you could tell us a little

bit about these seeds which maybe came

from the shaved bit of the building

these are a few of the tests we did when

we were building the structure so there

were 66 thousand of these this optic was

22 foot long and so the daylight was

just coming big was caught on the

outside of the box and was coming down

to illuminate each seed and I mean

waterproofing the building was a bit

crazy cuz normally it’s quite hard to

waterproof buildings anyway but if you

say you’re going to drill 66,000 holes

in it it was quite a that was quite we

had quite a time there was one person in

the contractors who was the right size

and it wasn’t a child who could fit

between them for the final waterproofing

of the building

thank you