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