Thomas Heatherwick: Building the Seed Cathedral

Hello, my name is Thomas Heatherwick.

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 crafts and materials

and invention on a small scale.

And I was there looking

at the larger scale of buildings

and finding

that the buildings that were around me

and that were being designed

and that were there in the publications I was seeing

felt soulless and cold.

And there on the smaller scale,

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.

Sorry, this was my mother, by the way,

in her bead shop in London.

I spent a lot of time counting beads and things like that.

I'm just going to show, for people who don't know my studio's 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 pair of cooling towers

for an electricity substation

next to St. 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,

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 Routemasters

are here in California now actually.

But they aren't in London.

And so you're stuck on a bus.

And if the bus is going to stop

and it's three yards away from the bus stop,

you're just a prisoner.

But 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 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

everything from the fabric

to the format

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 openings seemed --

everyone loves opening bridges,

but it's quite a basic thing.

I think we all kind of stand and watch.

But the bridges that we saw

that opened and closed --

I'm slightly squeamish --

but 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 then we looked at these kinds of bridges

and just couldn't help feeling

that it 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 just steel and timber.

But instead of what it is,

our focus was on the way it worked.

(Applause)

So we liked the idea that the two farthest bits of it

would end up kissing each other.

(Applause)

We actually had to halve its speed,

because everyone was too scared when we first did it.

So that's it 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 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

doesn't have a power station on it.

It has a child running through a field, or something like that.

(Laughter)

And so when a 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 just going to decorate a normal power station.

And instead, we had to learn -- we kind of forced them to teach us.

And so we spent time traveling with them

and learning about all the different elements,

and finding that there were plenty of inefficiencies

that weren't being capitalized on.

That just taking a field and banging all these things out

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 --

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 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 has to be --

I'm trying to get my --

250 feet high.

So it felt that what we could try to do

is make a power park

and actually bring the whole area in,

and using the spare soil that's there on the site,

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 have a cost-effective way

of making a structure to do this.

The finished project

is meant to be more than just a power station.

It has a space where you could have a bar mitzvah at the top.

(Laughter)

And it's a power park.

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 --

well we weren't invited; what am I talking about.

We won the competition, and it was painful to get there.

(Laughter)

So we won the competition to build the U.K. pavilion.

And an expo

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 a million people there everyday.

And 250 countries all competing.

And the British government saying,

"You need to be in the top five."

And so that became

the governmental goal --

is, how do you stand out in this chaos,

which is an expo of stimulus?

So our sense was we had to do one thing,

and only one thing,

instead of trying to have everything.

And so what we also felt

was that whatever we did we couldn't do a cheesy advert for Britain.

(Laughter)

But the thing that was true,

the expo was about the future of cities,

and particularly the Victorians

pioneered integrating nature into the cities.

And the world's first public park of modern times

was in Britain.

And the world's first major botanical institution

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.

I've never met anyone who says, "I don't like flowers."

But we realized that seeds --

there's been this very serious project happening --

but that seeds --

at these major botanical gardens,

seeds aren't on show.

But you just have to go to a garden center,

and they're in little paper packets.

But this phenomenal project's been happening.

So we realized we had to make a project

that would be seeds, 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 light and expose these things?

We didn't want to make a separate building and have separate content.

So we were trying to think,

how could we make a whole thing emanate.

By the way, we had half the budget of the other Western nations.

So that was also in the mix

with the site the size of a football pitch.

And so there was one particular toy that gave us a clue.

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Thomas Heatherwick: Okay, you get the idea.

So the idea

was to take these 66,000 seeds

that they agreed to give us,

and to take each seed and trap it

in this precious optical hair

and grow that through this box,

very simple box element,

and make it a building

that could move in the wind.

So the whole thing can gently move when the wind blows.

And inside, the daylight --

each one is an optic

and it 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 building as big as the football pitch,

we focused it on this one element.

And the government agreed to do that

and not do anything else,

and focus our energy on that.

And so the rest of the site was a public space.

And with a million people there a day,

it just felt like offering some public space.

We worked with an AstroTurf manufacturer

to develop a mini-me version

of the seed cathedral,

so that, even if you're partially-sighted,

that it was kind of crunchy and soft,

that piece of landscape that you see there.

And then, you know when a pet has an operation

and they shave a bit of the skin

and get rid of the fur --

in order to get you to go into the seed cathedral,

in effect, we've shaved it.

And inside there's nothing;

there's no famous actor's voice;

there's no projections;

there's no televisions; there's no color changing.

There's just silence

and a cool temperature.

And if a cloud goes past,

you can see a cloud on the tips

where 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.

(Laughter)

A key thing was how people would interact.

I mean, in a way it was the most serious thing

you could possible do at the expo.

And I just wanted to show you.

The British government --

any government is potentially the worst client in the world

you could ever possibly want to have.

And there was a lot of terror.

But there was an underlying support.

And so there was a moment

when suddenly -- actually, the next thing.

This is the head of U.K. Trade and Investment,

who was our client,

with the Chinese children, using the landscape.

(Video) Children: One, two, three, go.

(Laughter)

TH: I'm sorry about my stupid voice there.

(Laughter)

So finally, texture is something.

In the projects we've been working on,

these 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 project that we're building in Malaysia

is apartment buildings

for a property developer.

And it's in a piece of land

that's this site.

And the mayor of Kuala Lumpur

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 you have your tower,

and you squeeze a few trees around the edge,

and you see cars parked.

It's actually only the first couple of floors that you really experience,

and the rest of it 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 the 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 percent of the site

as a rainforest,

instead of only 10 percent of scrubby trees

and bits of road around buildings.

(Applause)

So we're building these buildings.

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.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

June Cohen: So thank you. Thank you, Thomas. You're a delight.

Since we have an extra minute here,

I thought perhaps you could tell us a little bit about these seeds,

which maybe came from the shaved bit of the building.

TH: These are a few of the tests we did

when we were building the structure.

So there were 66,000 of these.

This optic

was 22 feet long.

And so the daylight was just coming --

it was caught on the outside of the box

and was coming down to illuminate each seed.

Waterproofing the building was a bit crazy.

Because it's quite hard to waterproof buildings anyway,

but if you say you're going to drill 66,000 holes in it --

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.

JC: Thank you, Thomas.

(Applause)