Heatherwick studio has won a competition to design a Learning Hub for a university in Singapore. The hub will be part of a £360 million scheme which Nanyang Technological University is undertaking, and is the first redevelopment of its campus’ in twenty years.

It was clear to us that since the advent of the internet and low cost computers that there has been a distinct shift in how students approach educational facilities. University buildings have ceased to be the only site where students are able to source educational texts, and have become unappealing spaces with endless corridors, no natural daylight and only hints of other people’s presence.

The studio’s approach was to redefine the aspiration of a university building, and to once again make it an essential part of the tertiary education experience. Within this new context the purpose of a university is to foster togetherness and sociability, so that students can meet their fellow entrepreneurs, scientists or colleagues in a space that encourages collaboration.

The hub’s form is dictated by its function, and brings together 55 tutorial rooms into a structure without conventional corridors, which have traditionally created social separation and isolation. The learning hub has no one door, it is porous. Students can enter from 360 degrees around into a large central space which links all the separate towers together. Each tower is made up of a stack of classrooms which build up gradually, with gardens on selected floors.

Another inspiration for the hub was a wish to break down the traditional square forward-facing classrooms with a clear front and hierarchy, and move to a corner-less space, where teachers and students mix on a more equal basis.

In this model, students work together around shared tables, with teacher as facilitator and partner in the voyage of learning, rather than ‘master’ executing a top-down model of pedagogy.

Each of these tutorial rooms faces the large shared central space, allowing students to continually feel connected to all the other activities going on in the building.

In 2013 the learning hub was awarded the BCA Green Mark Platinum Award for sustainability by the Singaporean government. The award is a benchmarking scheme which incorporates internationally recognized best practices in environmental design and performance.

The gin-maker Bombay Sapphire is constructing the company’s first production facility, which will also be open for members of the public to visit and will become the home of the brand. Formerly a water-powered paper mill, the site currently contains more than forty derelict buildings, many of these are historically significant and will be regenerated and restored as part of the project. One of the original features of the site is the River Test, currently contained within a narrow high-sided concrete channel, is almost invisible. To make sense of this jumbled accumulation, the proposal is to use the river as the organisational device for the new facility. The river’s banks will be opened out and transformed into a route that brings visitors through the site to a new main courtyard at its centre. The widening of the river and the reshaping of its banks will create sloping planted foreshores, making the water visible and valuable once more.

The project brief also included a visitor centre but on exploring the dramatic sculptural forms of the vast copper gin stills, we believed that seeing the authentic distillation process, which follows a method devised in 1761, would make for a more interesting and memorable visitor experience. Because the use of the 10 botanicals in this process pointed us towards Britain’s heritage of botanical glasshouse structures, the project evolved into a proposal for two new glasshouses, one humid, the other dry temperate, that will emerge from the production buildings and sit within the waters of the widened river.

The Distillery has achieved a Breeam ‘outstanding’ rating for sustainability. It is the first facility in the drinks manufacturing industry to be awarded with this rating.

Heatherwick Studio was asked to find ways of improving Pacific Place, a 650,000-square-metre complex in Hong Kong consisting of a major four-floor shopping mall with four large tower buildings arranged on top of it, containing offices, serviced apartments and hotels. Although it had been constructed on a generous scale and finished with a distinctive palette of materials, the Pacific Place shopping mall had been widely imitated since opening twenty years ago, threatening its position as a market leader. Also, the mall’s lifts and escalators did not go to every floor, its public spaces did not function well and its angular, shiny surfaces felt outdated.

The project was to carry out a £166 million programme of improvements while keeping the mall, and its 130 shops and restaurants, open for business. It was the equivalent of designing and building fifteen separate, but related, projects. We improved circulation by introducing new escalators and lifts, transformed the signage, opened up sight-lines, increased the quantity of natural light and upgraded the development’s environmental performance by reducing energy use. We designed new restaurant and café buildings, the exterior of a new hotel and a new pedestrian bridge and created a large amount of public space and gardens.

The project was an exercise in detailing on a massive scale, using these details assertively and consistently to communicate a new identity while still exuding the confidence of the original design. To bring light and warmth, we introduced wood and stone, with their natural imperfections, and looked for ways of integrating different elements within the space. Among these unique details were the sand-cast lift buttons, a sculpturally carved dropped kerb and a toilet door hinge. The hinge developed in response to our reluctance to fracture the undulating wood surface, with which we had enclosed the toilet cubicles, by inserting doors with ordinary hinges. Instead, we looked for a way to bend the wooden wall without any visible hinge or line.

The outdoor area on top of the shopping mall that forms the base for the four towers was previously dominated by vehicle traffic and cluttered with raised planters surrounding awkward pyramid-shaped glass structures, which let daylight into the mall below. The space would be transformed if we replaced these pyramids with areas of flat glass that allowed more light into the mall, but we needed to invent a glass material which could be walked on and driven over, as well as screening views from below of anyone walking across it. Because it needed seven layers of glass to meet fire safety requirements, we created a glass that contained a distinctive three-dimensional patination embedded within these layers. This outdoor space is now a useable recreational landscape that also contains prestigious new retail spaces.

Following a tradition that began with the Great Exhibition of 1851, World Expo is a vast international fair in which countries participate by creating themed pavilions, representing their nation’s technology, culture and achievements. In 2010, the event was held in Shanghai, China. With more than 200 countries taking part, it was the largest ever Expo.

The competition to design the United Kingdom’s pavilion was won by a team led by Heatherwick Studio. Like the other western countries, the UK’s site was the size of a football pitch but, unlike those countries, the budget given to the project was much smaller. In addition, our brief was that the UK’s pavilion must be one of the expo’s “top five” most popular attractions.

If it was to meet this target, the UK Pavilion would have to stand out from the other 200 pavilions. Instead of trying to shout above the noise, we aimed to do one powerful thing with simplicity and clarity, insisting on surprising visitors by the absence of screens and technological devices. And, because many of the Expo’s seventy million visitors would only see the pavilion from the outside and many more would only experience it on internet or television, we also realised that the outside of the pavilion needed to tell you what was going on inside. The way to achieve this was to make the building be a manifestation of its content.

But we still needed to decide what to say about the UK. Instead of perpetuating outdated stereotypes like London fog, bowler hats and red telephone boxes, we wanted to represent the inventiveness and creativity to be found in contemporary British life. Taking our cue from the Expo theme, which was the future of cities (“better city, better life”), we started to explore the relationships between cities and nature and the significance of plants to human health, economic success and social change.

Developing the masterplan of the site, the restricted budget forced us to be strategic and pragmatic. Because the budget would not go far if we tried to make a building that filled the entire site, we chose to concentrate our resources on creating a memorable focal object, occupying one-fifth of the site, and then devised a quiet, cost-effective architectural treatment to house the functional spaces. Our strategy was to create a public space that filled the site, place our focal object on top of this landscape and tuck the functional facilities underneath it. This space would provide a breathing space, where visitors might recuperate from expo-exhaustion, and frame the focal object by separating it from its chaotic surroundings.

Predicting that many of the Expo’s pavilions might follow architectural trends in form-making, we chose instead to concentrate on exploring texture. We were thinking of the opening sequence of the 1985 film Witness, in which the camera pans across a field of grass swirled into patterns by the wind. On this windy riverside site, we wanted to make the building’s façade behave like this grass. We had once developed a proposal for treating a building like the Play-Doh figure that grows hair when you squeeze coloured paste through the holes in his head, conceiving the tips of these hairs as forming the outward projection of his original shape. It also seemed that if you magnified the texture of a building enough, the texture would actually become its form. We were excited by the idea of making the outside of the building so indefinite that you cannot draw a line between building and sky because they merge into each other. This notion of texture gave us a way to relate to the theme of nature and cities; our pavilion could be a cathedral to seeds, which are immensely significant for the ecology of the planet and fundamental to human nutrition and medicine. For the future-gazing expo, seeds seemed an ultimate symbol of potential and promise.

The Seed Cathedral is a box, 15 metres high and 10 metres tall. From every surface protrude silvery hairs, consisting of 60,000 identical rods of clear acrylic, 7.5 metres long, which extend through the walls of the box and lift it into the air. Inside the pavilion, the geometry of the rods forms a space described by a curvaceous undulating surface. There are 250,000 seeds cast into the glassy tips of all the hairs. By day, the pavilion’s interior is lit by the sunlight that comes in along the length of each rod and lights up the seed ends. You can track the daily movement of the sun and pick out the shadows of passing clouds and birds and, when you move around, the light moves with you, glowing most strongly from the hairs that point directly towards you. By night, light sources inside each rod illuminate not only the seed ends inside the structure, but the tips of the hairs outside it, covering the pavilion in tiny points of light that dance and tingle in the breeze.

The pavilion is sitting on a landscape that is crumpled and folded like a sheet of paper, which suggests that the pavilion is a gift from the UK to China, still partly enclosed in wrapping paper. With inclined surfaces and lifted edges forming a gentle amphitheatre, the landscape is entirely carpeted in silvery-grey Astroturf, which translates the softness of the Seed Cathedral into a more tactile softness underfoot and invites you to sit anywhere, lie down or even play, rolling down the slopes. Its atmosphere of intimacy and ambiguity of purpose allows people to treat the space like a village green, invoking the UK’s record as a pioneer of the modern public park.

Also incorporated within the landscape’s sloping surfaces are the ramps into the pavilion, along which are a series of artistic installations, designed by Troika, exploring the theme of nature and cities. Underneath the landscape 1500 square metres of required accommodation that includes a VIP suite, hospitality facilities and offices can be found.

Working with structural engineer Adams Kara Taylor, we spent many weeks setting out the geometry of the pavilion’s hairs. We designed a specific quirk into the outside, which meant that, from every angle, the image of the Union Jack appeared within the hairs of the pavilion.

In the duration of the six-month Expo, more than eight million people went inside the Seed Cathedral, making it the UK’s most visited tourist attraction. At a state ceremony, it was announced that the UK Pavilion had won the event’s top prize, the gold medal for pavilion design.

Heatherwick Studio has been commissioned to design a biomass-fuelled power station to provide heat and power for new homes near Middlesbrough, in the north of England, an area of acute deprivation that was once a prosperous industrial heartland.

Every major city seems to be responding to economic stagnation by rushing to build cultural facilities like galleries or museums. Instead, we asked ourselves if this project could offer the region a different kind of catalyst for economic development. We also thought about the contrast between the pride with which the earliest power stations had been constructed and the architecture of contemporary power generating facilities, which are normally utilitarian box-like structures housing pieces of equipment.

With its flat open landscape and famous landmarks, such as the Transporter Bridge, Middlesbrough is sometimes described as the Land of Giants. Instead of placing an object on top of the landscape, we wanted to think about a structure that had a more intimate connection with the ground.

Existing biomass-fuelled power stations normally take the form of a collection of separate sheds housing the different pieces of equipment and an 85-metre high chimney stack, placed on top of the ground. Working with engineers, we brought these pieces of equipment together into a single structure, clustered around the stack, which both improved the power station’s functional efficiency and simplified its composition. The existing facilities also seemed remarkably noisy, creating a perception of the power station as polluting, even when it wasn’t. Because it would feel much cleaner if it was almost silent, we proposed that the large quantity of soil that was sitting on the site could be piled up against the structure to dampen the sound.

To get away from the idea that a power station must be cordoned off with barbed wire and danger signs, we suggested that these slopes of soil might be seeded with plants and grasses, turning this landscape into a Power Park, where people might walk, sunbathe, have picnics or go tobogganing. And, instead of attaching a visitor centre, we imagined the whole building as a living museum or school of power, making this a local resource, a touristic attraction and even a public venue in which to hold a wedding or Bar Mitzvah. This makes this a piece of engineering that not only celebrates and connects with the area’s industrial heritage, but also creates jobs and facilities for the locality.

In nineteenth-century Britain, seaside towns like Blackpool and Skegness were visited by holiday-makers in their thousands, bringing those towns prosperity and renown but, after the 1970s, their fortunes went into decline. It was to help re-assert the importance of the British seaside town for visitors and local people that Littlehampton residents, Jane Wood and Sophie Murray, decided to replace their kiosk selling chips, burgers and ice-cream, with a new café building. They asked Heatherwick Studio to design it.

With the shape of a cigarette, it was a difficult site, a narrow, forty metre-long strip of land, trapped between the promenade in front and a high-pressure sewage line behind that could not be built over. Also, the location was exposed, so although we wanted to give people a fantastic view of the sea, we also needed to shelter them. It meant keeping the building open to the sea in front and making it solid around the back. But how could we avoid making the building’s windowless rear elevation into a flat, dead façade? And how could we protect the forty metres of glass facing the sea?

The convention for modern seaside architecture is to evoke white-sailed yachts and a bygone era of Art Deco steamships but, to us, the British seaside did not conjure up images of twinkling sea, golden sand and blue skies. Our associations were with stumbling around on damp brown shingle, spotting the magically eroded objects that the sea has offered up. It made us wonder how to make a connection with the texture and richness of a British beach and whether this building could sit in the shingle like any other interesting seaside object.

The design was led by the roller shutters that the building would need to protect its windows. Rather than sticking them on like eyelids, we began to think about making the whole building out of its steel shutter boxes. We took long, undulating ribbons of steel, the same width as the shutters’ boxes, and wrapped them around a space to form the roof and walls. Angling the geometry of the box ribbons across the building gave articulation to the rear façade. By day, the roller shutters could be hidden within the building without looking like unhappy additions.

The entire metal structure was fabricated in sections by Littlehampton Welding by just two men. While the outside is raw weathered metal, the interior was sprayed with rigid insulating foam.

East Beach Café is open and there are often queues to get in. As well as serving a loyal local clientele, the high-quality cooking attracts visitors from all over England.

Find out about visiting East Beach Café here

Heatherwick Studio won a competition to design low-cost facilities for sixteen start-up arts enterprises for Aberystwyth Arts Centre, part of the University of Wales Aberystwyth.

Reluctant to dilute the wooded character of the site by superimposing a single campus-style block, the studio chose instead to set eight smaller buildings among the trees. These consist of simple timber frame sheds, split down their centre and pulled apart to provide light and ventilation and a shared entrance area.

The studio developed a special cladding system for the buildings. As stainless steel is everlasting but expensive, the studio sourced steel the thickness of cooking foil. This makes it affordable, but it crinkles easily, providing neither structural rigidity nor insulation. These problems are overcome by crinkling it in a controlled manner before spraying a CFC-free insulation foam on the back of the crinkled surface. The paneling is affordable, rigid and well insulated; it accommodates details like eaves and windowsills and has a non- uniformity, reflecting the forest’s leaves and pieces of sky in its facets.

The project was officially launched in May 2009 and all sixteen units are already occupied.

The studio was invited by Longchamp to design their new global flagship store, a key to repositioning the brand and opening new markets. Located in SoHo, New York, the building was an unconventional choice, as the majority of the floor area is on the first floor, with a very small ground floor street frontage.

This unusual configuration of space allowed the design team to come up with a design solution that turns this into an advantage; a three storey void cut through the building bringing daylight down and people up a landscape formed by a staircase; a major intervention behind an unassuming façade.

La Maison Unique involved extensive structural re-modelling of an old building including the addition of a new third storey, incorporating showroom, offices and roof garden.

Constructed in 1¼” hot-rolled steel and taking six months to build, the landscape stair weighs 55 tonnes and is an installation that divides and converges to form a topography of walkways, landings and steps. The magnetic properties of the landscape stair enable movable lights and display stands to be attached with high-strength magnets. The transparent balustrades are fabricated using aerospace windscreen technology to create a series of individually formed panels that drape with the fluidity of fabric. On the main retail floor, the laminated wood ceiling is sliced open and sections folded downwards, their layers separated further to provide surfaces to display the merchandise.

The project opened in May 2006, and has been awarded an AIA Top Honour and Design Weeks Best Retail Interior.

Heatherwick Studio was asked to design a Buddhist temple for a hillside site in southern Japan, overlooking the city of Kagoshima and the smoking volcano of Mount Sakurajima. It was said to be the place where the last samurai, Saigo Takamori, was defeated in battle by imperial forces in 1877, so it was to be dedicated to Saigo and would serve as both a place of worship and a depository for cremated remains.

Because it felt important that, when you arrived at the temple, you shouldn’t see it straight away, we placed the building as far back on the site as possible. The programme for the building needed to reconcile practical demands of parking and access with liturgical requirements that dictated the positioning of the main Buddha effigy and other ceremonial elements. Using coloured blocks, we developed a model of how the building would work, but still needed to find a way to hold it together, in order to unify these functions.

After modelling with clay led us to produce awkward, ugly shapes, we wondered if fabric, with its sophisticated draping forms, might give us the combination of cohesion and flexibility we were looking for. Thinking of the stiff silk robes worn by our client, the Buddhist priest, we tried to achieve the kinds of folds that you see in cloth depicted in Old Master paintings. After experimentation, we found a rubberised foam material that could crease and undulate, as well as rationally defining spaces like escape stairs and monks’ cells, and allowed this material to manipulate itself into a temple. (The priest later said that the building reminded him of the soft cushion which the Buddha sits on.) The technology that would allow us to scan a three-dimensional object and capture the data was not yet widely available but our local hospital agreed to let us use their newly purchased machinery to scan our model of the temple.

We translated the complex, three-dimensional surface into a buildable form by building the temple up in horizontal layers that were each the height of a step in a staircase and would be constructed in plywood, secured to a steel armature and coated with a waterproof membrane. By extending the layers into the internal spaces, it would be possible to form staircases and furniture that were integral to the building.