On arriving in London, each of the 204 national teams competing in the 2012 Olympic Games received a special object, inscribed with the name of its country. Each slightly different from the other, these objects have sculpturally beautiful forms, made in polished copper.

During the opening ceremony, teams entered the Olympic stadium, a chosen team member bearing their country’s precious object. One by one, in a clearing at the centre of the growing crowd of athletes, these artefacts were laid out as offerings, forming a large-scale pattern on the ground that radiates like the petals of a flower.

After these copper components were illuminated by the London 2012 Olympic Torch, the first one began rising silently from the ground, carried upwards on a long fine stem, followed in circular waves by all the others. Over the next minute or so, the 204 separate flames converged to form one great flame of unity surging into the sky, making this a giant kinetic sculpture in the centre of the stadium that symbolises the coming together in peace of 204 nations for two weeks of sporting competition.

At the Closing Ceremony the Olympic cauldron opened out and divided once more into its constituent objects. It was the studio’s intention that the Cauldron would be a representation of the extraordinary, albeit transitory, togetherness that the Olympic Games symbolise.

On leaving London, each competing country took home its own inscribed copper object as a souvenir of their contribution to the world’s most iconic sporting event.

Heatherwick Studio is designing a new river boat as part of ‘Estuaire’, an innovative project that has brought about the construction of major works of art along the banks of the River Loire, in France. The vessel will travel between the city of Nantes and the port town of Saint-Nazaire, reinforcing the connections between these towns and allowing up to 200 passengers to see the artworks from the river.

The boat had to be designed for flexibility since it will be available for general hire, as well as organised art trips, and used as a venue for civic functions and meetings. It also seemed important to allow passengers to look in all directions, instead of facing forward as they do on a bus.

Because the boat itself will reach the sea at the mouth of the Loire, it needed to have sea-faring capacity but, to let it draw up close to the artworks, it needed to be equally at home in the shallow waters at the river’s edge. In response, the boat takes the form of a catamaran, a shallow-draft boat with two hulls, which is stable and agile and travels comfortably at both high and low speed.

We became interested in the idea that the hulls of boats and ships are often beautiful forms but they are hidden from view below the water, while the top part of a boat rarely tells you anything about the form of the hull. Catamarans, for example, are normally treated as a pair of skis with something separate placed on top. Instead, we wondered if we might make a relationship between the top of a boat and its hull and developed the idea of growing the boat from its hull. It is a single continuous element, a closed loop that forms the boat’s two hulls and crosses over itself to create two storeys of open decks and indoor space.

In January 2010, Heatherwick Studio joined the team commissioned by London’s mayor to develop the design of a new bus for London. Once production of the Routemaster ceased in 1968, London’s buses were ordered from catalogues of existing designs. Apart from being red, the design of these vehicles became increasingly compromised and uncoordinated.

This would be the first bus to be designed specifically for the capital in more than fifty years, but the brief was not to replicate the Routemaster, which was inaccessible to wheelchair-users and difficult for people with prams. As well as being three metres longer than a Routemaster, this bus would have two staircases and three doors. It would have a conductor to look after passengers and an open platform, which would give Londoners their freedom once more to get on and off the bus at will, but this would be enclosed outside peak hours. Having set the environmental target of using 40% less fossil fuel than existing buses, the team developed a hybrid vehicle, powered by both electricity and diesel, seeking to make it as lightweight as possible.

The geometry of the vehicle developed from a series of pragmatic decisions. It was in order to minimise the perceived size of the vehicle that its corners and edges were rounded. It was to allow the driver to see small children standing next to the bus that its front window was angled down towards the pavement. And, with its three doors on one side and two staircases on the other, it was the functional asymmetry of the bus’s internal circulation that led to its asymmetrical geometry. The windows form two ribbons of glass that wrap around the bus, corresponding to the two staircases, which transform the stairs from a dark constricted tunnel to a different kind of space.

In recent years, bus interiors had grown increasingly chaotic, with their peculiar seating arrangements, flourescent yellow handrails, over-bright strip lighting and protruding lumps of machinery encased in mysterious fibre-glass housings. The aim was to recalibrate the countless compromises that had accumulated over the years to create an interior that felt as calm and coordinated as possible. Using a simple palette of colours and materials, a family of details was developed that included new stairs, lighting, hand poles and stop buttons. We argued for a return to bench-type seats that two people could share and designed a new pattern of moquette, the tough woollen fabric that is used in transport upholstery.

The design for the new bus were unveiled in May 2010 and a prototype, developed and manufactured by Wrightbus, was launched in December 2011 by the Mayor of London. The first bus entered public service in February 2012 and a further 600 buses were ordered by Transport for London in September 2012. This fleet are the largest order of hybrid buses ever placed in Europe and will be delivered in its entirety by 2016.

The studio was commissioned to design a pedestrian bridge to span an inlet of the Grand Union Canal at Paddington Basin, London, and provide an access route for workers and residents. Crucially, the bridge needed to open to allow access for the boat moored in the inlet.

The aim was to make the movement the extraordinary aspect of the bridge. A common approach to designing opening bridges is to have a single rigid element that fractures and lifts out of the way. Rolling Bridge opens by slowly and smoothly curling until it transforms from a conventional, straight bridge, into a circular sculpture which sits on the bank of the canal.

The structure opens using a series of hydraulic rams integrated into the balustrade. As it curls, each of its eight segments simultaneously lifts, causing it to roll until the two ends touch and form a circle. The bridge can be stopped at any point along its journey.

The whole structure was constructed at Littlehampton Welding on the Sussex coast and then floated up the Grand Union Canal, before being lifted into position and attached to the hydraulic system which powers its movement.

The Rolling Bridge won a number of awards including a Structural Steel Award, and an Emerging Architecture Award.
It opens every Friday at midday.

Heatherwick Studio was approached by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in London, about developing a structure to replace some of the borough’s newspaper kiosks.

We learnt that, every morning, a newspaper seller could spend more than an hour, in all weathers, setting out all the newspapers and magazines on their stall. When it is closed at night, the kiosk becomes a dead, uninteresting object. It is made from plastic and fibreglass that becomes scratched and faded with age, while the flat shutters it needs to protect it from vandalism force the kiosk to be the shape of a box and perversely invite people to put stickers or graffiti on them.

We set ourselves the task of designing a newspaper kiosk that could be set up in a quarter of an hour and looked for a way to make the kiosk secure without flat shutters or hinged panels. Instead of a door or shutter, we gave it a geometry that enabled curved walls at each end of the kiosk to rotate open. The kiosk’s stepped shape comes from the stepped tiers of shelving that hold the magazines in place, where they can be left overnight, ready for the next day. Its uppermost tier is a window that brings daylight into the kiosk’s interior and allows a light to shine out of the kiosk at night, making it feel like a nightlight for the street. Fabricated in bronze, these kiosks can be seen on the streets of the Royal Borough at Sloane Square and Earl’s Court.

Occupying a central London site next to London Bridge Station, the approaches to Guy’s Hospital were confused and congested resulting in the main entrance being hard to find. A range of problems were identified: Great Maze Pond Road being used as a cut-through for cars; narrow pavements with high volumes of pedestrians; no designated drop-offs for patients or visitors; no secure cycle storage; the unsightly boiler house adjacent to the main entrance suffering from decay; the charity shop for the Friends of Guy’s in a state of poor repair.

The scheme, commissioned in 2005 and completed in 2007, captured a scope of works to address these issues for the benefit of patients, visitors and staff. Much of the scheme consists of functional, pragmatic moves, which create space for a focal point, in this instance provided by Boiler Suit – a bespoke tiled cladding system wrapping around the boiler house.

Boiler Suit is fabricated from high grade stainless steel frames, with braid woven through as the “warp”. The 108 tiles are geometrically identical, with 17 variants required to accommodate specific junctions. The tiles are a secondary façade system that is demountable and allows the machinery to vent through, whilst framed reveals shade the large windows on the south façade to reduce solar gain.

In 2007, the project won the Building Better Healthcare Award for Public Space, and the FX Magazine, Judge’s Special Award.

The Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity, commissioned the studio to design a sculpture for the atrium of its new headquarters. The site for the sculpture was within an eight-storey high atrium space above a pool of water. Although a huge space, the sculpture was commissioned after the building was complete, meaning it had to fit through a standard sized front door.

The vertiginous quality of this space, coupled with the presence of water, suggested the idea of exploring ways of capturing the dynamic shapes of falling liquids. Following extensive experimentation, pouring molten metal into water was found to create extraordinary and complex forms in a fraction of a second. No two experiments produced the same result. Over four hundred of these were produced before a five centimetre piece was created and selected as it was felt it would work well with the building and is the basis of the final thirty metre project.

This original piece was digitised and exactly replicated using 142,000 glass spheres suspended on 27,000 high tensile steel wires; 15 tonnes of glass and just under a million metres of wire. The spheres, made in Poland in a spectacle lens factory, were the result of a collaboration with Flux Glass, their shifting colour and brightness coming from a layer of dichroic film set between the two hemispherical lenses that make up each sphere.

Bleigiessen can be viewed on the last Friday of every month at 2pm.

Harvey Nichols, a renowned department store in Knightsbridge, London, commissioned the studio to produce an installation to celebrate London Fashion Week 1997.

The building dates from the 1880’s and is a well proportioned example of its style of architecture. Known for the quality of their shop window displays, these do not normally relate directly to the building within which they sit.

The studio considered the building façade as a whole, not as twelve separate shop windows. The installation was a single 200m long, veneered wooden element, woven through the façade and rising up the building, engaging with both the architecture and the street.

The installation, named Autumn Intrusion, took a studio team of makers six months to construct and was in place for eight weeks. The structure is a composite of wood and polystyrene, making it both lightweight and strong.

Autumn Intrusion won the coveted D&AD Gold Award selected from a field of 14,000 entries.

The National Malus (crab-apple) Collection commissioned the studio to design a permanent pavilion to sit within their grounds.

The structure is a cube, 2.4m in each dimension, punctured by over 5000, 18mm square hollow aluminium staves that act as miniature windows with tiny glazed ends, The staves form the structure and texture of the building and suspend the cube 1m above the ground.

The cube was precision-machined, by an aerospace company, from 15mm anodised aluminium and bonded together using special high-strength adhesive. The aluminium staves are arranged radially, the origin point being the centre of the cube. A single light source located at this central point emits light at night through every tube, causing the windows to glow. Seating is created by elements that extend into the cube to support a machined aluminium surface.

The name “Sitooterie” is a Scottish term for a small building to literally “sit oot” in.

Paternoster Square is part of a development in a high-profile, sensitive location, next to St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It is a new public space containing a pre-existing underground electricity substation. This substation required a cooling system with outlet and inlet vents, but the client team was unhappy with the proposed solution for a single large object as it would turn the surrounding space into a corridor. The studio made use of the two existing holes in the concrete slab covering the substation, to reduce the overall size of the vent object by splitting the outlet part into two smaller vents – saving significant space by setting the inlet ducts into the ground using grilles flush with the pavement. The aesthetic design is derived from experiments with folded paper, scaled up to 11m in height; the vents retain the proportions of the A4-size paper used in these experiments. The Vents are fabricated from 63 identical, 8mm thick, stainless steel isosceles triangles welded together and finished by glass bead blasting. The Vents are a permanent installation, available for the public to visit.