Bleigiessen
Wellcome Trust Headquarters
London, UK
Image: Steve Speller
The Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity, commissioned Heatherwick Studio to design a sculpture for its new headquarters to be situated within an eight-storey high space above a pool of water.
The vertiginous quality of this space, coupled with the presence of water, suggested the idea of exploring ways of capturing the tumbling forms of falling liquids. Following extensive experimentation, pouring molten metal into water was found to create unique and complex forms in a fraction of a second. Over four hundred of these were produced before a five centimetre piece was created and selected as 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; 12 tonnes of glass and just under a million metres of wire created a total weight of 14 tonnes. 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 into each sphere.
Bleigiessen can be viewed on the last Friday of every month at 2pm. To book a tour please contact Elayne Hodgson at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it or call the Wellcome Trust on 020 7611 8888.