Blue Carpet
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Image: Mark Pinder
Heatherwick Studio won a competition to design the city's first new public square for a century. Close to the city's busy inner ring road and surrounded by a mix of building types, the long narrow site was more of a disused road than a square.
The space was unified with a single surface using tiles, developed for the project over four years, consisting of blue glass from recycled Harvey's Bristol Cream bottles set in white resin. The surface articulates around trees and distorts as it meets buildings, and is perforated around bollards and peeled back to form benches. The square's trees, imported from Germany and Holland, were the largest ever imported and transplanted in this country.
The studio also designed a new staircase into the square, a spiral of laminated wood fabricated in situ by a firm of traditional Tyneside boat-builders.
Since Blue Carpet opened in 2002, the number of visitors to the square's Laing Gallery has increased by 57%. The project went on to win a D&AD silver award and The Worshipful Company of Paviours' annual prize.