Heatherwick Studio at V&A
Thomas Heatherwick is one of those creatives that you can’t actually fit in any precise category. He became quite famous in design-ish circles with his Spun chair produced by the Italian manufacturer Magis. When it comes to a wider acclaim, it only came about when he was charged with designing the British pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, and earlier this year with the re-design of the London bus. Not that designers ever become superstars outside of their closed world, but that says a lot about the knowledge wider public has of the discipline.
Fortunately there are some institutions that recognize the quality and importance of people that shape our visual and material world. Hence, when Victoria and Albert Museum announced a grand retrospective of Heatherwick’s work, it really came as a relief.
Entitled “Designing the Extraordinary”, the exhibition runs through almost twenty years of professional career that started with a small studio Thomas, opened in 1994, after graduating at Royal College of Art. The exhibition has been set up using primarily models and objects the designer has accumulated in his studio in all these years, spanning from small scale object to architectural models.
Heatherwick is extremely difficult to classify under the limited boundaries of a single profession, since he has given shape to almost every kind of tridimensional objects. Gaining himself some lament coming from the architectural community, he has successfully designed both buildings, pavilions, shops, busses, chairs, benches and tables, giving each object unique quality and a distinctive signature. In a moment when disciplines collapse and design is an over-abused word applied to describe almost anything, a wider public can finally confront itself with a design excellence.
