Bal Harbour

206 BAL HARBOUR t times, you'd think Thomas Heatherwick was the only architect-designer working these days— he gets that much attention. In his native Britain, he is endlessly chronicled, praised and sometimes pilloried for his out-there designs, which frequently have an organic, curving shape to them. Curly haired, well-dressed and intensely focused, Heatherwick is known as the mad scientist of design because all of his work involves ingenious leaps of imagination, even though they are also possessed of a simplicity of concept. No wonder that when London's V&A Museum put on a 2012 exhibition of his work, it was subtitled "Designing the Extraordinary." The 46-year-old Heatherwick, founder of Heatherwick Studio, is probably best known for his torch from the 2012 London Olympic Games, known as the Caldron. It was made up of smaller flames carried into the stadium by athletes, that, when combined, formed one very big, fire-y statement about cooperation and global unity. In the United States, his star wattage was enough to attract billionaire developer Stephen M. Ross, of the Related Companies, who commissioned him to design a $150 million interactive sculpture of sorts—a climbable, 15-story basket-shaped structure in bronze- colored steel—to anchor the Hudson Yards development on the west side of Manhattan, due to be completed next year. Called the Vessel, the project's design was debuted with ballyhoo last September. His island in the middle of the Hudson River off Manhattan, known as Pier 55, is moving forward with the sponsorship of media mogul Barry Diller. Heatherwick's still-in-development London Garden Bridge—essentially a densely planted park—has been on-again, off- again with controversies and funding. Let's just say he has a lot going on in terms of forthcoming projects, too. The list includes the Zeitz Mocaa, a private contemporary art museum in Cape Town, and the attached hotel, The Silo; a collaboration with architect Bjarke Ingels on the new Google headquarters in Silicon Valley; and a collaboration on the redo of the New York Philharmonic's home. His website lists his projects in three categories—small, medium and large—but they all seem to have a very big impact on the design world. Heatherwick grew up in Kent, England and never trained as an architect: he's always seen himself as a creator of three-dimensional objects, and buildings are just one of the many types of things that, in his mind, need designing. He's spent a lot of time and energy on product design, like his bottle for Christian Louboutin's fragrance, Beauté. Given his wide-ranging creativity, it's not surprising that he's from a family of artists, inventors and other "makers." After his education at the Royal College of Art, he was mentored by the British design icon Terence Conran. Recently Heatherwick wrote a heartfelt introduction to Conran's memoir-with- pictures, "My Life in Design." Though Conran has been more associated with furniture and home goods, particularly through Conran's and the Conran Shop, he's a polymath in a similar vein to Heatherwick, refusing to be categorized or to be stopped from thinking across genres. Until 2010, Heatherwick's projects A

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