6 Astonishing Designs by Thomas Heatherwick That Will Blow Your Mind

Thomas Heatherwick is a London-born designer (born 17 February 1970) whose studio, founded in 1994, works across buildings, bridges, vehicles and objects. This guide is for students and designers studying his work: it revisits six of his best-known designs, corrects the record on which were built and which were not, and turns them into five design principles you can test in your own projects, with a comparison table and sources to cite.

Who is Thomas Heatherwick?

Thomas Alexander Heatherwick studied three-dimensional design at Manchester Polytechnic and furniture design at the Royal College of Art (RCA). In his final year at the RCA he met Terence Conran, who invited him to build a plywood gazebo he had designed at Conran’s country home and then bought it. Heatherwick has also been named one of GQ’s 50 best-dressed British men (2015), but his reputation rests on the studio’s work.

Heatherwick Studio was set up in 1994, right after he left the RCA. It is based in King’s Cross, London, and combines a design office with a workshop where models and prototypes are made. Wikipedia currently gives a staff of about 250. The studio describes itself as working across architecture, urban spaces, infrastructure, products and furniture rather than in a single discipline.

Unlike many design firms, the studio does not define its work by a style. Each project starts from a problem (a shutter that looks dead at night, a classroom that isolates students, a pavilion with a small budget) and is developed through physical models, material tests and research into how the object will be made. That process is the thread running through the six designs below.

Several of the studio’s projects became widely known beyond architecture: the London 2012 Olympic cauldron, the UK Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai (the “Seed Cathedral”), the New Routemaster double-decker bus for London, which entered service in February 2012, and the cancelled Garden Bridge over the Thames.

Awards given to Heatherwick include the Prince Philip Designers Prize (2006), the London Design Medal (2010) and the RIBA Lubetkin Prize (2010) for the UK Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.

He holds honorary doctorates from the University of the Arts London, the Royal College of Art, the University of Dundee, the University of Brighton, Sheffield Hallam University and Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2004 he became the youngest practitioner to be appointed a Royal Designer for Industry, and he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to the design industry.

Six designs by Thomas Heatherwick, built and unbuilt

The six projects below were chosen by the original article. Three were built (the Learning Hub, East Beach Cafe and the UK Pavilion) and three were not (the Garden Bridge, the Teesside power station and the Kagoshima temple). The unbuilt schemes are still useful precedents because the studio’s design reasoning is documented, but they should not be cited as completed buildings.

1. NTU Learning Hub, Singapore

The Learning Hub, known as The Hive, is a teaching building for Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. Heatherwick Studio was appointed in 2011 and the building opened in 2015; the Singapore firm CPG Consultants worked with the studio as local architect, according to Dezeen’s 2015 report. The studio states that the building received a Green Mark Platinum rating, Singapore’s highest environmental award.

The brief responded to a real question: if students can get lectures online, why come to campus? The studio’s answer was to make the building about meeting people. Instead of rectangular classrooms with a teacher’s end, the tutorial rooms are rounded, with no corners and no obvious front or back, so tutors and students sit as a group.

Twelve towers of stacked tutorial rooms taper inwards at their base around a shared, naturally ventilated central atrium. A 2015 article in The Singapore Engineer (published by NTU) gives 56 tutorial rooms in total. Every room opens onto the atrium rather than onto a corridor, so the circulation itself becomes the social space, and the building can be entered from all sides.

The photograph above shows the stacked, rounded rooms from outside; the textured concrete of the towers is part of the studio’s attempt to make a teaching block feel handmade rather than institutional.

2. Garden Bridge, London (cancelled)

The Garden Bridge was a proposal for a planted footbridge across the Thames between Temple on the north bank and the South Bank. The idea came from the actor and campaigner Joanna Lumley; Heatherwick Studio designed it and Arup was the engineer, with strong backing from the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

The original article said the studio was still developing the scheme with Arup and Transport for London. That is out of date. A review for the Mayor by Margaret Hodge (April 2017) criticised the business case and the procurement, and after Mayor Sadiq Khan refused to guarantee the bridge’s running costs, the Garden Bridge Trust abandoned the project on 14 August 2017. Reported figures put public money spent at about £43 million. For students, the project is a lesson in how governance, maintenance funding and public trust can stop a design however popular its images are.

3. East Beach Cafe, Littlehampton

East Beach Cafe is a small seafront cafe in Littlehampton, West Sussex, completed in 2007. The client was Brownfield Catering, run by Jane Wood and Sophie Murray, who wanted to replace a kiosk selling chips and ice cream with a building that would give the town’s seafront a reason to visit.

The site was a challenge: a long, narrow strip with the public promenade in front and a high-pressure sewer behind that could not be built over. The building had to open fully to the sea while staying closed and secure at the back, and the studio’s project page notes about 40 metres of glazing facing the beach. Two further problems followed: the windowless rear could easily look dead, and the glass needed protection at night.

The answer came from the roller shutters themselves. Instead of fixing shutter boxes on top of the facade like eyelids, the studio made the whole building from long, undulating ribbons of raw steel the width of a shutter box. The ribbons wrap over the space to form both roof and walls, the shutters disappear inside them by day, and the angled ribbons give the rear elevation its texture. The studio lists the local firm Littlehampton Welding among the collaborators.

The drawings above show how a single repeated element, the steel ribbon, becomes structure, enclosure and shutter housing at once. That economy of one idea doing several jobs is the clearest principle to take from the cafe.

Seen from the promenade, the glazed front sits under the rust-coloured steel ribbons that curl over the roof, which is why the rear and roof had to be designed as carefully as the glass.

4. Teesside biomass power station (unbuilt design)

In 2009 Bio Energy Investments appointed Heatherwick Studio to design a biomass-fuelled power station on Teesside, in north-east England, an area with a long industrial history. The studio’s project page says it would serve about 2,000 new homes in nearby Stockton.

Rather than treating the plant as a box hidden behind security fences, the studio proposed using it as a public landmark and a catalyst for the area. A conventional biomass plant is a set of sheds with an 85-metre chimney; here the plant’s parts were clustered around the chimney in a single form.

Earth excavated from the site was to be banked up around the structure to dampen equipment vibration and form planted slopes. These would make a public “power park” for walking, picnics and tobogganing, and the interior would include a visitor centre described as a “living museum and school of power”. The scheme received planning permission, but the Cooper Hewitt museum’s collection record for the design describes it as not realised; the renderings above show a proposal, not a built plant.

5. Temple, Kagoshima, Japan (unbuilt design)

In 2001 a Shingon-shu Buddhist organisation asked the studio to design a temple on a mountainside overlooking Kagoshima and the Sakurajima volcano. According to the Cooper Hewitt record, the temple was to be dedicated to Saigo Takamori, the samurai leader defeated by imperial forces at Kagoshima in 1877. It was also to serve as a depository for cremated remains.

The original article described the site planning in detail. Those details could not be traced to the studio or another reliable source and have been removed. What the studio does document is the form-finding process.

The studio first tried clay forms and found them unsatisfying. It then looked at the shapes fabric makes as it falls, such as the folds of priests’ robes, and tested real fabrics until it settled on a thin rubberised foam that could fold, crease and undulate. A single sheet of this material was shaped into the whole temple and captured with a 3D laser scan.

The scanned form was then sliced into horizontal layers, each the height of one stair step, so that the building could be constructed in layers. Stairs and furniture extend from the walls, and glazing set between the layers forms the windows. The Mori Art Museum’s exhibition list records the temple as unbuilt.

6. UK Pavilion, Expo 2010 Shanghai: the Seed Cathedral

World Expos trace back to the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851. Expo 2010 in Shanghai had 246 participating countries and international organisations and more than 73 million visitors, a record attendance. The UK Pavilion stood on a site of about 6,000 m² and was built for a reported budget of £26 million, modest compared with many national pavilions.

The centrepiece, the “Seed Cathedral”, was a box about 20 metres tall pierced by 60,000 clear acrylic rods, each 7.5 metres long. The tips of the rods held about 250,000 seeds, supplied through the Kunming Institute of Botany, a partner in Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (details here).

The rods carried daylight into the dark interior, so visitors saw the seeds glowing at the ends of the rods. At night, light sources inside the rods lit both their inner and outer tips, making the whole object glow.

The design process

Heatherwick Studio won the competition to design the pavilion. Rather than filling the building with screens and technology, as many pavilions do, the design was based on a single, simple object. The studio’s strategy was to give over much of the site to public space and to set the pavilion within it like an object on display, so it stood out against the busy Expo around it.

The landscape around the pavilion was folded like opened wrapping paper, a reference to the pavilion as a gift from the UK to China. It was covered in grey artificial grass, and the folds created a viewing platform, ramps and covered space for the pavilion’s other functions.

Instead of competing on form, the studio focused on a texture to be experienced. The idea of a surface that behaves like grass in the wind came from the studio’s earlier work, and magnifying that texture produced the pavilion’s soft outline. Seeds, as the starting point of plant life used for food and medicine, became the symbol of the pavilion. The design won the RIBA Lubetkin Prize in 2010.

The close view above shows the inner tips of the rods with the seeds set into them, the detail at which the whole design was conceived.

Five design principles from Thomas Heatherwick’s work

These principles are drawn from the six projects above and the studio’s own project descriptions. They are an analytical reading for study, not rules published by the studio.

A simple way to use the table: pick a project of your own, write the problem in one sentence, then test whether one of these five moves solves it better than adding more elements. If it does not, the principle does not fit, and that is a valid finding too.

Precedent analysis: comparing three built projects

The three built projects make a useful set because they differ in scale, climate and budget but follow a similar process. The table below compares them on the points a design studio crit usually asks about.

Plans and sections of these projects are copyright of the studio. If you need them for a study, request them through the studio’s press office or use the published drawings in books and journals with a citation; the East Beach Cafe sections shown earlier in this article are reproduced courtesy of Heatherwick Studio.

Later work and the studio today

Since these projects, the studio’s work has grown much larger in scale. The table below lists some later completed projects with their opening years, as a starting point for further study; each deserves its own precedent analysis.

Not every proposal has gone ahead: Arch2O has reported on the cancellation of the New York Philharmonic concert hall revamp, which Heatherwick had been working on.

In 2023 Heatherwick published Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World, which argues that many modern buildings are boring and harm well-being. Arch2O has also reported that Heatherwick was to address the Global Wellness Summit 2026 on the built environment and health, a sign of how central that argument has become to his public work.

Summary and next step

Thomas Heatherwick’s work is best studied as a method rather than a style: start with a specific problem, test it with physical models and materials, and look for one element that can do several jobs. If you are researching him for a project, begin with the built works (the Learning Hub, East Beach Cafe and the UK Pavilion), cite the studio’s project pages for facts, and treat the Garden Bridge, Teesside and Kagoshima schemes as documented but unbuilt designs.

Sources and further reading

• Heatherwick Studio: Learning Hub (project page).
• Heatherwick Studio: Temple, Kagoshima (project page).
• Thomas Heatherwick, Wikipedia (biography, honours and project dates; accessed 1 November 2026).
• Expo 2010, Wikipedia (participants and attendance).