European Landscape Architecture: Best Practice in Detailing

United Kingdom

Design philosophy

The brief issued by Newcastle City Council called

for a designer rather than a design. The idea

was that the involvement of an artist in the

scheme would bring something special to the

design and lift it out of the commonplace. Thomas

Heatherwick trained in three-dimensional design

at Manchester Metropolitan University and the

Royal College of Art, and founded the Thomas

Heatherwick Studio in 1994 to bring together archi-

tecture, art, design and engineering. The proposal

which won this commission for Heatherwick was

very different from the scheme that was eventually

built, although the continuity of his thought proc-

ess is easy to follow.

Presented with an irregular site which was lit-

tle more than a piece of abandoned roadway,

Heatherwick’s first thought was to make it less

linear and more like a city square. This led him to

imagine a sinuous curvaceous form, rather like a

lava flow, which would lap into the adjacent streets.

It would be ‘as if someone had poured a material

called “Square” into this space and, like mercury, it

has flowed up the streets’.^1 The designer had been

collaborating with Pallam Precast, a terrazzo com-

pany, and experimenting with the idea of putting

9.1 (top left)
View towards the Laing Art gallery showing the
‘peeled’ benched and the carpet lapping against
the gallery wall
9.2 (above right)
View of Laing Gallery prior to implementation
9.3 (above left)
The site before implementation: view towards the
Newcastle Building Society