The Blue Carpet, Newcastle upon Tyne
Case study
The Blue Carpet, Laing Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Project data
Project name: The Blue Carpet
Location: Laing Square, Newcastle upon Tyne
Date completed: 2002
Cost: £1.4 million
Area: 1300m^2
Designer: Thomas Heatherwick
Client: City of Newcastle
Overview
The location of this project, outside Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery, and its title, the Blue Carpet, suggest
that this is a piece of public art and this was certainly the way in which the City Council chose to represent
it. But Thomas Heatherwick, the designer who won the competition to remodel this neglected corner of
the city, where the new glazed entrance to the Laing faced a scruffy expanse of tarmac and a miscellany
of unrelated buildings, does not describe himself as an artist, and he is adamant that the Blue Carpet is a
functional part of the city. It is just that more thought has gone into it than goes into most urban spaces. It
is not so much that the paving material used, which was the result of much research and experimentation,
is blue (indeed, one of the critical reactions to the project has been that it is not blue enough), nor even that
it uses recycled glass, but that in its form and in its details the Blue Carpet is out of the ordinary.
The Blue Carpet is essentially a paving scheme, but unlike conventional repaving, it does not fit tidily
inside the usual boundaries provided by adjacent buildings and road kerbs. Instead, it has been laid, like an
irregular mat, into a space which is itself oddly shaped. It laps up against the wall of the Laing Gallery like
an Axminster that has crept. It appears to have been punctured by bollards. Strips peeled from the carpet
form benches. Deliberately ill-fitting, it over-laps tree pits, while the paving surrounding it is conspicuously
ordinary. It is rather as if the owner of a house with poor floorboards has bought an exotic rug and thrown it
down to distract attention from what lies beneath, but just as a rug can change a room, so the Blue Carpet
has altered the entire character of this formerly nondescript corner of Newcastle city centre.