United Kingdom
Design development
For Newcastle City Council the idea of employing
a designer with distinctly adventurous and artistic
ideas to repave a road junction was a major depar-
ture and it required many of the other professionals
involved to adjust their thinking. The competition
brief had been written by an urban designer work-
ing for the Planning and Transportation Division, but
the people Heatherwick would have to work most
closely with were highways engineers. The idea that
an ‘artist’ might not just want to produce an object
to place in the new square, but in effect would
want to design the whole place from scratch was
difficult for them to accept and there was initially
much scepticism and resistance. This mismatch of
perceptions was also reflected in the unrealistic fee
initially offered to the designer, which was based on
the assumption that most of the detailed and tech-
nical design would be done by others. Fortunately
it was possible to overcome these obstacles and
Heatherwick found a great ally in Nader Mahktari,
the local authority engineer appointed as project
manager.
When it became clear that the lava-flow concept
was not going to be possible, Heatherwick realised
that he would have to do something closer to a
customary paving scheme. He was certain that
he did not just want to make a pattern out of con-
ventional elements, which meant that the material
itself had to be something unusual. Glass inter-
ested him because it is inherently hard and thus
resists wearing. Coloured glass is homogeneous
and will not fade through wear or exposure to the
elements. These are its virtues, but it also presents
difficulties. The sharpness of broken glass makes it
an unlikely paving material, particularly in Britain’s
safety-conscious culture. There are technical dif-
ficulties about using it as an aggregate within a
cementatious matrix. Heatherwick recalls how the
engineers would take out their keys and scratch the
sample blocks to see if any shards of glass became
detached.
Blue glass was chosen in preference to green or
brown because it seemed to keep its colour better
when embedded. Initial tests showed that white
cement was better than grey because it reflect-
ed light back through the glass. The quest was
to achieve the mix which allowed the maximum
amount of glass at the surface without any of the
particles becoming loose. The glass particles were
very small and the blocks were not polished, so the
surface, without being rough or jagged, provided a
good grip.
The breakthrough came when Heatherwick turned
to the idea of using resin as a matrix rather than
concrete. One of the benefits of this was that the
material could be used to make thin tiles rather
