The Blue Carpet, Newcastle upon Tyne
than heavy blocks. Glass is so extraordinarily hard
that a layer of only 5mm will have a wearing life
of 60 or 70 years. These tiles could be bonded on
site to a concrete base. Heatherwick made con-
tact with the Design Research Centre at Sheffield
Hallam University where they had been exploring
the use of glass as an indoor terrazzo component.
Heatherwick did not want his material to be pol-
ished, so he asked them to produce samples in
which the resin was cleaned back to expose the
facets of the glass. Eventually, working with two
companies, Dew Pitchmastic and Resin Building
Products, the team devised a system for making
the necessary tiles. Each tile measures 450 x 150
x 10mm and is made from blue glass in a white
resin base. They cover a total area of 1300m^2 and
are bonded to the base material with an epoxy
adhesive. An epoxy grout was also used. This new
material is now known as TTURA. It consists of 85
per cent recycled glass held in a solvent-free resin
and can be regarded as an environmentally sym-
pathetic material. It is also resistant to acids and
alkalis, diesel and petrol spillage and, perhaps the
most likely hazards in this party-city, cigarette burns
and alcohol.^3
The surface of the carpet is broken up by strips of
brass which echo the overall shape in the manner of
contours on a plan. In the daytime the neon tubes
are switched off, but these metal strips catch the
light. The most eye-catching features in the square
are the benches which seem to have been formed
of the carpet material, peeled up and given a gentle
twist. No one was prepared to manufacture these
at a reasonable cost, so their brass edges, together
with the structural steelwork that would be hidden
inside them, were made in Heatherwick’s own stu-
dio prior to casting by Pallam Precast.Although the Blue Carpet is essentially a hard-land-
scaping scheme, it includes seven mature trees
that were transplanted from nurseries in Germany
and the Netherlands. This aspect of the work was
supervised by the City of Newcastle’s Landscape
Section. They are some of the largest trees ever
imported into the UK (one is over 16m tall).Another feature of Thomas Heatherwick’s scheme
is the spiral staircase which links the new public
square to one of the city’s main car parks across
the Central Motorway at Manors. Designed as an
elegant replacement for an existing steel structure,
the staircase has at its core a simple broad spiral
made of 1,340 individual pieces of marine plywood.
It was decided that only a boat-builder, used to the
complex curves of hulls, would be able to construct
this sophisticated and technically-demanding shape
and the work was given to McNulty Boats Ltd of
Hebburn. The metalwork of the stairs themselves
was manufactured by Hi Def (UK) Ltd. The stairs