Thomas Heatherwick Is the Winner of a Design Award at BritWeek
Break out the tea and crumpets. It’s time once again for BritWeek in Los Angeles, the annual creative summit and celebration of the myriad cultural ties that bind the U.S. and the U.K.
This year’s festivities include the coronation (BritWeek!) of multidisciplinary provocateur Thomas Heatherwick as the winner of the BritWeek/Christopher Guy Design Icon Award, an honor previously bestowed upon milliner Philip Treacy, interiors maven Nina Campbell, and Jaguar design director Ian Callum. Transatlantic furniture-and-style czar Christopher Guy Harrison will present the accolade on April 29 at a private reception in the glittering Christopher Guy showroom in West Hollywood.
Heatherwick’s profile in the U.S. has skyrocketed in the past year on the strength of a traveling architecture-and-design retrospective (currently on view at L.A.’s Hammer Museum and on its way to the Cooper-Hewitt in Manhattan) as well as the announcement of several ambitious new projects on American shores. Chief among them is a sprawling campus for Google in Mountain View, California, which Heatherwick Studio is designing in collaboration with Danish architect Bjarke Ingels.
During a recent phone conversation, Heatherwick remained tight-lipped about the Google job—one can only imagine the byzantine strictures of his nondisclosure agreement—but decidedly upbeat about the opportunities his growing notoriety has afforded. “We’re always searching for unusual types of projects with unusual briefs—assignments that allow us to question how and why we build the things we build,” he says.
Heatherwick is particularly enthused about the progress of his Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, a project that involved the daring transformation of a historic grain silo that was for half a century the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa. “It’s unbelievable that this will be the very first museum devoted exclusively to contemporary African imagination,” says Heatherwick. “Even if you hate our design, it will be the one place in the world to see this astonishing collection.” Cheerio to that.
For those who want more Brit for their buck, Heatherwick’s impish charm and incisive mind will be on full display at the Hammer on April 30, when the newly crowned design icon will make a presentation as part the museum’s ongoing Artist Talk series.
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