Thomas Heatherwick is the designer who defies convention. His magical structures now span the globe, but in this exclusive interview with Time Out he explains why Hong Kong remains the city that fires his imagination

Abridge that rolls itself into an octagon. A glass cathedral that wafts in the wind. Thomas Heatherwick possesses an uncanny ability to create structures that stop people dead in their tracks, as if mesmerised by what they are seeing. The 41-year-old Londoner is currently the world’s most in-demand designer (or architect, or inventor, or sculptor – describing Heatherwick is never an easy business) and he’s widely celebrated for that very queer quality of capturing public attention, be they young or old, wise or innocent. Everyone, seemingly, is carried along by his magical powers to create reality-defying buildings which appear both alien yet immediately comprehensible. At last year’s Shanghai Expo, his glorious ‘Seed Cathedral’ was worshipped by millions of Chinese visitors (including their awestruck political masters) while his designs for a Buddhist temple in Japan look like nothing else on Earth. He’s just reimagined the famous red London bus for the 21st century (it looks even more iconic now) and he’s about to unveil his feverishly-anticipated designs for the 2012 London Olympic cauldron (Beijing – prepare to eat your heart out). Every city in the world wants him. But, incredible as it seems, Heatherwick wants one city more than any other – Hong Kong. He’s visited more than 80 times. Hong Kong fires him up, inspires him, leaves him breathless. ‘You’re very spoiled!’ he tells Time Out over the phone from his London studio. ‘You’re living in Hong Kong!’

You may not know it, but Heatherwick has been a very busy man in our city. He’s currently redesigning the million-square-foot shopping complex of Pacific Place (both inside and out), and he’ll soon unveil plans to build a ‘hotel tower’ in Sheung Wan. But what he wants most of all is to get involved with the West Kowloon Cultural District. One can only imagine what Heatherwick would do to the waterfront, but that depends on the bravery and vision of those in charge. We hope they will read the following interview and act fast, because Heatherwick is constantly, restlessly on the move…

Let’s begin with the immediate present. How is your life at the moment? Are you in five places at once or do you have time to sit and think?
[Laughs] Well, the studio has been going 17 years now and I’m lucky enough to have people around me who can work with me and think with me. Things are hectic, but I have the chance to travel and move around and not just to be based in London. It’s easier now than it was 15 years ago.

Because you started with nobody and now have this incredible team around you?
Yes. I never worked for another practice, or architect, before I set up this studio. So we have been inventing our own way of working instead of following the established method. We’ve developed a way of working efficiently but not to a corporate culture.

That must be great.
It is, but it takes time to find your way through.

Your studio seems to juggle many projects. Is it a case of things being on red, then amber, then green for go?
The thing I find that works well is putting something down and then moving on to something else and then coming back to it. I heard about a painter who had a technique that stuck in my mind; whenever he worked on a painting he’d stick it on top of his television. So when he watched TV he would catch it unawares out of the corner of his eye and then have fresh thoughts about it. I’ve found that by working on more than one thing at a time you retain your freshness as you alternate. There’s no paralysis.

So do you have symbols and objects placed around the studio to catch your eye?
Well, a project isn’t over until it’s fully complete, rather than just the drawings you send off. I truly believe your role is to support the craftsmen and contractors and commissioners to the very end. Do everything you can to make it the best it can be. You’re always fighting to not have something you regret at the end. So the new London bus we’re working on at the moment [the famous Routemaster red bus], the first one will be coming off the production line in just a couple of weeks. Technically our main design work finished many, many months ago but we’ve been with the factory helping with the delivery and trying to coordinate everything as best as possible.

Can we talk about Pacific Place. What phase of completion is that at now?
Parts of it are ‘complete’ complete, while some parts, like the façades, are still in the early phase, because you want to have minimum disruptions to all of the different tenants. Pacific Place is a really interesting project because the creativity of the management team has been as great as anything we as designers have ever done. Their role is to say, ‘how do you make a fundamental change to a phenomenally successful environment without closing it down?’ So for us [that means] how do you invent your way of having elves who can work on incremental changes on a profound level, rather than just the surface, while keeping it open.

So it’s like open heart surgery.
Yes! Brain surgery and open heart surgery! While trying to keep the patient smiling and talking!

You once said that reimagining Pacific Place was like re-building a small town.
Well, my father was an aircraft carrier when he was in the Royal Marines and he described to me all the different functions that were on an aircraft carrier – like a town on water. Pacific Place is just like that – a whole town, very self-contained at the same time as being very connected with the surrounding area. It’s got to carry on thriving for the next 20 years. In some senses it’s been one of the quietest projects we’ve done, but then we had to really support the vitality already in the area.

So can the question of it ‘being on target’ be truly answered?
You mean when will we finally complete it?

Yes.
The priority has been a quality of outcome rather than a speed of outcome, and trying to minimise disruption – that’s been the priority. Internally we’re almost complete, the external side that is still to happen – the new bridge across to the Tamar site and the park on the other side across Queensway – well, we’re really hoping we get permission from the city to build this. We’re excited about the park bridge which will have really substantial quantities of greenery and not just a few pots strapped to the handrails.

You mentioned Tamar. Isn’t that building the antithesis of what Thomas Heatherwick is all about?
[Pause] I don’t know a great detail about the project and also I know Rocco Yim to be an architect with great integrity.

But the Tamar government building is seen as cold, soulless, threatening, impenetrable. People loathe the sight of it.
I don’t know what the procurement process was for that building, and what the full original vision was, and what might have been compromised on route to get there...

Okay.
...But for me, Hong Kong is amazing because of the mix of so many things, and the intensity of these things rubbing shoulders and jostling with each other. That to me is Hong Kong’s really incredible thing, and the reason why I’ve come to Hong Kong about 80 times now is because each and every time it fires me up in a way unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been to.

The towers and mountains inspire you?
Yes, it surprises me how much the physical environment can hold the architectural quantum all together, breathing together, it’s just… it just lifts me! I find the intensity very exciting. I’m so used to masterplanning documents that use the word ‘vibrancy’ and ‘energy’ about places that are, well, they’re cliché ridden words used too often. But the collision of different scales and wealth levels in Hong Kong all based around intense activity… and yet without the coldness of cities like New York where there is one major park, and I know that Hong Kong is going to get a new park but it has proximity to these phenomenal jungle-clad sculptures behind you, these Hong Kong mountains, it balances the scale of the architecture for me and makes harmony. It may seem phenomenally unharmonious to some people’s eyes, but to me it’s absolutely harmonious, how it balances. A city with such an intense habitation and business occupation next to such symbols of remote jungle life all squished up against each other is just… breathtaking.

Well, one of the things…
You’re very spoiled!

True!
You’re really spoiled living in Hong Kong!

But what about the West Kowloon Cultural District? We dearly wish you to be involved.
And I would dearly love to get involved. But I am very interested in how the world has fallen in love with culture and art. Anyone with any wealth in any place of wealth in the world is desperate to have cultural credibility. It feels like a century of everyone trying to show how desperately cultural they are, for status.

That’s dangerous.
Whether it’s dangerous or not, it’s important to realise that everybody else is doing it as well. There are various places on this planet with varying degrees of wealth which, from one extreme, think this thing called ‘cultural’, which means ‘the arts’, is the solution to social deprivation, to lack of education, to property, and so on. [They think] the arts will solve all of that! There are lots of examples in Europe where there is real degeneration of areas that a new library or opera house is perceived to solve everything. It’s become a formulaic solution.

Indeed.
[Quickly] Yes and at the other extreme there are cities that want to create touristic value and they are looking across the world thinking, ‘where do people like to go? I know, opera houses, museums and art galleries!’ [And they say] ‘Well, we have the money, so let’s have that. Let’s have the best! We’ll have a Louvre! We’ll have a Guggenheim!’ That to me is like buying the latest and most expensive handbags. It doesn’t mean you are more intelligent or more unique or more special. Am I yabbering on?

Certainly not.
To me the key thing for West Kowloon is that it must be suitably paranoid that this is a well trodden formula in cities all over the world, and individuals, corporations and companies need to know that. Hong Kong is really wealthy at the moment so it’s important that what happens at West Kowloon doesn’t look like it’s a rich person buying credibility, a rich city buying ‘culture’.

But will you be involved?
I would love to be involved in helping West Kowloon become a manifestation of incredible inventiveness and uniqueness to Hong Kong. The WKCD has to look clever rather than rich, and must be something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. I’m weary of the word ‘culture’ because culture is everywhere – it’s your life, it’s a launderette, it’s everything. The arts are just one part of culture. Culture is dress, how you go to the toilet; it’s your culture. It’s a very powerful word and I think there is an opportunity for Hong Kong to defy what we expect – which is trophy jewels placed out in a park.

We fear a big opera house, a big museum and a big art gallery being plopped down on the waterfront.
It’s absolutely right that anywhere at this moment embarking on something like this should have that fear. I’ve met [WKCD boss] Michael Lynch and he seems an incredible person. Sorry, I keep saying incredible a lot...

It’s alright, it’s important.
[Laughs] … And the [Norman] Foster masterplan seems sensible and practical and really good armature with which to build the next phase of life and activity. We’ll certainly be fighting as hard as we can if Hong Kong people want us to help make this project become really distinctive and not just a version of something that exists in China or the United States.

We do!
I just feel so strongly that it’s a chance for Hong Kong to express itself even more distinctly and become its own. Those words are easily said but the reality is very hard when there is a big community of people who are dying to have a fantastic opera house. Give me a big wonderful museum like they have over there on the other side of the globe! [Laughs] West Kowloon needs to be fantastic not only for Hong Kong but fantastic to have on this planet. It has to be a treasure of the world, not just in the region. By the way, treasure doesn’t mean mega-icons and brand names attached to that.

Time Out lives next to Southorn Playground in Wan Chai. You made incredible plans for this playground but they were rejected. Did the government lose its nerve?
[Pause] Well, it’s just like what we were talking about with West Kowloon; I think it’s important Hong Kong has the courage to invest in the cultural infrastructure in the wider [city] and so we were somewhat saddened – and surprised – that a project that was motivated by our commissioners and Wan Chai District Council to make a really special cultural function within an area where there is huge pressure from developers to shunt that cultural function – a sports cultural function – in order to build some more giant office buildings. Reinforcing its right to be there is really important. There’s nothing much wrong with the playground, it could just be better. It could work even better. There’s a thirsty need for that in Wan Chai.

So what happened?
A main property developer wanted to put in half the money but the government wasn’t up for matching it. It was a bureaucratic decision. I think it was handing it from one person to another to another…

...Until the flower wilted.
Nobody had the courage. I’ve found there are so many reasons for things NOT to happen, and it’s really an extraordinary thing when a project does happen because it means it’s been through so many micro-hurdles to get there. Somehow, in Wan Chai, hurdles got in the way of making a great facility even better as a resource for everyone in the area. The most cynical thing would be to do a cunning land swap – we’ll give you three times the space in the New Territories – but that’s when Hong Kong loses its spirit. The thing I am so moved by is that the people in Hong Kong want things protected. Just having a football pitch and four basketball courts in some of the most valuable real estate on this planet is really such a nice thing! [Laughs]

And it’s always full of people.
Yes and having a horse racing course in the middle of giant buildings on the most expensive areas of land in the world … at first it looks absurd, but you’ll never forget it in your life! Anybody who has ever been to Hong Kong and seen Happy Valley will never forget it again in their life.

True.
And Southorn Playground is not on the same scale as horse racing, but it has the same quality. It has commercial illogicality that makes it so special for people who live there and work there. Am I being longwinded again?

No!
Anyway, local places are important. We can’t just have one ‘ghetto’ for the arts.

The Heatherwick name has been linked to a hotel tower project in Sheung Wan.
In Sheung Wan we’ve been working with some developers who have commissioned us to build a new hotel building. I can’t talk in more detail about the design, other than to say Sheung Wan, again, has these wonderful contradictions that are so precious to Hong Kong. Can we have the spirit maintained [in Sheung Wan] while not impeding process? It’s the dried fish capital of the world! The smell is incredible! All these shops selling things you never even knew existed from the sea in various drying versions on the streets. Inserting a new building into that environment, which isn’t Central, which has that juggling activity overlaying each other, we will have to find ways to not fall into the trap of when a new building comes along... what’s the best way to put it?... when it has a big bum! It lands and kills the life of the street. The street frontage vitality is broken with a shiny glass lobby. Our work is to retain a texture because that’s what Sheung Wan is rich with, texture.

Will the lower floors look like the new Malaysian housing project you’re doing?
Yes, exactly! It’s the same point – however tall a building is, which is great for the postcards, it’s the first two or three floors which are your emotional human scale experience. It’s common to many projects I’ve worked on, finding the human scale.

We’ve also heard you’re involved in a big project in Happy Valley.
[Cautious, confused] What have you been told?

That you could be reimagining the neighbourhood surrounding the racecourse.
Er… I wish! I wish I had the opportunity to think about that. I understand the Jockey Club has recently released images of design work they have commissioned. I would love to help to reassert the place of a racing course in the centre of a city, as a serious long term thing. The way people use the Hong Kong Jockey Club has changed since it was first built, but there is a real chance to reassert its uniqueness to Hong Kong rather than mimicking sports architecture to the rest of the world, like Ascot in Britain. That’s a totally different proposition.

Can you tell us about your designs for the 2012 London Olympics flaming cauldron?
[Knowing laugh] Well the cauldron is the most secretive thing we have ever worked on.

How can you hide it from the press?
The architecture of the London Olympics is already very visible so people around the world can see what’s being constructed before the Games start. But we were asked by the film director Danny Boyle, who’s in charge of the opening ceremony, to collaborate with him on the cauldron, and its lighting. It’s been a real privilege to work with such a fantastic film director. He has a cool creative team always working around him. He’s incredible. And I think there’s also a parallel with our team.

Is it going to look awesome?
[Laughs] We’ve had to shred every single drawing of the Olympic cauldron as soon as we’ve reviewed it in the office. The models are all locked up in a special safe-box. If everyone knows everything before the Olympics start then it’s less interesting.

May I ask about spirituality?
Okay.

You’re designing both a Benedictine monastery in England and a Buddhist temple in Japan. What’s your conception of a spiritual building?
In one sense a spiritual building is also a public building. Many of us spend time in faith-based buildings regardless if we are a member of one faith or another faith. They all have a place. What’s the best way to answer your question?

...Do you have to be spiritual in order to create a spiritual building?
I’ve been very touched to be asked by organisations of different faiths to make them happen. If we’re talking culture, a temple is as much a culture as an art gallery, or power station.

Your Buddhist temple looks incredible, but it was rendered years ago and is still waiting to be built. Why?
The Buddhist priest we are working worth is still struggling. No, not struggling, but he still needs to raise the money to build it. Just because you are a special person in your faith does not mean you are the fastest fundraiser. This high priest is described as ‘the inspirer’. They say his name and then say ‘the inspirer’!

That’s excellent.
And you think, yes, he is an inspirer! He’s very effective. So every project, whether it’s a shopping mall in Hong Kong or a new Cantonese opera house at West Kowloon, the key is, who are your inspirers? You need to find your way through all those micro-hurdles that got in the way of Southorn Playground from happening.

Will you be setting up an office in China?
Yes. After the Seed Cathedral project in Shanghai we’ve been commissioned to do a couple of projects, so our plan is to set-up there.

This is a sensitive question, but China’s ‘can-do’ approach to urban planning has come at the expense of people’s rights. It’s an enormous social issue and it’s getting worse. How does that sit with you?
I feel very wary to preach a simplistic response because I feel there are many things that one can question as uncomfortable in most places in the world. I have great envy for the people of China at the facilitation and progress that is happening that will benefit generations and generations to come in their freedoms. China is really stitching the country together in a way that will allow people freedom to do business and also to go places. I feel it’s important to keep an open mind and question from all angles.

Your famous glass bridge – will it become a reality? And if so, where will it be built?
[Laughs] Through research funding we know it’s buildable now, and doable, so we just need a city that needs more unique elements that don’t exist in other places in the world. Who knows, maybe West Kowloon has water that needs crossing!

So then... designer. Inventor. Planner. What’s the best word to describe you?
Oh, I don’t...

...How about ‘inspirer’?
Jake, you’re really putting me on the spot! In one sense I’m not interested in titles at all. I feel the activity I do is to design. Design straddles broadly everything. Designer is a true unpretentious title.

It’s a good unpretentious title.
But basically you can call me anything you like!