A grand summer canopy improbably made of white traffic cones greets you outside the V&A. Inside, a defiantly non-electronic machine packed with spools of stout paper will — if you crank its squeaky handle, cannibalised from a mangle — serve you an exhibition catalogue, which emerges in a strip exactly 4ft long by 4in wide. “If you’re going to print all these catalogues,” says the designer Thomas Heatherwick, subject of the exhibition, “I thought it would be good to show what all that paper looks like.”
The vertical stack of gradually diminishing paper reels is a bit like one of those lumps of rotating kebab meat, thinks Heatherwick, and he will arrange the spools, as they reduce, so that they assume an interesting shape, as if carved. It’s a shape he has predesigned, because he and his large studio of colleagues design everything in obsessive detail. From London’s new Routemaster bus to some extraordinary sculptural buildings and masterplans in the Middle and Far East, it seems there is nothing Heatherwick and co cannot design, generally in a manner that would not occur to anybody else. Others simplify, standardise, pare down; Heatherwick is exuberantly baroque in his approach. He never plays safe. He makes things from first principles.
The show occupies a single large temporary gallery space, as if it were junk piled in a garage. Artfully piled, mind. Everything is on plinths, whether it’s the size of a postage stamp or a complete back of a bus. You wander round this stuff — a circular table of slats that expands to a long oval, an ingenious kinetic bridge or the huge device, like a medieval torture instrument, that crumpled thin stainless-steel sheets used on artists’ workshops in Wales, say — and it’s obvious you’re looking at the products of an exceptionally fertile and inquiring mind. But, but...
The unworthy thought often strikes me, with his work, that little of it is actually necessary. Then again, what is? Heatherwick sets himself problems, then finds clever solutions to them, which a conventional designer would avoid in the first place. Such as the bridge made of lots of vertical unfastened fillets of glass, together forming a flat deck and separate balustrades, which would just fall apart if not clamped with colossal force. So Heatherwick devised an engineer-tested mechanism with 800-tonne weights hanging in shafts either side of the bridge, acting on giant levers that thus squeeze the whole thing immovably together. It is, as he says, “a romantic, powerful idea”. One that needs a patron who has yet to come forward.
I’m sure it can be done. Does it need to be done? Of course not, except for the fun of it. Any other way of making a bridge would be easier and cheaper. This is not, obviously, the Heatherwick way. He has clients aplenty, he is successful, but I’d say he’s principally designing for himself, in the sense that he always needs new challenges to overcome. He is clear he is a designer, not an artist, but he sure as hell has an artist’s mindset.
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One object is missing from this show. You won’t find any drawings, models or pieces of the Olympic “cauldron” he has designed for the London 2012 Games. It’s a secret he, along with everybody else involved, won’t be drawn on. So I try a different tack. In his huge new book, Making, which has been published to coincide with the exhibition, Heatherwick asks a question of each project, such as: “Can you flatpack a 10-metre-high sculpture?” (Yes, if it’s made of long strips of thin, bendy plywood.) So, then, I try: if you can’t tell me about the cauldron, what question did you ask yourself to get your design mojo working on it? Heatherwick gently replies: “The question is the big giveaway. If I told you that, you’d know what the problem was that we figured out.” Touché.
What he does say is this: “We were asked by Danny Boyle to help with the opening ceremony. For me, it was a dream to work with a film director. Because it’s not just an object, it’s a moment. A moment in this brief, extraordinary public event.”
Remember, Heatherwick loves things that move and behave unexpectedly. Bridges that roll up and extend like caterpillars. Buildings with translucent hairs, rather than windows, such as his British pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. A boat that looks as if it has tied itself into a knot. In his way, he is an illusionist. I can imagine him asking questions such as: “Can an Olympic flame appear to hang in the air, unsupported?” Or: “Can a whole Olympic stadium have a flame running right around the top?” Or: “Can we turn that Orbit viewing tower into a flaming torch?” So long as the Olympic bureaucrats don’t cramp his style, whatever it is will be extraordinary.
Still youthful and curly-haired at 42, Heatherwick is an appealing figure. When I first met him, he admitted he slept in a former water-tank cupboard in his studio. He once designed an oak cabinet so complex and heavy, he had to spend 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for four months, carving it by hand. He is dedicated to his craft as few are. I don’t like or necessarily understand everything he does. Yet I applaud him, not only for his talent, but for his determination and attitude. When challenged on his seeming love of the overcomplex, he says: “I’m wary of glossiness. I’m being emphatic. There is a tendency for dried-up restraint. I’m celebrating materials and techniques.” We need that, and we need him.
Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary, V&A, SW7, until Sept 30; Thomas Heatherwick: Making is published by Thames & Hudson at £38