Event 2: Hammer Museum

From the 2010 EXPO Shanghai and the 2012 London Olympics I heard about the great English designer, Thomas Heatherwick, who is gifted in generating innovative ideas, but I know little about his real talent and how his designs improve things around us until I recently visited his exhibition “Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio” in Hammer Museum. I not only harvested times of delight from figuring out how his designs delicately resolve the question but also was mesmerized by his designs filled with both novel and aesthetic feeling.

The first thing directly attracting every tourist of the exhibition is the “spuns” at the entrance. “The Spun Chair has the appearance of a sculptural vessel. But when leaned on its side, it becomes a fun and functional chair that lets you rock side to side or spin around.”(hermanmiller.com) As the explanation shows, the chair really gives my girlfriend and me a lot of fun when we spinning with the chair. People are worried about falling from the chair when they first cautiously spin it, especially when they lean backward. However, as the introduction shows, the special design of spun chair just provides people with both comfort and pleasant. As a chair, the spun chair really does not possess the ordinary appearance of a chair for people’s daily usage and the look of it gives it much artistic specialty.

Because of my great interest of the design, I used the Photoshop to further study the 3D models of the spun chair when I was back home. It is obvious that the artistic design also relates to some ergonomics and physics knowledge. From the 3ds model, we can see that the upper disk has little bit smaller diameter than the lower one, providing people with the largest sitting area while preventing the chair from falling down and insuring the stability. If we look inside of the chair, there is a thin pillar at the center, which supports all the weight put on the chair so that it cannot be squished. Also, from the Internet research I know that “the designer created the Spun Chair using a rotational molding technique to shape plastic.”(upinteriors.com) It is also a field of engineering. Therefore, it can be concluded that the design of a simple chair combines art with other science and technology as we learned from the course.

Entering into the main exhibition, I felt a strong sense of creativity, novelty and science and technology. Although not technically an architect, Thomas Heatherwick is a designer with a lot of architectural experience. “He has a studio in London which produces many architectural designs, but that is not all. He is a designer who tried to revolutionize the ways that objects are approached and used. He has been called "the new Leonardo of design.”(The-Archi-Blog.com) Designs like the stairs of Longchamp flagship store and the garden bridge all reflects the combination of both art and other scientific field like psychology, neurology, ecology and so on. “The magnetic properties of the landscape stair enable movable lights and display stands to be attached with high-strength magnets. The transparent balustrades are fabricated using aerospace windscreen technology to create a series of individually formed panels that drape with the fluidity of fabric.”(heatherwick.com) The stair successfully making the delicate psychological effect and driving people tend to move upwards by the fluid wave-shape. The design of the garden bridge, as large construction, further relates to a city’s overall figure and its people. As the application shows, “the environmental impact assessment has been undertaken in part to avoid or reduce negative environmental effects and to also identify and promote positive effects.” The assessment has considered the following aspects of the environment: Air quality, Noise and vibration, Transport, Ecology (land and river), Water (scour, flooding and drainage), Archaeology, Built heritage, Landscape, Visual effects, Socio-economics and so on. Reading the list, I cannot deny my great respect to Heatherwick as his design is not only a building or a functional construction, but also an artistic and a scientific blended works.

The visit of the Hammer Museum deeply made me feel what I learnt in the course and I would like to explore more for such inspiring creations in my daily life.

Reference:

"Spun Chair." Hermanmiller.com. Web.

<http://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/lounge-seating/spun-chair.html>.

"Spun." Upinteriors.com. Web.

<http://www.upinteriors.com/design/spun-by-thomas-heatherwick/>.

"thomas heatherwick on scale and critical thinking." The Archi-Blog. 26 Oct. 2013. Web. <http://archi-blog.weebly.com/context--history1/category/task 3 project 2 ergonomics64fcdbe9c4>.

"La Maison Unique." Heatherwick.com. Web.

<http://www.heatherwick.com/la-maison-unique/>.

Garden Bridge Planning Application - Environmental Statement: Non-Technical Summary. 2014. Page 8. Print.