 Good evening. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Nadair Tehrani, and as the new Dean of the Irwin S. Channon School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, I am very happy to welcome you to tonight's lecture, the first current work lecture of 2015. Alongside our friends at the Architectural League of New York, we're pleased to undertake another season of joint lectures, this after 12 years of collaborative work. I want to thank Rosalie Ginevro, its executive director, and Anne Rieselbach, its program director for having helped build this long and fruitful relationship among other contributions they've made through the league. Any of you who are out there who are young architects have known them for what they gave to us as we grew up in architecture. For me, this is a particularly special night standing on the stage for the first time below the stage, as it turns out, speaking to you not as a guest this time, but as host. It is indeed an honor. Though she's not in attendance tonight, I want to thank Belitian, the president of the Architectural League for a critical voice and helping to assemble a great range of voices for this season. I also want to make a special thanks to Elizabeth O'Donnell, who not only led this school over the past couple of years under great duress, but has also played an instrumental role in welcoming me to this community, and indeed now continuing her great work with me to oversee the next chapter of this great school. On a more personal level, I'm also very happy to see a couple of friends out there. Chuck Hoberman, Amy Flom, Elise Jaffe, Jeff Brown, and I wish I knew more, and hopefully I will soon. I bet I welcome you. Tonight's event has in fact three cosponsors, not only the Architectural League and the School of Architecture, but also the Cooper Hewitt. The program is in conjunction with the exhibition Provocations, the Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio, curated by Cooper Hewitt Deputy Director Brooke Hodge, who will introduce Thomas Heatherwick in a few minutes. Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum is the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Cooper Hewitt educates, it inspires and empowers people through design by presenting exhibitions and educational programs and maintaining active publications. The museum was founded in 1897 by Amy Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt, granddaughters of the industrialist Peter Cooper, as the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, which was housed in the Cooper Union's original foundation building, along with classrooms for free instruction in the arts and sciences, a free reading room and, of course, this great hall. A branch of the Smithsonian since 1967, Cooper Hewitt is located in the landmark Andrew Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street in New York City. This program and other Architectural League programs are supported in part by public funds from the New York State Council of the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo as well as the New York State Legislature, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by League members who provide ongoing support for the League's programs and projects. And for this, I thank you all. Now, I will relent on taking the spotlight, but let me just say that we are very delighted to have Thomas Heatherwick as our first speaker here at Cooper Union. In a school whose legacy is marked by a dedication to making and to a pedagogy that is focused on the research of representational, generative and analytical processes, it is refreshing to have someone here that can extend our own discussion towards new horizons. In Heatherwick's work, we witness an unorthodox transgression of disciplinary boundaries unimpeded by a traditional interpretation of tectonics. Merging the protocols and sensibilities of industrial design, engineering, fashion, sculpture, among other things, his work is there to challenge the received frame of reference of the work of architecture, what he calls three-dimensional design, but in fact is something much more devious and saturated in its ability to blur, graft and invent a hybrid interpretation of media at large. The protein ability to merge and travel across disciplines also problematizes our lens of interpretation as much as our barometer for appraisal. After all, discourses of engineering, art and architecture differ in significant ways, all with their own standards of rigor and their sense of propriety. Drawing from these sometimes contradictory discourses, Heatherwick's work collapses the traditional dichotomies posed between the siloed categories that divide avant-garde from kitsch or from the optimized structure from the whimsical rhetorical figure. His work in fact denies us the possibility of passive encounter and instead demands a renewed critical attention. Tonight stands to be a great pleasure for all of us. Now, before having Brooke Hodge take the stage, please join me in welcoming Caroline Bowman, the director of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum to the stage, and she will help to amplify and extend these introductions. Welcome. Thank you so much for those kind words, Nadia, and welcome to your very important new role at Cooper Union. We're all very excited and we're all your friends. Good evening. I am super excited to hear Thomas Heatherwick speaking tonight in Cooper Union's Great Hall and by the looks of it, you all are too. I'm only sorry that we didn't bring the spun chairs that are currently in the Cooper Hewitt here so that the people standing could actually spin in the chairs as they're listening to this great discussion. Next time. I wonder too if Abraham Lincoln filled as many seats when he spoke here in 1860. We'll have to find that out. The Cooper Union and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum share a history that dates back to the turn of the last century. And as Nadia mentioned, the museum's name reflects our common ancestry. Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt who first established the Cooper Hewitt collection were indeed the granddaughters of Peter Cooper. And it was in this building in 1897 that the Hewitt sisters installed their remarkable collection of design objects as a practical working laboratory for students and designers to enjoy and study. The museum remained at Cooper Union for several decades until it finally moved into the Carnegie Mansion uptown on East 91st Street where our museum is now located. The Hewitt sisters are fascinating figures in the history of American design and we have a great blog on the Cooper Hewitt website Meet the Hewitts where you can learn all about their marvelous journeys in search of a truly global collection of objects. Among recent additions to our extraordinary collection is Heatherwick Studios' fun chair, of course, one of the most collected objects with our new interactive pen. If you haven't tried the pen, I want to see you up at Cooper Hewitt very soon so you can try the pen and you can try out the chair. I am delighted that Cooper Hewitt could partner with Cooper Union and the Architectural League of New York to make tonight's talk possible. And I'd like to thank Elizabeth O'Donnell, Associate Dean, Cooper Union, Rosa Lee Genevro, Executive Director of the Architectural League, and Wieselbach, Program Director of the Architectural League for all of their efforts to make this wonderful night possible. And now I have the great pleasure of introducing my colleague, Deputy Director of Cooper Hewitt, Brook Hodge, Curator of our Exhibition Provocations, the Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio, which is on view at Cooper Hewitt through January 3rd. Thank you. Thank you, Caroline. And to Caroline's thanks, I'd also like to add a thanks to Andy, who's in our audience tonight, who's saved the evening by providing us with an adapter for Thomas' laptop. So thank you, Andy. It's my great pleasure tonight to introduce you to Thomas Heatherwick. I first visited Heatherwick Studio in 2002, and even then, more than 10 years ago, I could tell that Thomas and his team, then about five or six people, were doing something extraordinary. His imagination and ideas are brilliant, expansive, reaching for the sky and beyond. Thomas, who was born and raised in London, completed his first degree in 3D design at Manchester Polytechnic in 1991. For his degree project, he broke all the rules by designing and constructing a full-scale pavilion. Design students usually make bowls, not buildings, but Thomas' vision has always been about more than objects. How can an architecture student learn about architecture if he or she doesn't build something at real human scale? He went on to postgraduate degree at London's Royal College of Art, where he wanted to continue researching and experimenting with ways of making buildings. Again, he made a building for his degree project. This time, it was a 20-foot tall gazebo, made of two stacks of interwoven birch plywood L-shapes, which curve outward and then in toward each other. The building itself is ingenious, but how Thomas got it built is equally clever. He met the iconic British designer and entrepreneur, Sir Terence Conran, one day when Conran was visiting the studios at the Royal College of Art, and enlisted his support for the project, which he ended up building on the grounds of Conran's country house because, of course, there wasn't enough room in the studio. Thomas graduated from the RCA in 1994 and established Heatherwick Studio that same year. The rest, I like to think, is history in the making. From the innovative rolling bridge at Paddington to the astonishing Seed Cathedral for the UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo to the brilliant Olympic Cauldron and the Verdant Garden Bridge, each project is more innovative and inspiring than the last. Soon enough, we New Yorkers will have our own amazing Heatherwick projects, a lushly-planted public park and performance venue on the west side called Pier 55, and a soon-to-be-unveiled project in Hudson Yards. Following his talk tonight, Thomas will be joined on stage by the renowned architecture writer Paul Goldberger for a Q&A, and then following the close of that program, we invite you out to the lobby where both of them will be signing their books. We thank them both for sharing their insights with us tonight. Settle in, you are about to be inspired. Let me start since you talked so specifically about so many of these projects. Let me step back and start our conversation with some more sort of more general thoughts. Nadir Tarani, introducing, welcoming us this evening, spoke of your work as challenging the paradigm of different design disciplines and the separateness of different design disciplines. And you showed us some fairly large-scale, primarily architectural and landscape things, but of course you've also done furniture, objects, the London bus, the current version of the red London bus, which you did not show this evening. And it seems to me that I can't recall a figure since maybe Charles and Ray Eames, who have moved so comfortably among various realms of design. So let me start by asking, is design all one thing? Yes. Okay. Do you care to elaborate? No. Okay. Well, when I was growing up, I was, people didn't talk, my parents, one thing I appreciated is they never asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I think often adults sort of project because they almost don't know what to say to children. So they say, what do you want to be? Because they've got their own fascination, they're putting on to somebody and nobody ever asked me that. And so there weren't a list of professions that were sort of, they're kind of being promoted or, and so my grandfather had these engineering books about the great Victorian and Georgian engineers. And, and then as, and my, my mother was making things with her to go to my parents' bedroom. I had to go through her workshop. And your mother was a jewelry designer, right? She was just, yeah, at that time she was doing a lot of enameling. So there was lots of toxic chemicals and kilns and things like that. But then when I was, as I was sort of looking as a little person, it surprised me that everything seemed to be, I don't know, maybe it was automatic. But I had heard of inventors and I'd seen inventions for ways that buildings could do things, inventions for ways bicycles could go faster. I had books of Edwardian inventions and patents and you'd look through them. And so ideas didn't seem to have a scale. And then it surprised me that the world of ideas was chopped up into all these things. And it also struck me that that was a fashion of our time. It wasn't the same a few centuries ago and it probably won't be the same in a few centuries. And there were mindsets for each titling, which were very, very different. It astonished me how different the mindset was when an object was big enough to go inside it from when an object was something you sat on. Totally different education, totally different expectations, what kind of person did that. Utterly different relationship with product, with outcome. And I felt that there was sort of slight emperors new clothes things in the middle of that. And then there were, in a way, I suppose I've found that I was interested in artistic thinking. And sometimes artistic thinking wasn't in the world of art. It might be somewhere you didn't expect it, like food, or waste sewage treatment, or business idea. And so I had that sort of funny sense that there were these things that people comfortably slotted into and I'm one of these. And rather than the objective thing, I was interested objectively of what things did, why they were like they were. And because I hadn't got a bunch of categories, I sort of saw them as a continuum. I mean a bus is, for some reason, buses are such a different mindset. If you build a new building in London, a two-story building in the centre of London, you're going to have the local planning authority asking, is it in keeping with the vernacular of London? There's a quarango called the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment that will probably call it in for a review. And you'll justify it to a big panel and they'll agonise over its context and how it goes. But if you're doing a two-story building on wheels, the only stipulation is, is it red? Even though there are 7,000 of those two-story buildings, and you're more likely to see one of those two-story buildings than any other building in London. There are two-story building on wheels that more people will experience than any other two-story building. So it just seems that, why aren't you worrying about that one? And why do you go, oh no, that's infrastructure. And then there's people who, oh they do infrastructure. And there was this two-story building world on wheels where the things, good practice in the world of the ones without wheels, about lights that's vaguely flattering for human skin tissue, hadn't been applied to there. So fluorescent tubes like in a battery chicken farm were in the thing that was on wheels. But even in totally mediocre kind of hotel bar-ish thing, lighting was considered and understood a bit better. So there were things that were just, by seeing them as a connected way, you could just apply some of the basic things that work in other worlds. But to say with the bus for a moment, it's not as though they truly said, just do whatever you want, just remember to put wheels on it or something. I remember you told me that London Transport did push you and fight with you on a lot of things. And it was actually a push to get some variation in the form. Because in a way you could say there was a context, the context was the previous versions of the bus, that you had to kind of argue to go beyond and change significantly, right? While still being true to a certain DNA, I guess, of the London bus. We were allowed quite a free rein. The main thing was that they wanted the bus to use 40% less energy, which we all did. And to use 40% less energy, it meant it needed to be lightweight. To be lightweight, it meant using composites. Composites is a posh word for fibreglass. No one really likes fibreglass. And so it became about fibreglass handling, because fibreglass is brilliant actually, because it makes a fireproof surface, it also makes structure and its ability to take form was good. So we had shared objectives. The only thing we weren't able to do, which we now are doing, was we weren't allowed to put opening windows. That brief was like, no, opening windows! Because the public, they open the windows, and then the heat goes out, it gets in. And we said, yeah, but then a stinky kebab can smell, can go out. You made very big changes in the stair, as I remember, too. I mean, that's one of the most dramatic things on the bus. I think the thing that really interests, and I don't know if it came across, I try to think from the human experience on every project, rather than having this sort of set of, this is how we work, and we apply it to the world, whether it's in Shanghai, a bus, a Perthian bottle, or a nursing home. But instead we're trying to think what would mean most in each context, and work outwards from that. And so with the bus, it felt that the priority in the past had always been about getting A to B success in London's transport system, was about transferring people from one place to another within a certain time. But it hadn't been about how does that person feel about their life at the end of that experience, when they do that every day for 25 years. And so the dignity of the passenger, it felt a pompous word to use the word dignity. So even a little staircase, I mean the staircase is this wide, but how could we give it some feeling of grandeur? And it also was striking that however rich someone is, a Ferrari going around London, or whatever, you can't get a better view of London than the front at the top of a double deck of bus. And so why is this not so special? And I think that one thing that also people say is that the most successful cities are a city where rich people take public transport. That's a test. And there are many cities one goes to where rich people don't use public transport. And we're not designing for rich people, we're all, it's the lovely thing about public transport is that it's for all of us. And is it actually functioning as a democratic presence, in effect, in the city, is what you're saying? In a successful city, it's a kind of mixing chamber. Well, going to Moscow and seeing the underground system there was so moving to me. I mean, amazing, these underground stations, many of you have been there and seen this station. The notion of the people's palace was just incredible. And you were looking and you think, they've put chandeliers and they've got this, and then you're thinking, that's ridiculous, that's over the top. And then having been in a real palace of someone, somewhere else where there were sort of four people all day long in this place, and then being in this space that was 70 years old, which had had these chandeliers sitting there with train, and you knew that that would have cost a bit more, but then you, is it called amortising? You worked out that about a quarter of a million people go through that station every day and I've been doing that for 70 years, worked out the numbers on that, and you suddenly thought, you know, a bit of joy that that gives. The chandelier was actually quite a bargain. Yeah, I'm not obsessed with chandeliers, by the way, but it was just the symbiotic, the notion of people's palaces, I think, is phenomenal. And there were a couple in London that kind of got lost their way, but I think... Well, but on the other hand, compared to New York, it's... I mean, something... One thing that I was sort of very affected by was, and in a way has motivated some of the projects that you see, is that you knew that in an art gallery something was going to be great, because if it's not great, it has no reason to exist at all in the world in an art gallery, and you walk through the door of an art gallery with a kind of, go on, amaze me, go on. Make me meaningful, be meaningful, blow me away. And then people's homes, you knew people's homes have amazing private worlds, but the bit in between that we share was rubbish, the bit I experienced growing up. It was astonishing how bad, like British hospitals, just astonished that that happened, and you started to see why, and the buses and the street, you grew up with such low expectation, and I learnt why, because it's extremely hard to make public projects happen, and so it just seemed... I knew that I had sort of determination, and so I just thought, why not try? I was rubbish at anything that was about speed, but just hanging in there and just trying to see if it was possible, it moved me whenever I saw an effort made to try to make something that would work in multiple levels in the public realm that you encountered in your life. I was very struck in your talk how you presented each and every project as a narrative, and in effect the project, the story of the project was not the story of the form, but the story of how you solved the problem in effect and how you conceptualized it and how you got there. I don't know if that was done consciously or if it's just the way you think and how it comes out, but each of them really was a story that culminated in our almost discovering, along with you, what the solution was, and it created a wonderful sense that first that you view, you view it all as a narrative, as a process, as experiential, and in each case, the argument, the final product or result felt almost inevitable. Can you comment on that at all? I mean, is there a conscious sense of each of these things as a narrative? Because that was very, very powerfully, you were absolutely not starting with the form in any a priori way. I suppose that when we're working, we feel like we're trying to hunt down the answer to a problem, and that's how we were, and I don't see it as trying that I'm trying to express myself or any of my team. We're trying to find what is the answer to a problem. So a lot of the time at the beginning of a project, you're trying to figure out what is the problem and the problem might not be what it seems like. Or even what the client thinks it is, right? When you start, there's a thing of what the client thinks it is, and then you're there thinking what's the real problem, which might be slightly a different version, and figuring out what that problem is, then that's like you're writing your own brief to solve. And so, in the book that we did and in the book's exhibition of our work at the Koopy Hewitt, she sort of drew out these things which were provocations, I think they got called, which were often with our projects. That was the question. Once you figured out the question to ask yourself, then you're halfway there. And so with the cauldron, for example, you had to stay top secret, so you weren't allowed to tell anyone. But then a friend of mine said, what's the provocation then for it? I said, I can't tell you because if you knew that, you would have guessed the answer. We probably guessed the answer. But a friend of mine did guess the answer. And you had to have him killed, I suppose. It was very strange because I rang up my friend and said, we've been asked to do the cauldron and I can't tell you what we're doing. He said, don't tell me. You're going to get 204 bits. And I was like, who knows? And I thought, how can we get him to work for the studio? And then, yeah, so that was... You didn't mention another project you're doing here in New York, Hudson Yards, which is equally under wraps, I suppose, the centerpiece for that. Is there a question without revealing what the project is because I know you can't? Is there a question that faves that one that will not tell us everything that will not reveal the solution? No. I'm going to be careful not to wave my hands around because they'll start miming it. Okay, okay, okay. Almost. Michael Loughran, who's our collaborator from Related and Project Manager is here somewhere. And before, we were... because construction has started. I mean, it's sort of 16 stories high, a serious thing. I mean, it will be when it's finished, it's not now. Yeah, it will be. He was almost going to give me all the cut pieces so then people could look at it and try and guess what they've add up to make. Like a jigsaw, like a puzzle. The problem was at the corner of the drawing, it gave it away, something was there. So otherwise, I would have shown it tonight. Given that it has now begun construction, what is the point at which you or Related will choose to reveal it then? I think the plan is early summer next year as it starts being assembled and constructed on sites. Let me go back to two other projects that you did show us. Pier 55 here in New York and the Garden Bridge. Each of which have raised somewhat similar issues in these two cities about the private design, let's say, of the public realm. And each has been criticized in one context or another as representing a kind of privatization of the public realm or public process. What's your response to that? I mean, it's not a criticism specifically about the design itself and the result, but about the environment of private philanthropy that has often, in some cases, taken over from public planning and taken along with it, I suppose, a certain expectation of privilege to come with it. Is that an objection that is more one in principle and in reality, why should we be complaining when we're getting such a gift? Or is there some merit in that? Can you address that larger question? The Hudson River Park Trust have a mandate to make all these river parks, to extend and grow the river park. And this is one of those elements, and they're used to designing and working on all of these different elements. And so, in a way, this is no normal, no different than that. And, I mean, America has been made by the great philanthropists in a way that the rest of the world envies that the philanthropists have made the incredible places that we know of here and stepped up. I think it's different when something is about privatization, but the peer is going to be free for everyone to go on and heavily subsidized any of the performances that are going to be there. So this is, I think it's an interesting, I mean, it's understandable, but the jumping to the assumption of suspicion motive that somehow something is privatization, that's absolutely the opposite of everyone's objective. And the Hudson River Park, it's their project, where the whole thing is that that's free. And like with so many projects in the States, you've got incredible philanthropists. The UK doesn't have people who step up like that. It's very, very rare. And so it's kind of... And then managing to inspire philanthropists to get involved. I think it's not like there's money just waiting to do something with. It's their success that they manage to inspire philanthropists to put money in that would otherwise not go into the public realm and might stay in private... It's also true that the protection or defensiveness about the public planning process is not as though it had done so well before. In other words, it's not as though left to its own devices, the public planning process was yielding something so wonderful. I mean, we've, as you pointed out, we've always needed some degree of private engagement as well as philanthropy in the actual design process as well. But I mean, these are the forces. You know, I said how public bit between us has tended to be a bit rubbish. The forces at play are big. There's a good reason because everyone can have a say, and that's understandable, and that's the amazing thing about democracy. But that makes it harder because, you know, those totalitarian regimes did some amazing design. I don't think we want to go to that. But, you know, so it's always going to be a tussle. I think public projects are a tussle. And the question is whether something has enough global support to then make it happen. Yeah, one of my favorite statistics about that is I remember years ago in Beijing being told that the Beijing Air Terminal, from conception to design to construction to opening, took a shorter timeline than the environmental review process for Heathrow Terminal 5 in London. There you are. Democracy is messy. There's no question. Messy and slow in every case. But now in London, of course, there's the added issue of a certain degree of, let's say, suspicion of private philanthropy because, as you pointed out, so much has been done publicly for so long, unlike in this country. But the Garden Bridge is, in fact, now a definite go. Virtually. Virtually, okay. I saw something in one of the papers recently that said the Lambeth Council had withdrawn its support and that may be only symbolic and of no meaning whatsoever. There's, as with any main centre of any main city, there's politics get involved. Lambeth has supported the project for two and a half years. Yes, right. And we had a meeting with them earlier this week. So, you know, there's normal kind of tussly bits. But 70% of Londoners have said they want the project to happen. And so it's just trying to shuffle together a country and a city to try and help something to happen. I mean, the idea is what inspired me to become involved. And I think that, you know, everyone said that London Eye was going to be a failure and it was a stupid idea. And I remember I thought, just a big wheel, really? And then it happened and it was wonderful. And you realised cities can take it. Cities can take much more than we think they can. And the Olympics, everyone assumed the Olympics would go wrong. It was going to be a disaster, right? It was a disaster. British people love that, all that stuff. So the kind of, it's the conspiracy theorists, you know. And I remember someone telling me in the local kind of Sanway Chopping King's Cross how Tony Blair and Bill Clinton controlled the world's weather. And you just thought, you overrate those people. You know, they're amazing. But really? I know. The degree of suspicion and paranoia that comes into the, any discussion of the public realm sometimes, I think. But I don't think that's unique to this time. I mean, if you look at the history of Central Park, you know, there was vicious opposition to it. And Olmsted was fighting all the way. So, and I mean, we've had the same and we've had things. I mean, you can see here the St Paul's Cathedral. The view isn't blocked of St Paul's Cathedral, but there was an article that said, you know. The view would be blocked. This is a vanity project and it's going to block the view of St Paul's. And you think, what's the biggest vanity project that's ever happened in London? I mean, St Paul's was the biggest project. Yes, exactly. And everyone objected to St Paul's at the time. And Christopher Wren had to put up these big hoardings to try and keep everyone away and out. And so they didn't see the construction as it began. So, you know, hopefully I'll touch Abraham Lincoln's wood, so to speak. That's a long way to end this trick. That's a long one. Don't treat that. That's a guarantee someone will. Let me ask you to talk for just one more moment about New York versus London, since you've now been doing a lot of work here. You're based in London. You've done more work there over the years. How different is the environment in the two cities, both for you as a designer and architect, and also just in terms of what you observe as an observant person? I mean, I felt a strong parallels, really. When the 70s and 80s I was growing up in in London, London felt stuck. And it felt that you had to go to Paris or Barcelona for a city that wasn't paralysed by its heritage and dared to create new heritage. And I think it was this trauma about the post-war construction that had happened. So things weren't happening. When I was in New York, I'd come here to see my great-aunt, and you were just confused by the energy that had made these spectacular buildings with detail that had confidence, and then that seemed to have ground to a bit of a halt. And I couldn't really understand it, but it feels like both cities have kind of lurched into a next phase of optimism and believing and having confidence in themselves again. I think London started a bit before, and 9-11 was obviously a massive blow of weirdness here, but then there's a kind of no with doing this. So I think it's just exciting to feel a city kind of pushing forward, but I guess it has to be careful. I was in Los Angeles, this meeting quite a few people involved in the world of art who had moved away from New York, because they couldn't afford to be here anymore. And that seemed to be a challenge. Most of them also now can't afford to be in Los Angeles either, and San Francisco is even more expensive, as you know from your work on the other project you can't talk about. Google. Let me ask you... Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it anyway, of course. I'm not going to give up that easily. Google, can you talk without discussing anything specific, which I know you cannot do, just talk in general about the challenge of designing for an enormous company in Silicon Valley where the culture is evolving and changing very rapidly. I was actually there yesterday and went through Facebook, the new Facebook building, and putting aside any specific comments about the architecture, it is so hard not to be blown away by just how different the culture is in a lot of ways. The culture in the work culture in these places. It's just a whole different world in which if you're your age, you probably feel ancient. And... Thanks, I'll ask you about it. And there's all this free food, and there are all these bicycles, and there's all this, you know, it's a little bit of a kind of Disneyland, all this stuff going on there. What is the feeling working, trying to create a work environment for that new digital culture? Can you speak in a very general way without saying the things Google doesn't want you to say? Yeah, sure. So, we're not doing this alone, we're collaborating with an architect based in New York who many of you will know, Bjarke Engels, and we've been working together, and I think the thing that's exciting is that sort of cheesy slickness has been discredited, really, and the idea of sort of power lobbies and reception desks and the kind of big bits of marble and Trumpy-pumpy gold and things like that, that's kind of not the issue. And so I think there's a kind of down-to-earth truth of how do you make a place to work, and a sort of wariness of the kind of boasty facade. I think it's a challenge, the interesting challenge. They hardly want to project the image of Google as a little mom-and-pop organization, however. Well, no, they're nicely messy at the moment, in a sense, and there's a scattering of lots of different initiatives. They're not mono. In a way, that's got a humanity to that. Yeah, their present campus is like a study of that as a building. There's projects that have worked, and in processing which we all go, ooh, that didn't work, but they'll try another thing. And it's interesting time when there's the growing up adolescence of working in the old buildings in Silicon Valley, in Mountain View, that were for some micro-systems but now they've run out of space, and you can't use other people's buildings anymore. You've run out of them. You've run out, and suddenly you've got to build your own. But that's an interesting moment in organization because in a way, that's the classic moment where you suddenly build your big, cheesy, gleaming headquarters. Ding, and you die. Usually it symbolizes the coming end of the corporation. Exactly. And so how do you make that a kind of living continuum? And there's a charm to appropriating spaces that aren't meant to be used in a certain way. Yes. And suddenly when you make your perfect, perfect, perfect space, what is perfect? And it's an open plan to some extent has been discredited. And you can sort of celebrate, right, we're making a place for 20,000 people to work and easily end up with something that doesn't promote the specialness that every one of those people need to feel. You need to feel you're not just one-twenty-thousandths of an organization because then you think, well, I might as well go somewhere else because who needs me? So allowing the bubble of importance to each person to what they're doing is something that I'm fascinated by and it's a nook and cranny factor. I knew we'd hear that again. No, but how do you do that? And so there's the grand scale of housing so many people and a site, the equivalent of from Wall Street to Harlem in scale of a piece of land we're needing to think about. But then within that, how do you make spaces that can really work at an individual level and make buildings that can be reused and changed and have that kind of fragility at the same time? Right now there seems to be two new paradigms there which represent very opposite responses to the problem that you've just set out. This Facebook, as I said, and then the new Apple headquarters which is in fact quite inflexible and seems to aspire to that very platonic perfection that as you say is unattainable really. I mean originally we didn't actually return the phone call because it took a while and I was kind of thinking oh another kind of somewhere that's private over there removed from the world and then actually when we did engage and then what became exciting in the discussions was the potential for it to be public and that we're making a piece of town even people who don't work for Google will be able to walk through some of these buildings and spaces and there's also the bay that has been suppressed and all the car parking and so that became much more interesting in terms of making a piece of town and reinstating the laser. It has been until recently a very banal and ordinary suburban environment even though all this extraordinary stuff has gone on there and it's in desperate need of a certain kind of urbanism. We're in the thick of it at the moment. Right, that's exciting. Let me ask you one other more general question about your work which is that you've never chosen to design consumer products. Each of your projects is a very special kind of one-off thing that everyone can experience because it's a public thing, it's a contribution to the public realm yet you have not chosen to, other than the sponge chair I suppose that we are not spinning in tonight but looked at pictures of which is a product that any of us can buy but in general, unlike many other very prominent and successful designers you've not sought to create a brand identity so to speak that involves consumer products that have your stamp on them in some way. Is that a conscious and deliberate decision that that represents a problem that you are not interested in let's say or what? I think it's because I'm a bad business person and I also have enormous respect for how hard it is to make a really good product and we've worked on various different things and I think to make something, I mean my passion is making difference making something worth doing and I think there are some extremely good product designers extremely good furniture designers and I felt if there are really good people doing something, don't compete but it felt that there was this gap in this scale which was between was it architecture, urban planning, sculpture, landscape it felt that there was a gap and so I've gone for gaps more rather than thinking what's my shaver look like? Who cares? I mean if I would love to invent the next magical incredible shaver I'm not certain shavers Live on the royalties front forever I think there's been a sort of realism in that and a focus also because I started feeling quite when I was a child in a way looking quite indignantly believing that the new buildings were pretty rubbish that were being built around I couldn't believe why was there a sterile lacking three dimensional complexity at all for white to fall on in some way That was a pretty impressive view for a child I didn't go on telling everyone it was you just felt it and so that felt like a gap and I mean there were other ideas I remember thinking ice lollies were too small They were almost too small? Ice creams because they were all greedy and you don't think that's too small and I'm thinking why don't they do bigger ones and then they invented the magnum Years later I thought I had that idea you bigger off to be sick at the end Exactly But you've never been one of those designers who's sought to say reinvent the spoon or the paperclip I mean I think if something is right you leave it alone you don't feel you have to make your mark on every single object Is that right? Our passion is ideas and it's just sort of jiggering around with the outside of a paperclip or they're like what's the point in that they work already So every attempt to do another one has not been as good as the basic paperclip The round one is quite nice though I mean I admire so much when people manage to do that and I think in a sense it's harder because something has to be repeated thousands of times You've got to find a manufacturer who can manufacture You've got to have happened to have not picked the wrong colour that happens to be unappealing to the nation and also it'd be packaged well, branded well, distributed well work well and retailer's shelves But going back to the building thing just to say from that indignant position about buildings then when I wrote my thesis and started really spending time with the people educating people to design buildings the people building them engineering them and realised how incredibly hard it was to build a building at all and that was I think is underestimated in criticism of architecture these days and scorn the gets poured on things and I celebrate anything which is wholehearted it's hard to build anything with any qualities at all let alone something with some specialness and so in a way with buildings I'm not interested in a way of my own taste it's what if something is wholehearted you wouldn't want the whole world to be my taste you want all the layers of different voices making places have an authenticity and layering It seems to me that what you're saying is that you want to create things that have an emotional resonance in the real world and that actually can be achieved in the real world When I was studying there was the people designing the notion of the paper architect then was this big thing and it seemed the world of architecture was a bit depressed and it seems an entirely self-referential and it got used to the idea that it was about abstraction and the drawings were impenetrable and it was a quasi art form that was celebrated into intellectual complexity and it seemed to me that it was getting stuck and moving away from the real world and my passion was the real world I had learned people who had ideas and made them and so it seemed there was a gap for how can you make something have the same cerebral depth but be excited by reality you don't have to design for a one armed person on the moon in an absence of gravity which all the pure poor students on these architecture courses were doing they thought why out there is really interesting and really exciting, more exciting if you can actually make difference in the real world than the world of the axonometric I think that's actually a wonderful, wonderful note on which to conclude to make a difference in the real world Thomas, thank you very much