British architect Thomas Heatherwick is an architect just as he is a designer and sculptor, inventor.

Training

Thomas Heatherwick was born on 17 February 1971 in London. He studied Architecture and Three-dimensional Design at the Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. After earning his degree, Thomas Heatherwick started his career by founding Heatherwick Studio in 1994 in his hometown. Being the mastermind of his company, he still attaches great importance to what his nearly 50 employees have to say.

Works

Classifying Thomas Heatherwick is close to impossible. "I'm making three-dimensional design", Heatherwick says about his work. His three-dimensional design can be seen in his urban-planning projects just as it is obvious in his designs of articles of daily use, e.g. he designed a handbag for the manufacturer of luxury goods Longchamp. Be it a handbag of the "Wellcome Trust", an eight-story high sculptor at the atrium of the biomedical research institute in London, each project is an experiment for Heatherwick.

Heatherwick has been very successful. Industrial designer and architect Ron Arad appointed him A&W-Mentor-awardee, the Royal Institute of British Architecture has awarded him a prize of honor, and he left behind Zaha Hadid with his design of the UK Pavilion in 2007. Particularly impressive, however, is probably the fact that Thomas Heatherwick has received an honorary doctorate four times: from British universities Sheffield Hallam, Brighton, Dundee and the Manchester Metropolitan University.