Will Wiles at Literary Review:
In 1989, when Thomas Heatherwick was eighteen years old, he picked up a Taschen book about the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí in a student book sale. Inside it, he saw a double-page spread showing Gaudí’s Casa Milà, an apartment building in central Barcelona. ‘I was stunned,’ he writes in the introduction to Humanise. ‘I had no idea that buildings like this existed. I had no idea that such buildings could exist.’
The picture had a transformative effect on the young Heatherwick, who was already eyeing a career in design. He has since become a prolific and original maker of buildings and other architectural spectacles. His studio has chalked up some very significant successes, such as the delicately beautiful UK pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, the cauldron for the Olympic flame at the 2012 London Games and Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, a remarkable gallery for contemporary African art carved out of a concrete grain silo, which opened in 2017.
more here.