Original subtitles

Narrator: In New York, one of the biggest developments

in America's history has chosen British designer

Thomas Heatherwick to create its centrepiece.

Inspired by the stepwells of India,

the Vessel has been built in Italy,

shipped across the Atlantic,

and erected on Manhattan's West Side.

It's cost $150 million,

it's been a hit with the selfie generation,

and it goes nowhere - just as its designer intended.

In a sense, we tried to be very idealistic and think,

"What's the best thing

"that we really think should happen here?"

In the development team's mind originally

was that there would be a sculpture.

Of course, identity is done with a sculpture.

And in the studio, we've been interested in trying

to break down the idea that there's a functional world

and then there's culture

and that they're two separate things

and that aesthetics and function are two separate things.

To us, how a place makes you feel is its function.

[rhythmic piano theme]

Narrator: Built over the unlovely train tracks

on Manhattan's West Side,

Hudson Yards is a $25 billion development,

the brainchild of Stephen Ross.

It's a mixture of offices, shops and apartments

set in a new piece of New York's public realm.

And at its heart is a structure that is hard to classify.

The Vessel comes from the studio of Thomas Heatherwick,

designer, model-maker, problem-solver,

the man who created the new London Routemaster bus,

and the cauldron for the Olympic flame in 2012.

But what is it?

Is it art? Is it sculpture?

Is it engineering?

It is, says Heatherwick, all these things and more.

The development team's mind originally

was that there would be a sculpture.

Of course, identity is done with a sculpture.

And in the studio,

we've been interested in trying to break down the idea

that there's a functional world and then there's culture

and that they're two separate things

and that aesthetics and function are two separate things.

To us, how a place makes you feel is its function as well.

In sense, we tried to be very idealistic and think,

"What's the best thing

"that we really think should happen here?"

And a wealthy development company

creating a new district,

putting a sort of inexplicable object in a plaza

that everyone looks at and wonders

what they were thinking when they created it -

it felt, could we instead bring people together?

And that led us to looking at the way

amphitheatres have been designed

and that led us to looking at the way that, in India,

there have been these stepwells that were very...

I mean, if you see images of them, it's very captivating.

And there's togetherness in quite an extreme way.

Narrator: As well as being inspired

by India's ancient stepwells,

Thomas Heatherwick wanted to respond to developments

in the modern age,

including what some have called an "epidemic of loneliness" -

the idea that through mobile phones,

social media, the internet,

society is turning in on itself.

In a virtual world, there's a danger,

says Thomas Heatherwick,

or forgetting the pleasure of exploring real spaces.

- In Italy, when I was a teenager,

I used to go and stay with a friend there

and there was the promenading in the evenings,

it's called a 'passeggiata'.

And people walk and people love to see and be seen,

and that is a powerful human instinct that I think goes back

and is deep in us in the way we respond to each other.

And so, we tried to design something

that would bring people together and...

..invent something, if we possibly could,

that hadn't existed before.

[rhythmic string music]

Narrator: In Manhattan, developer Stephen Ross

is walking in the footsteps of those

who pioneered the city's public realm,

from the board of commissioners who commissioned Central Park

in the middle of the 19th century,

to the neighbourhood parks built by Robert Moses in the 20th.

But this is a city where every inch has a value

and every inch counts.

And it takes nerve to allocate space

to something other than offices and apartments.

- It's a big deal to create land

where there hasn't been land before.

So, there was a very good reason why this area of New York

had never existed before - because it was just railyards.

So, I think there's 30 lines

that come out from Penn Station going east-west.

And so, land in New York's very, very valuable,

but there were large railyards that needed to stay working.

So, the decision to build a table,

and to engineer a gigantic table,

which has cooling pipes to cool the plants

that are being planted above,

that has air handling so that the trains below

still get the fresh air coming through,

and then to build millions of square foot

of homes and workspaces and places people can eat

and drink and be and space for people -

it's a really complicated engineering challenge.

I think that there's a bravery,

maybe fuelled by the strength of the economy

in that city, to believe that that could be possible.

And there's a dynamism.

I think that there are quite a lot of development companies

in the United States who are led by single individuals

who really hold things together.

I think sometimes in the UK,

there are development companies that are...

very broad boards

and it's maybe harder to drive forwards...

..strong, confident development projects.

Narrator: It was this commercial pressure on space in New York,

where the only way is up,

that gave Thomas Heatherwick and his team an idea.

That and the development of the High Line nearby -

a disused railway turned into a park.

I think that we realised there was an opportunity

to build on the heritage that the High Line has there.

You know, this elevated park

that was reappropriating an old piece of infrastructure,

but it made 1.5 miles of new public space.

And so, we realised that even in just a relatively small site

relative to that chunk of Manhattan

that the High Line sat within,

we could make a mile of space.

We could wind a space up

and have the humour and chemistry of looking up,

looking down, seeing each other.

Also, 2,500 steps, in one sense, as a major workout,

if you were to walk all of those steps.

16 levels.

When did you last walk up 16 floors?

During the launch,

there were all sorts of interesting conversations.

I remember someone saying, "But it has no purpose,"

and then sort of looked back at them and said...

"What's the purpose of Central Park?

"What's the purpose of the High Line?"

These aren't routes, they don't generate power,

but the purpose is the human need

for something other than direct, obvious purpose and function.

That is the function

and that feeds us and nourishes us in its ambiguity

and your freedom to do or be what you want.

Narrator: Thomas Heatherwick was born in London in 1970.

He grew up feeling that

all was not quite right with the world around him.

That the UK was becoming a hard, commercial culture,

where developers and architects were failing people

by neglecting the public realm.

- I grew up at a time when it felt that

the built environment had become

very politically driven and very cerebrally driven,

but that the physicality was quite cold and sterile.

And...that's carried through.

In the post-war construction...

..there have been some amazing brutalist buildings built.

There's been, I think,

the biggest quantity of rubbish been built as well.

And so...

..it felt that there was also

an absence of the same qualities that we might expect in,

for example, this cup of tea that's over here.

You know, for example, this mug that's here.

Part of it's beauty is the imperfection in the glaze

and the way that it dribbles

and the graininess,

and that's because there's love in the making.

And I think in the construction industries around the world,

there's been so much pressure, because it's a very...

There's so many things that the designer

of the built environment has to pull together.

Financially, from a permissions point of view,

and politically,

and the budgets that are being juggled,

and the context of it all.

We're all excited also about how you can make things

that improve the world and use less energy.

Obviously, in this context that we sit in now,

there's so many things,

and often what suffers

is a sort of essential soulfulness of projects.

And that was an instinct that I had

when I was a teenager, and I was lucky to be -

or unlucky! - that all the first projects we did,

we had to build them ourselves.

And so, making was essential.

It seemed that you could tell projects designed by people

who don't understand, really, lovemaking

and projects by people who do.

And so, the studio is surrounded by...

I mean, in this studio,

I've tried to surround us

with objects of every scale,

materials of every type,

processes of every type.

We've done quite a lot of concrete pouring

and trying different mixes,

because often the thing that could be special

about a building might be a detail.

It might just be the quality of the surface

and not necessarily the shape.

Because if everything is made out of aluminium panelling,

silicon sealant and shiny glass,

it all feels the same, even if the shapes are different.

Narrator: 'Making' is Thomas Heatherwick's word

and in this studio of 200 souls,

you can feel the passion that goes into trying things out,

creating models and leaving them on shelves to inspire

where other practices might put them in store.

This is the art of architecture on display.

[uplifting string music]

Few design practices are as diverse as Thomas Heatherwick's.

Over the past 25 years,

it's completed a range of projects,

all of which started on paper.

A rolling bridge for London's Paddington Basin

which, unlike most bridges,

that break apart to let boats through,

rolls up to become a piece of installation art.

Heatherwick won the competition to design

the UK pavilion for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

The theme was that the future of cities

and he had the idea of creating a building

that referenced the Millennium Seed Bank

in Kew Gardens.

60,000 acrylic rods containing 250,000 seeds.

The new London bus came along in 2012,

paying homage to the original 1956 Routemaster

with its hop-on, hop-off platform.

Two years later, a new gin distillery in Hampshire.

Then a finance centre in Shanghai,

working with Foster and Partners -

a building inspired by Chinese weaving.

Followed by the conversion of a disused grain silo

in Cape Town into a gallery of modern art.

[string music rises]

And in London, the restoration

of a Victorian coal yard at King's Cross.

I was interested in...

..invention and engineering and design and was...

The only thing I wasn't terrible at was art and drawing

and thinking about ideas when I was little.

So, in a sense, this is an evolved...

..development of my bedroom when I was six years old

in North London and it's...

..it's...

..grown and...

..there was a sort of official moment,

which was when I graduated after seven years of studying

and finished at the Royal College of Art

and had managed to find a place

where I might be able to live and work.

I was by myself

and then the last 25 years,

we've been meeting collaborators

and it's growing into a team.

In a way, moving from 'I' to 'we',

and that's been the most exciting thing

and so much more effective and enjoyable

and interesting than working by yourself.

[string music climaxes]

Narrator: Drawing something as unusual as the Vessel,

using 3D printers to produce the maquettes,

calculating the engineering details,

may be everyday life for Thomas Heatherwick's team...

..but this is New York

and all the models would have meant nothing

if he couldn't convince the developer, Stephen Ross,

to pay for something that goes...nowhere.

- Nobody anywhere spends money on something

unless they can justify it.

Maybe at a small scale you might indulge something,

but at the large-scale,

everything has to argue for its value.

No-one has a spare millions of dollars to spend on things.

And so, a lot of the time, you're...

..you're sharing your process.

It's not a mysterious place

where you sort of pop things out. It's...

You are having conversations about value

and it's a two-way, really collaborative conversation

because Related, who built the Hudson Yards development

and led all of that, are very, very experienced.

They started working also and got going

by building huge amount of social housing

in the United States,

and so have an understanding of place-making

that we found quite interesting.

So in a sense, you're learning from that

but trying to push and build on that,

so the conversations were quite interesting.

The really good property developers

want to be challenged and they challenge you.

You also work with the city.

There's so many people involved

when something is going to be publicly accessible.

We are all familiar with plazas, piazzas, corporate spaces

and the open space in between buildings,

but it was always our intention

to three-dimensionalise and bring a new paradigm

to something that we're all very familiar with.

Often, public space is merely

the leftover in between buildings.

And so...

..turning that on its head, three-dimensionalising it

and lifting people up

and bringing an intense socialisation

felt to us like a step change

and something that was no longer a passive experience

of merely looking at a fountain or a sculpture or an artwork,

but something where people and movement

were actually the key to the whole experience.

Thomas: The challenge, if you brought people together,

was that they might exclude the world beyond,

so it felt if we were to make an amphitheatre in some sense,

it should be porous.

So, we led from designing from the inside outwards,

not from the outside in.

It was funny in the development of the project

that people were seeing an outside and starting -

as we all do - you start judging

and thinking it's about an outside.

And I think the nice surprise has been for people to see

that it was actually all about the inside.

[playful piano music]

- We're a making studio.

We draw, we use computers, we certainly make.

We have a very substantial workshop

where we can build all sorts of things -

not just scale models but functional prototypes.

So, we did use contemporary technologies such as 3D printing

to build what would be a very difficult thing

to build by hand, certainly very difficult to build accurately.

But once we were moving into design development

and thinking about things like handrails

or steps or the widths of critical spaces,

we were able to build things at full-scale

and build them of timber or foam and representative materials,

but very, very critical prototypes were made

to help us decide on and make important decisions.

[playful piano continues]

Being open-minded along the journey

of design development is critical,

because what you think at the beginning

is invariably not exactly what you'll get at the end.

Part of our...

..spirit as a studio is learning.

And so, along the way there were many, many adjustments

that were driven by physics, structure, weight, cost,

geometry, the size and step of a human being,

and through working fluidly with them in 3D digital formats,

we were able to track and adjust the design

and really just integrate all of the things that had to happen.

Narrator: Having got the go-ahead,

the design team had to find someone to build it.

Not in America, but on the other side of the Atlantic

in northern Italy.

In the small town of Monfalcone,

a firm that specialises in fabricating

complex steel structures

for everything from bridges to football stadiums

agreed to make the Vessel in 75 sections.

They're familiar with New York. They're involved with

Santiago Calatrava's Transportation Hub,

its characteristic curves rising above Ground Zero.

And with Liz Diller's theatre -

another part of the Hudson Yards development,

a performance space that can be extended on giant wheels.

It's being called 'The Shed'.

The idea was to keep the construction of the Vessel

as secret as possible,

and the people at Monfalcone are doing their best

but in the design world,

there is always interest in what Thomas Heatherwick

is doing next, so secrecy was a challenge.

The design team has chosen a noncorrosive steel

to coat each level of the structure.

They hope copper will mirror the action

above and below each level, especially when the sun is out,

a contrast to the grey of New York's skyscrapers.

But will it survive the weather

on an exposed part of the Hudson River?

- One of the most enjoyable aspects

of what we do for a living is getting to work with experts

and people of very high craftsmanship.

So, the company that built Vessel taught us a lot.

And their background is in shipbuilding,

complex steelwork building -

basically anything that's odd, difficult

or very, very large to build.

And this, for them, was wonderful playtime,

to be thrown this as a challenge.

You could see the joy in their eyes

and they just relished the opportunity.

And so, the entire project was fuelled

by this optimism of everyone feeling that

they were building something really quite extraordinary.

Very difficult, with lots of points of technical challenge,

but fundamentally exciting to them, as much as to us.

Narrator: This is a wonder to behold.

Thomas Heatherwick has travelled to Italy

to see progress for himself.

[uplifting string music]

With him is Stephen Ross, the man who's paying for it.

Strange to see this 21st-century folly

being assembled not where it will land in Manhattan,

but in an Italian construction yard.

For Heatherwick, a man who loves models,

seeing one built at life size must be a thrill.

[music rises]

150 feet tall, 50 feet wide at its base,

154 concrete and steel staircases with 2,500 steps,

80 landings, capable of taking over 1,000 visitors,

the Vessel is unlike anything the Italians have made before.

And now they have to get it across the Atlantic.

It goes in bits.

10 sections in the first shipment,

which find their way to a port in New Jersey

and then by barge to Manhattan - a 15-day journey.

And in the dead of night, in the city that never sleeps,

this most unusual of loads makes its way to the West Side.

Now we are in the hands of the Americans.

This, of course, is a nation used to working on a big scale.

It's not just the prefabricated sections of the Vessel

that are giant-sized -

so is everything that goes with this huge Meccano set,

from spanners to nuts and bolts.

It's the coolest gig in town

and New Yorkers watching from the High Line

are wondering what a Brit from 'over there'

has given them over here.

And here, the scale of the Hudson Yards development,

a decade in the making, becomes clear.

16 skyscrapers, a shopping mall, luxury apartments,

a theatre - The Shed -

and 20 acres of public space.

And at the centre of it all,

Thomas Heatherwick's mystery object.

The Vessel is open.

New Yorkers are not quite sure what to make of it.

But that doesn't stop them flocking to this curiosity

on the city's West Side.

Within a few months,

it's become the most Instagrammed background,

the favourite setting for selfies

posted by users of Tinder, the mobile dating app.

And a must-see for visitors to the Big Apple.

And others, who don't know about 'swiping right',

to simply enjoy climbing all 2,500 steps.

[rhythmic piano]

Of course, Thomas Heatherwick is pleased with the response

and he likes the fact that his idea

of getting away from the traditional approach

to squares and plazas has paid off.

- The sort of functional essence, the design ethos -

that you made big open plazas

and you put your sculpture sitting there

that was a bit inexplicable

and everyone looked at this sort of piece of modern art

that was sitting there -

it felt that that was a format we were familiar with

and didn't do justice

to our time, somehow.

There hadn't been a battle on this site.

There hadn't been some major thing to commemorate.

This has been a railyards for a very long time

and was now going to be a space bigger than Trafalgar Square.

And so, it felt...

What was there that was a real reason in that space?

And it felt to us the people in that space were the reason.

[rhythmic piano]

- The Vessel was never,

would never have been complete without people.

It was designed for people, for the human form.

And so, seeing it full of people

smiling, running, some slightly walking with intrepidation,

taking many, many photographs,

seeing it really captured by the public consciousness

has been an absolute joy.

And it's the first project

that certainly I've ever worked on

where the social media component is enormous.

The Instagram effect, the Twitter effect,

of people being artistic

in their interaction with the project,

taking photographs of themselves or moving through it.

It's wonderful to see the public take ownership of it.

And really, for us, with all of our projects,

that's the ambition,

is that it becomes the property, in a way, of the public.

I remember looking with a friend of mine

at playgrounds years ago and looking at climbing frames.

I wondered, why are they all so ugly?

Why do children get these sort of...things?

And why is play, the idea that play is only for children?

And then suddenly it's serious and you go to gyms for adults.

And so, there seemed to be a possibility,

rather than designing what people might think of

as a sculpture, to design something

that was pushing forward something

that New York's done historically.

I think that really successful cities...

..are dense,

mean that people don't have to travel huge distances

to get to work.

But also have the antidote to that intensity,

which is space that doesn't tell you what you're supposed to do.

[rhythmic strings]

Narrator: The reaction among Manhattan's movers and shakers

is mixed.

The 'New York Times' is critical,

but New Yorkers vote with their feet - literally.

In its first few months,

the Vessel is overwhelmed by visitors,

patiently queueing for their timed tickets

and coming back for more.

The copper does indeed reflect all those who climb it,

and almost everyone wants to use

the thoughtfully-provided circle in the middle

for group selfies

with the superstructure rising above them.

It doesn't go anywhere,

but just as the Heatherwick team hoped,

it's bringing people together.

Some are calling it 'the honeycomb',

others 'the wastepaper basket'.

Stephen Ross thinks it could become New York's Eiffel Tower.

Only time will tell.

[string music continues]

How to explain what ties

Thomas Heatherwick's diverse projects together?

From a rolling bridge,

to a new headquarters for Google in California.

From the Olympic cauldron

to a pavilion made of optic fibres.

From a gin distillery to the Vessel.

The answer lies in his gift to Londoners, the Routemaster,

that passes the front door of his creative studio

hundreds of times a day.

The Routemaster embodies what he calls the 'culture of life'.

- The way people have thought about transportation in the past

was about transportation of numbers of people

from A to B

and the dignity of the passenger wasn't the focus too,

given that many people will spend...

..40 minutes on a bus in the morning,

40 minutes on a bus in the afternoon.

So, they're spending 1 hour and 20 minutes

of their life, possibly for 20, 30 years -

it's part of the culture of their life.

The culture doesn't begin when they get in the art gallery

and end when they walk back out of it.

The culture of our life is all of these things.

And so, I think that's what we are very interested in,

is thinking about the emotional impact

that the places around us have on us

and what they say to us about society.

That's what we've got increasingly interested in,

more and more and more over the years

that the studio's been going,

and it's felt like the gap.

And my passion, really, is the gaps.

What are people not doing?

I don't feel that our job is to 'express ourself'.

I feel our job is to try

and see what's not happening

and try to do everything we can

to make those things

that might be better,

that might make a difference.

[sweeping orchestral theme music]

Narrator: Next time, Ptolemy Dean believes in

the power of art in architecture.

Architect, sketcher, painter, restorer of buildings,

co-presenter of the television series 'Restoration',

surveyor of the fabric at Westminster Abbey,

he is inspired by the work of Wren and Hawksmoor.

His latest project was born on the train.

On the 0800 to London Bridge, Ptolemy Dean sketched a scheme

for the first major addition to Westminster Abbey in 250 years.

[bell tolls]

A stair tower that allows visitors

to see a secret part of the abbey hidden for centuries.

- I was sketching this thing, you know -

how does it work, how does it work?

And of course, it suddenly came.

In fact, I can remember where it came -

it came between Tonbridge and High Brooms.

Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.tv