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The trustees of London’s garden bridge, including actor Joanna Lumley and the former Labour minister Lord Davies, could have breached their legal duties over the failed project, that cost taxpayers more than £40m, according to a leading lawyer.
The legal opinion comes as pressure mounts for a formal investigation into how the charity behind the abandoned scheme spent so much money without construction work even beginning.
— The Guardian
"The decision to press on with the construction contract led to public losses, initially capped at £16m, increasing to an estimated total of £46m by the time the scheme was cancelled in 2017," The Guardian reports. "The project, championed by then London mayor, Boris Johnson, was intended to be... View full entry
A major new shopping district and public space in King’s Cross is set to open to the public on Friday 26 October 2018. Designed by Thomas Heatherwick, his studio has overseen the transformation of two dilapidated heritage rail buildings into a lively retail precinct. King's Cross, a former... View full entry
Heatherwick Studio employs architects, but Heatherwick is not an architect. His work could be described as a celebration of never having absorbed, in a formal architectural education, dogma about designing things to be flush and taut. “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work,” Ingels said. “An element of steampunk, almost.” — The New Yorker
In his long read for The New Yorker, Ian Parker tells the story of New York's (potential) new Eiffel Tower, the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and profiles the British designer behind this and many other ambitious structures, Thomas Heatherwick. View full entry
The clown king of novelty infrastructure fantasies has once again stolen the limelight with his preposterous plan for a 22-mile bridge across the Channel. [...]
But none of this matters. In a world where Johnson got as far as flushing £37m of public money into the Thames on another fantasy project, the Garden Bridge, a great Channel crossing could easily be conjured into being.
— The Guardian
The Guardian's architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, responds to the former London Mayor's suggestion to build a 22-mile bridge across the Channel and physically connect the European Union with the brexiting island kingdom (on top of the already existing 31.35-mile Channel tunnel). Let's just... View full entry
Thomas Heatherwick plans to bring more eccentricity to Manhattan’s west side with two condo towers covered in a bubbled facade and bisected by the High Line, as CityRealty reported on Wednesday. The straddling pair at 515 West 18th Street, currently known as the Hudson Residences in... View full entry
The Vessel, a 150-foot-tall climbable sculpture made of bronzed steel and concrete, topped out Wednesday, serving as the public centerpiece of Hudson Yards Public Square and Gardens. Designed by Heatherwick Studio, the $150 million interactive landmark includes 154 interconnecting flights of... View full entry
Last month, London mayor Sadiq Khan, joined by a trio of Google executives, broke ground on the site of Google’s new campus in the city’s King’s Cross district. [...]
The property has been dubbed a “landscraper,” a building as long and as horizontal as skyscrapers are tall and vertical, and it could represent a shift in the very shape of the places where people work.
Google’s London flagship will be 1,082 feet long, which is 66 feet longer than The Shard, London’s tallest building, is high.
— Quartz at Work
Quartz' article features input from American futurist, Amy Webb, who predicts a bright future for landscrapers — not only in London. Image courtesy of Google.More about the new Heatherwick Studio + BIG-designed Google London HQ here. View full entry
Pier 55, the elaborate $250 million performing arts center on an undulating pier in the Hudson River, is back from the dead.
Forty-three days ago, Barry Diller, the entertainment mogul behind the plan, pulled the plug on the project [...]
Now, in an agreement brokered by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Mr. Diller agreed to revive the project, known as “Diller Island,” and opponents who had filed a series of lawsuits to stop the plan agreed to drop their legal battle.
— The New York Times
In never-ending-money-and-politics-tale news: "Diller Island," the controversial Pier 55 park structure floating in New York's Hudson River, isn't so dead after all after reports of a Governor Cuomo-brokered agreement between billionaire financier Barry Diller and opponents surfaced yesterday. "In... View full entry
The Bund Finance Center, designed by Foster + Partners and Heatherwick Studio, is a major new mixed-use project on in Shanghai’s waterfront. The 420,000-square meter masterplan, composed of eight buildings, links the old town to the financial district. © Foster + Partners© Lauratian... View full entry
In April, construction began on Hudson Yards’ Vessel, a 150-foot-tall climbable steel structure designed by Heatherwick Studio and its 100,000 pound-components were put in place by crane. Construction on the $200 million “public landmark” has now hit its halfway mark. The structure includes 154 geometric-lattice linked flights of stairs, 80 landings and will able to hold 1,000 visitors. — 6sqft
Via CityRealtyVia CityRealty View full entry
The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), the world's largest museum of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, will open to the public on September 22. Zeitz MOCAA is located in a former grain silo at the V&A waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa. Zeitz MOCAA Picture... View full entry
Back in 2015, the 11-storey, AHMN-designed scheme for Google's headquarters was deemed "too boring" by Google CEO Larry Page. Heatherwick Studio and BIG were brought in to add some pizazz to what was an admittedly fairly straightforward, boxy design. Today's freshly unveiled renderings show a more... View full entry
The garden bridge, proposed to cross the Thames from the South Bank to Temple, is nothing if not a landmark of the post-truth era. It has wrung tens of millions out of the public purse on the basis of deceptions, distortions and facts that proved to be fake. First sold as “a gift to the people of London”, entirely paid for by private sector donations, it is now due to cost a minimum of £60m in public money. Its estimated total cost has gone from £60m to “north of £200 million”. — Rowan Moore
Its claims to fundraising prowess are exaggerated, its promised transport benefits minimal. Its backers assert overwhelming public support on the basis of a poll that told those polled nothing of the costs and drawbacks of the project. View full entry
Silicon Valley is in the midst of something of a building boom with several of the tech giants commissioning new headquarters from big-name architects. First came Facebook with a campus designed by Frank Gehry. Next, Apple got Lord Norman Foster to design a spacecraft-like, donut-shaped building... View full entry
More than three years ago, Google announced plans to build a massive “landscraper” headquarters in London. But after switching architects from AHMM—whose plans were deemed “too boring"—to Thomas Heatherwick, and following the chaos of Brexit, the plans were up in the air. Now, the... View full entry
