Smash hit

The “we” in these sentences refers to the dozen or so like-minded creative hotshots that Heatherwick has gathered round him in his King’s Cross studio — a mix of architects, landscape planners, structural engineers, industrial designers, even a theatre designer. Just as Heatherwick is endearingly dismissive of his own whiz-kid reputation (“Brunel was managing the entire team constructing the Rotherhithe Tunnel when he was 17”, he reminds me), so he is also admirably scrupulous about sharing with his colleagues the credit for his astonishing success. “My job here is just to keep fluffing up the pillow,” he says, slightly Delphically. “Most of our best projects come out of our discussions. They are like ping-pong: we knock ideas backwards and forwards, improving them all the time.”

But there is no doubt in anyone’s mind about who generates the sparks. Heatherwick seems to have one of those one-in-a-billion minds that is capable not only of imagining the impossible — shapes that seem to defy the laws of physics and all conventional engineering wisdom — but of making the impossible happen. “Turning aspiration into reality is what counts,” he says. “Not storming off in a rage because your idea has been compromised.”

And he thrives on solving problems by unorthodox methods or untested materials. The phrase “pushing the envelope” could have been coined for him. When he carpeted that Newcastle square with blue glass, for instance, he spent three years with scientists from Sheffield Hallam University perfecting the new material. Then, to stop B of the Bang from toppling over, he and his structural-engineer colleagues produced what experts reckon to be the most complex core of fabricated steel the world has yet seen.

And to compute the exact dimensions for his next big project — an extraordinary, stratified temple on a mountainside in Japan, modelled on the drapes of fabric round the Buddha’s throne — he has persuaded the Royal Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital to scan his working model with 3-D scanners normally used to check facial swellings before and after surgery.

Yet the most startling aspect of his talent is its protean multiplicity. While one part of his mind is apparently bogged down in the engineering details of some huge venture, another part seems to be soaring free as a bird, evolving some fantastic new vision. “Yes,” he says. “When I am supposed to be building a bridge I can quite easily dream up a new way of making chocolates.”

And he is determined not to be typecast, nor to repeat himself. “I am very aware of designers and architects whose careers are entirely dominated, or restricted, by the commissions they receive. So at least a third of our work here is projects we have thought up without being commissioned.”

As for inspiration, that can come from the most unlikely sources. A zip factory next to his old workshop, for instance. “I went in there one day and was amazed to discover that you could buy zips not just in men’s fly length, but hundreds of metres long. So I thought I would invent something that used a 100-metre zip.”

Out of that evolved the expanding handbag made from nothing but a zip. “Actually it was an incredibly complicated spiral to sort out: we had a structural engineer working four months on it. But now, to my amazement, they have sold 6,000 of them.”

What accounts for the fertility of Heatherwick’s mind? Surely not his education: what he describes as a “hotchpotch of North London schools”, followed by design courses at Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, where his nascent talent was spotted by Conran.

No, a more likely source of his maverick genius is his delightfully bohemian family background. “My mother ran the Bead Shop on Portobello Road for 20 years, and started the Bead Society of Great Britain,” he says. “My father was a musician, but also in the Marines for ten years, and one of the most creative people I know. He’s the sort of person who would come along when you think you had a project just right, and make you start all over again by showing you the fundamental flaw in your thinking.

“And my grandmother was a textile designer; in fact she ran Marks & Spencer’s textile studio. So I suppose you could say that it was no great surprise when I ended up making things for a living.”

But along with that passion for making things Heatherwick also harbours an equally strong conviction that, through grand design, limitless flair and stupendous feats of engineering, he can make the world a better place for ordinary people — just like his hero, Brunel.