Stephen Bayley

Is Thomas Heatherwick the best person to preach about modern architecture?

We can all sympathise with his desire to end bad, ugly new building, but too many of his own projects have had to be scrapped for functional reasons

Heatherwick’s ill-fated ‘B of the Bang’ sculpture in Manchester was completed long behind schedule in 2005 and scrapped four years later. [Getty Images] 
issue 14 October 2023

It needs a big personality to answer a big question: why is so much new building so very bad; why are our cities so ugly? Thomas Heatherwick is that big personality. He is the Jamie Oliver of architecture and design: personable, blokeish, smart, tele-genic, extremely successful, nearly demented with ambition, and, one suspects, inclined to petulance if crossed.

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