With its new exhibition, Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio (to Jan. 3), the Cooper Hewitt has hit its stride after what struck me as a shaky debut. Organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, this traveling show owes its existence to the long-haul perseverance of the Nasher’s director, Jeremy Strick, and the Cooper Hewitt’s deputy director, Brooke Hodge, who were both at LA MOCA when they became intrigued by the brilliantly quirky creations of British architect Thomas Heatherwick, a mad inventor gone mainstream.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The New York version of this three-venue show (debuting last fall at the Nasher and opening this winter at the Hammer Museum, LA) is uniquely blessed by a newsworthy addition with a local angle—the models for Heatherwick’s proposed Pier55, a man-made, $130-million urban park and performance space, which would jut into the Hudson River across from the New Whitney. It would be funded primarily by the Barry Diller/Diane von Furstenberg Family (with additional money kicked in by the city and state). As you’ll hear in my CultureGrrl Video, below, Hodge was careful to distance herself from the controversies over this not-yet-approved project.
Notable for its complete absence from this show is Heatherwick’s most high-profile assignment, designed in collaboration with Bjarke Ingels at BIG:
Asked why the Google project went unmentioned, a Cooper Hewitt spokesperson told me this:
The show had just opened at the Hammer when the Google announcement was made. Plans for the exhibition at Cooper Hewitt and its design were already well underway at the time, and Google was not ready to release anything, with the announcement’s being so fresh.
The show does include telling examples of how the architect’s early, outré experiments laid the groundwork for his better known creations. The challenge he set himself in the project below was: “Can a building stand up on the architectural equivalent of matchsticks?”
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The ideas he toyed with in Northumberland, England, came to glorious fruition more than 10 years later in Shanghai:
Photo: © Iwan Baan
While Heatherwick emphasizes that he “never studied art in my life,” his work nevertheless comes across as strongly sculptural. One example is his rotation-molded “Spun” chair, which could make the New Whitney’s terrace a lot more fun (but perhaps more precarious) than the boxy Mary Heilmann-designed seating currently installed there.
Here’s one that’s owned by the Cooper Hewitt. It’s not in the temporary exhibition but is displayed downstairs in the permanent-collection galleries:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
“Provocations” (named for the improbable challenges that the studio poses for itself, as quoted at the top of each object’s exhibition label) originated when Strick was director at LA MOCA and Hodge was one of its curators. They changed jobs but continued the project—he at the Nasher, she at the Hammer Museum and then the Cooper Hewitt, which she joined almost a year ago.
In a way, the trajectory of Heatherwick’s career reminds me of the fortunes of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who were more appreciated for their inventiveness as conceptual creators than taken seriously as pragmatic architects, until their new home for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, changed all that.
As you will see in my video, Heatherwick has a liking for cranks (the mechanical devices, not the grouchy critics): You’ll see three of them in the show—one is operated by visitors to print out exhibition brochures; one is part of a contraption (“The Crumpler”) used to add texture to the stainless steel skin of one of his early projects; one operates a model for a proposed “Large Rolling Bridge” over the Thames. (Demonstrations of that drawbridge can be seen daily at 1:45 p.m.)
Come watch that bridge in action now, and view the Pier55 models and other exhibition highlights (such as his 2012 London Olympics cauldron and 2012 redesign of that city’s iconic red double-decker bus), by joining us now at the press preview: