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Home / Type of trip / Attractions / V&A exhibition – Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary

V&A exhibition – Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary

August 22, 2012 by Gretta Schifano 3 Comments

heatherwick spinning chair

This exhibition runs until September 30th as part of a season of events celebrating British design, and my daughter Bella and I went along to see it at the weekend. Although London’s V&A Museum is free, there is a charge for the exhibition: it cost £10 for the two of us. The tickets are timed, but we didn’t have to wait at all. The exhibition is in a gallery near the main entrance, and the first thing we saw was a quirky, hand operated machine where we turned a handle to roll out and tear off our own exhibition guide. Inside the gallery are more than 150 objects from the studio, ranging from a scale model of the London 2012 Olympic cauldron to a full-scale section of the new London double-decker bus. It was great to have a close look at the cauldron, but it is very small – maybe 30 cms high. There is a full sized petal next to it though, as used on the actual cauldron.

Thomas Heatherwick established the studio in 1994, and it pulls people together to collaborate across their disciplines,  making the majority of their models in-house.  Its work spans architecture, furniture, urban planning, engineering and sculpture – as well as bags. Bella was excited to learn about the design of the first Longchamp expandable zip bag, and enjoyed seeing the intricately designed Christmas cards which the studio has produced over the years.

I loved the design for Worthing swimming pool, which resembled a load of wood in a random pile, refelecting a woodpile which washed up on Worthing beach a few years ago. My favourite exhibit was a model of the cloud bridge, designed for an unnamed private house in the UK. The bridge is covered in reflective metal discs placed at many different angles and does resemble a beautiful, bridge-shaped cloud. I’d love to see what the actual bridge looks like, but there were no photos of it. Nor could we take photos inside the exhibition, so you need to go there if you’d like to see it for yourself.

It was crowded in the exhibition when we went, and the exhibits are very close together and so I definitely wouldn’t take young childen as they wouldn’t be able to see and would probably get frustrated. From the exhibition we went to the museum’s courtyard garden where people were enjoying sitting, rocking and spinning on a group of  Heatherwick spinning chairs in a shady corner, while others cooled off in the central pool.

www.vam.ac.uk/heatherwick

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Related

Categories: Attractions, City, London, Seasonal
Tags: cloud bridge, day trips, design, Designing the Extraordinary, exhibitions, Heatherwick, London, Longchamp zip bag, Olympic cauldron, spinning chair, Thomas Heatherwick, travel, V&A, Victoria & Albert Museum, Worthing swimming pool

About Gretta Schifano

I'm a freelance journalist and blogger specialising in family travel with teenagers, trips when parents manage to travel without their kids, and 50+ travel. I also write about vegetarian travel, parenting teenagers, adoption, SEN, ADHD and anxiety. My work's been published by the Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, National Geographic Traveller, Lonely Planet and others. I've lived and worked in Italy and Spain and am now based in rural south-east England with my husband, adoptive and birth kids and our dog. I previously worked as a social action radio producer for the BBC.

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Comments

  1. Geraldine Dawson says

    August 29, 2012 at 7:04 pm

    This sounds fantastic. It is such a shame that these things are all London based and never seem to tour. I will be checking though

    Reply
  2. Susan says

    August 25, 2012 at 5:39 pm

    This sounds fantastic, I’ll definitely be popping over there some time next week with the kids, I think my daughter will love seeing the Olympic cauldron and my son should really enjoy it as he wants to be an engineer when he grows up!

    Reply
    • Gretta says

      August 25, 2012 at 5:43 pm

      I’m sure they’ll enjoy it.

      Reply

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This is a personal blog written and edited by me, Gretta Schifano. Sometimes I’m given products or sent on trips to review, but I always make this clear and give my honest opinion. See my About page for full details.

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