Dim Sum Towers – Heatherwick Studio’s Learning Hub in Singapore
Thomas Heatherwick
After a personal tour around the Learning Hub building and Nanyang campus in Singapore, Johnny Tucker sits down with Thomas Heatherwick to investigate the genesis of the project which was won through a competition
Blueprint: What was your original thinking for the competition entry?
Heatherwick: We didn't want to build one big building. The existing university buildings remind students that they are 1 of 30,000, that they are small. And we really wanted to reinstate that human scale, so instead of doing that standard size of university building, we decided to divide that into 12 units [each] the size of a terrace house and then connect them in the lightest possible way. It also meant we could stop them at different heights to emphasise the separation and have a garden on one as well -- to give an outdoor learning terrace.
Blueprint: Then you won. What were the key factors that influenced the creation of the Learning Hub from the outset?
Heatherwick: The big thing was 'What's university for?' The tutors and professors here would say to us: 'It's to meet people.' It's all about meeting your future business partner, meeting someone you're going to have an amazing idea with, someone to start up a charity with or have a political initiative with. In that context the existing university environments, of miles and miles of corridors, seem the least likely place you are going to meet people. I remember when I was at college it was only if you had a fire alarm that you'd get to meet with other people in the building, and so I used to love fire alarms! We were trying to make a building that didn't have to have fire alarms for you to be able to meet people. There are different types of spaces in the building that can capture and hold you.
The other half of this project was about changing the master-and-servant relationship between the wise guru at the front of the class and the slaves who bow before them. We were also ordered to have no corners in the classrooms, which we obeyed, as you can see. The context of the university felt so unorganic, and in a way this building was a response to the immediate surrounds that felt very monotonous. It's corridor-led Machine Age architecture and I felt our role was to be fresher and to create a break.
Blueprint: The project was done in a really short time scale and to an extent you were making it up as you went along. Was the modularity built into it when you did the original competition entry?
Heatherwick: When we won the competition, we hadn't got an exact cladding system for the learning modules in place, and that emerged from the very particular Green Mark buildability scoring system they have here in Singapore. We didn't know about this at the beginning and we had to respond.
There's so much romance attached to creating imaginative ideas, but most of your ingenuity is usually used in responding to the practical restraints of budgets and building codes, and the performance of the building. So we had to find a way of using the same mould to create all 1,050 panels. One guy spent eight months drawing those panels. We could have made them all identical, but then it wouldn't have had the spirit that the project needed to have.
Blueprint: Tell us about the horizontal striation patterning.
Heatherwick: In a lot of our projects we're trying to maximise the three dimensionality and create a human scale of detail. The horizontal bands also have a visual weight, that's stronger than the vertical panels. If you just had the vertical it would feel like we weren't taking advantage of the curvaceous nature of these tutorial rooms. The horizontals are stronger ,and then making those stop and start gave it the variety, otherwise it would have looked remorseless.
When you go up to new buildings their surfaces often feel so dead. We were trying to build in detail that would add meaning for the students -- as well as hiding the craftsmanship challenges of having a very low budget. We knew we were not going to be able to get that kind of bare-faced Tadao Ando beauty.
Blueprint: Five years ago it was the Shanghai Expo Seed Cathedral. What has happened to Heatherwick Studios in the past half a decade, and are you now an architecture practice?
Heatherwick: Never! The really exciting thing for me is the studio. We are now 170 people and it has moved from being very about much me, to now being a team of very good people. These are interesting times where there are real possibilities and greater awareness of the real value that good architects and designers can bring, and Blueprint is definitely part of that!
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