Thomas Heatherwick on Terence Conran
In my formative years Terence Conran was the only person who seemed to combine business with design.
He seems to be someone who has found a way to really harness a deeply felt passion and deep critical design sensibility, with an understanding of people's wants and needs. If you call that commercial, then call that commercial, but that's actually a phenomenal talent. I overcame my shyness to speak to him, literally on the back staircase at the RCA , about a project that I wanted to carry out, and he said, 'Well, why don't you come and see me at Butler's Wharf' and gave me his card. I said, 'Is there any chance I could speak to you for five minutes?' and ended up being there for three hours the following week. It was a six-and-a-half-metre-high gazebo, and this was in 1994. I was interested in small temporary buildings as an achievable scale of architecture. He said at the end of our meeting: 'Well, if you need somewhere to build it, why don't you come and live at my house?' and I was like, 'What?' And so I ended up living in his house in Berkshire for four months and built this building. There's this word, a very old-fashioned word, and I only really learned the full power of it when I went to Japan and this word is mentor - that's what Terence has been to me.