The Pixel Facade
Heatherwick Studio has been asked to design a forty-storey hotel with three hundred rooms for a district of Hong Kong - part of the historic center where preserved buildings of XIX - early XX centuries. This area is famous for selling unpackaged dried fish with stinky richly textured seafood hanging from shop fronts and piled high in baskets. The atmosphere of streets like these can be wiped out when a row of small shops is replaced by a single flat, shiny building. However, the hotel is located among the modern buildings, where there is no need to hide behind pseudo-historical facade. Being free Heatherwick offered to make it out of concrete base and metal boxes of 4 different sizes. This technique is another variation on the theme of the “pixel” wall, which is in perpetual motion - first straws and then reunites in a single space. Because most hotel projects deal with putting arbitrary new interiors into existing buildings, it is rare to find a connection between the inside and the outside of a hotel. This project, which was to build a hotel from scratch, was an opportunity to conceive the inside and the outside at the same time. The idea that Heatherwick Studio developed was to interpret the familiar objects found in a hotel room – bed, window, mini-bar, safe and a place to keep the iron – as a series of boxes, of four different sizes. In every room, all the furniture and fittings are formed from a different arrangement of these boxes, making every room unique, while the building’s external façade is composed from the outside surfaces of these thousands of boxes. Making them protrude to different extents gives the hotel a very different architectural texture from the smooth, shiny frontages normally seen on new buildings and breaks down the scale of the new development so that it relates to the scale and grain of the existing street. The building is a concrete structure, filled in with metal boxes, which are manufactured with the foldedmetal technology used to make air conditioning ducts and water tanks. Inside the building, boxes are lined with bronze and sprayed directly with rigid insulation foam or upholstered to make beds and seats. Thomas Heatherwick (born 17 February 1970) is an English designer known for innovative use of engineering and materials in public monuments and sculptures. He heads Heatherwick Studio, a design and architecture studio, which he founded in 1994. Heatherwick’s most renowned works include the B of the Bang, The Rolling Bridge, East Beach Cafe and the Seed Cathedral. Heatherwick also conceived the design for the 2012 Summer Olympics flame cauldron, which features 204 individual ‘petals’ symbolising each country participating in the Games. The ‘petals’ converge with one another to create a unified flame symbolising hope and peace.
Heatherwick Studio