Top 41 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Heatherwick

It gives me the creeps when I see a frame for a building going up and recognise the architect. You shouldn't know who a project is by.

I'm not really interested in creating things to be seen inside a private gallery. I'm interested in creating things that are all around us, that engage us. I just find the things that I respond to are useful.

I have a strong sense that every project is an invention, which is not a word I hear being used in architecture courses.

One great building does not make a great city.

When I heard of the 'garden bridge' idea, it seemed so clear and powerful, the notion of using nature to scale down an enormous piece of potentially wind-swept exposed link. That's what struck me - not treating the bridge just as a link, but as a place.

Ambition is a form of creativity.

The world of contemporary art has, in a way, exponentially expanded in the last couple of decades, and almost every major city in Europe and Asia and North America has fallen over themselves to have their own contemporary art museum.

Clearly I've got an ego.

I don't enjoy the sound of my voice in front of other people.

I try to be a positive person, but I'm also always looking and wondering, 'Maybe this could be done differently.' As soon as your mind is in a critical mode, you're halfway through designing; as soon as you start thinking about whether something could be better, you're already halfway through a solution.

At the root of everything I do is a fascination with ideas - what ideas are for, what jobs they do.

When I was little, I just was very tuned in to the functionality and aesthetics of things around me.

I think that human nature is scared of change and justifies it in all sort of ways.

The studio does projects all over the world, and in each place, we focus on trying to make a project specific to that place. We take a different perspective everywhere we work - our passion is public projects, wherever they are.

I've always been interested in projects that work at multiple levels.

As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.

My studio's passion is improving the public experience of cities for everyone.

Our job is to get people in, create the spaces, and then get out of the way.

I used to say I'm not a business. I'm not! But I've had to come round to it, to acknowledge that you had to be an organisation and had to have a business dimension in order to do your passion.

I am finally getting the chance to build large structures and break preconceptions that my designs are just sculptures for people to be in. But my work always comes down to the human scale.

When you think about the worst places humans come into contact with, they are often our health environments.

Often the most important moment in the design process is figuring out what the right question is.

I'm wary of the word 'inventing,' because in the British psyche the word 'inventor' is immediately linked with 'mad'. For me, inventing is problem-solving.

For me, every one of our projects is a research-and-development project.

You can make people feel valued or cared for by design alone. It's not purely about money. It's about how we choose to value human experience.

Everything that we start is something that we don't know what the outcome is going to be.

I'm very interested in buildings that have meaning for a particular place. I suppose it feels slightly rude to me if the imposed style that lands in a place is almost stronger than the place. For me it's about inventing a solution for each place; if people then want to know who did it, then great.

An interest in ideas is a sign of human life. People are fascinated by what the future is going to be - and the future is going to be an accumulation of ideas.

The Garden Bridge has not found its right moment, but I hope one day it will and that London continues to be open to ideas that make life here better.

I don't feel I'm trying to make art. I'm trying to make interesting things. People can relate to that.

I'm in love with cities. I find them amazing, the quiet co-ordination of thousands of people, going about what we're trying to do, and that organism of the city nurturing human aspiration, and the actual city fabric itself being a special thing rather than just infrastructure.

To make architecture with any real value is a massive challenge.

I thought I wanted to be an inventor but then discovered you couldn't study inventing!

Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.

It's important for people who criticise architects - whether what they build is or isn't to your taste - to appreciate how they devote themselves and put everything into bringing a building into existence.

The Learning Hub is a collection of handmade concrete towers surrounding a central space that brings everyone together, interspersed with nooks, balconies and gardens for informal collaborative learning.

I studied at a time when buildings were sterile things, and their creators were hands-off people - super-intelligent people, but you felt they didn't love the stuff buildings are made from.

At the root of everything I do is a fascination with ideas – what ideas are for, what jobs they do.

I have a strong sense that every project is an invention, which is not a word I hear being used in architecture courses

The British government - any government - is potentially the worst [architectural] client in the world.

Museums just seem to have this borrowed cachet—if I want to seem cultural, I will design something cultural. I resist the idea that culture is only opera houses or theatres. Culture is your entire life around you: toilets, the bus, the kerb or the dump where you drag your waste. Culture has come to mean the arts, but it’s swimming pools as well.