The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) has named Thomas Heatherwick as the recipient of the 2017 ACADIA Design Excellence Award.
The ACADIA Design Excellence Award is given by ACADIA's Board of Directors to exceptional architects, designers, and researchers who have made significant, innovative, and impactful contributions to the fields of architecture and computational design. Recipients are selected through a highly competitive nomination and voting process.
"Thomas Heatherwick's work epitomizes the high caliber of design innovation that ACADIA has sought to foster over the years," commented Jason Kelly Johnson, ACADIA president and founder of Future Cities Lab in San Francisco. "From furniture to bridges to buildings, his work is consistently experimental, iterative, and well-crafted. It also synthesizes digital and analog techniques in groundbreaking ways."
Thomas Heatherwick is a British designer whose prolific and varied work over two decades is characterized by its ingenuity, inventiveness and originality. Defying the conventional classification of design disciplines, Thomas founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 to bring the practices of design, architecture and urban planning together in a single workspace. Thomas leads the design of all Heatherwick Studio projects, working in collaboration with a team of 200 highly-skilled architects, designers, and makers.
Thomas' unusual approach applies artistic thinking to the needs of each project, resulting in some of the most acclaimed designs of our time. Based in London, Heatherwick studio is currently working in four continents on projects valued at over £2 billion. Following the success of the UK Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, Heatherwick studio has gone on to win exciting design briefs including the Learning Hub at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, and the new Google campus in Silicon Valley. Thomas has been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Royal Academician and in 2004 became the youngest Royal Designer for Industry.
The award will be presented at this year's ACADIA conference 'Disciplines & Disruption,' November 2-4 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Heatherwick will accept the award and deliver a keynote lecture during the conference.