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ASK THE ARCHITECT
Eliot Postma, partner & group leader at Heatherwick Studio answers ADF’s questions on how his career has helped shape him as a designer, and what inspires him currently
WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO BECOME AN ARCHITECT?
It goes back to junior school; I still remember looking forward to Wednesdays. It was the best day of the week because after lunch, the only thing you had was design and technology – which was essentially sitting in a small workshop and making stuff.
As I went to secondary school, I continued to pick design whenever it was an option. I always liked the workshop environment and getting to make models and trying to build things, so the natural evolution of that was asking myself what the biggest things one could build were. Becoming an architect went from there.
HOW DID YOU TRANSITION FROM YOUR FIRST FIRM FOSTERS, AND WHAT WAS IT LIKE ARRIVING AT HEATHERWICK? I had a break between the two. Being at Fosters was an incredible foundation and introduction into the profession. The organisation works on such an incredible scale, working alongside a thousand other architects in Battersea was a great opportunity.
After Foster + Partners, I went to do my master’s and I was pretty sure after that I wanted to work somewhere smaller. I
I love the idea of working on a typology that’s typically unloved, and changing its fate
studied at the Royal College of Art, which is a melting pot of lots of different creative disciplines – it is not an architecture school but focuses on all the arts. I enjoyed this environment – getting to work across departments, learning screen printing or glass blowing, working with people studying design interactions or product design.
I was very much attracted to Heatherwick Studio in the sense that it’s not an architecture but a design studio. We embrace all elements of design and work at all scales. Plus, the fact that we were 22 people when I joined felt very different, and I wanted to see what was possible.
WHAT INDIVIDUAL PIECE OF DESIGN ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?
I’ve been very lucky to work on such a great selection of projects, but your fi rst is always special. As it happens, we visited my fi rst project recently, the Bombay Sapphire Distillery in Hampshire. Getting to work on a project from day one of the
Bombay Sapphire Distillery © Iwan Baan
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ADF SEPTEMBER 2024
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