Thomas Heatherwick

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“Clearly I've got an ego.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”