Latest news with #ThomasHeatherwick
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘It's absolutely f---ed': Why Google's new £1bn London office is in crisis
The crowning glory of Google's new, massive headquarters in London's King's Cross is its rooftop garden. More than 300m long, with hundreds of trees across four stories and a running track, star designer Thomas Heatherwick envisaged it as a haven for the tech giant's 7,000 staff, as well as bats, bees, birds and butterflies. At least, it is meant to be the crowning glory. However, delays to the project have meant that, while it is still under construction, the building and its garden have been invaded by foxes. The vulpine skulk has taken advantage of the building's lack of human occupants, digging burrows in the manicured grass and leaving their droppings around. 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception,' a Google spokesperson said after a report on the London Centric website. 'While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' The foxes, pests though they are, may be the least of Google's problems. Today, visitors to the construction site are met with the cacophonous sounds of drilling and hammering; the sights of scaffolding and cherry pickers obscuring the view; the constant bustle of workmen coming and going. The 11-storey building, the cost of which has never been confirmed but expected to be well north of £1 billion, still appears to be a long way from being completed. Building site sources tell The Telegraph that all manner of things have gone wrong, from shoddy workmanship that was, in effect, 'hidden' because of the vastness of the project to wooden floors that became so saturated with rainwater that they need complete repairs. Much of the ground floor, which is supposed to house shops and other public spaces, remains a shell. The date for its opening, which was meant to happen last year, has been repeatedly pushed back. 'If they get this job done by the end of 2026 it would be a f—ing miracle,' one worker tells me. 'I don't think the people building it know what they are doing.' An electrician says: 'They have unlimited money so they throw out ridiculous dates. It's going to be interesting, but very stressful and long hours.' (Both Google and Heatherwick Studio declined to comment on these claims.) There is a sense of gloom among those working on site. One worker simply says: 'It's absolutely f---ed, mate.' Another, who only started working on the project on Monday, describes it as 's--t'. Some might say that Google bosses should not be surprised that building its landmark has not gone entirely smoothly. Heatherwick, 55, has a habit of designing ingenious objects and places that are later found to be impractical, from a sculpture to commemorate Manchester hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games to a New York visitor attraction later called a 'suicide machine' and London's Routemaster buses to Boris Johnson's abandoned Garden Bridge in the capital. The $2 trillion technology giant launched its quest for a London headquarters in 2013, when it commissioned a more typical office block from architects AHMM; by 2015, those plans had been binned as they were apparently 'too boring' for the tastes of co-founder Larry Page. Enter Heatherwick, who can be described as almost anything except 'boring'. He turned the concept of a giant office building (almost literally) on its head, and designed a long structure parallel to King's Cross railway platforms that is longer (330m/1,083ft) than The Shard is tall (310m/1,106ft). The finished building – dubbed a 'landscraper', as opposed to a skyscraper – will have nap pods for weary workers, as well as a 25m swimming pool and a basketball court. Plus, of course, the garden. The final design is a collaboration between Heatherwick's eponymous studio and that of Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect. The team also worked on Google's (completed) California headquarters. Heatherwick was unlikely to design a run-of-the-mill office and always makes a point of doing things differently. He had a bohemian childhood as the son of a pianist father and jewellery-designer mother, and attended two private schools – Sevenoaks in Kent and the Rudolf Steiner School in Hertfordshire – before studying design at Manchester Polytechnic and London's Royal College of Art. It was at the latter institution that he met Terence Conran, the founder of Habitat and the Design Museum, whom Heatherwick impressed by building an 18ft-high gazebo out of laminated birch that sat in his garden. Conran became Heatherwick's mentor and famously described him as 'the Leonardo da Vinci of our times'. He has had his fair share of successes, most notably when he designed the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 London Games. It consisted of 204 copper cones, one for each participating nation, attached to long stems that wowed people the world over when they came together to create one larger vessel. Heatherwick, who was awarded a CBE in 2013, was also the driving force behind Coal Drops Yard, a stone's throw from Google's King's Cross building, that is a thriving hub of shops and restaurants after decades as a derelict wasteland. But for every Heatherwick triumph, there has been a misstep. His sculpture for the Commonwealth Games – named B of the Bang – was a cluster of metal spikes coming from the top of a column to imitate an explosion, but it was completed late and over budget. More concerningly, a tip of one of the spikes fell off shortly before it was unveiled and, when others threatened to do the same, it was dismantled in 2009. Manchester City Council sued Heatherwick and his contractors; the case was settled out of court. Other notable misses include Heatherwick's Routemaster buses, which were commissioned by Johnson when he was Mayor of London, which were much more expensive than other models and had a tendency to overheat in summer months, and the aborted plan for a Garden Bridge across the River Thames, which ultimately cost taxpayers £43 million without anything to show for it. Most destructive was the Vessel, a visitor attraction in New York's Hudson Yards. The copper-coloured network of 154 staircases and 80 landings was supposed to be New York's answer to the Eiffel Tower, but it was closed down in 2021 (after less than two years) after four people had killed themselves by jumping from it. Carla Fine, a local who is an expert on the matter, told The Telegraph at the time that it was a 'suicide machine'. It only reopened last October after netting was installed. 'The project met all the safety standards, and actually it went above them. It was just an extremely tragic, sad use that the project got put to,' Heatherwick told the Financial Times in 2023. 'Nobody predicted Covid and what that would do for people's mental health.' His current projects include transforming the Kensington Olympia in West London and turning the capital's BT Tower into a high-end hotel. Not a trained architect himself (but the employer of large numbers of them at his studio), Heatherwick has said that we are in the grip of an 'epidemic of boringness', with soulless glass-and-steel buildings populating cities all over the world. Heatherwick's eccentricity, which has been a characteristic for decades, is almost designed to attract opprobrium or eye-rolls from others in the field. As he finished his postgraduate studies, rather than make a business card Heatherwick made ice lollies that had his phone number on the stick; on various occasions he has shipped a snowball to China so that somebody there could experience British snow, and taken a kebab to Italy for someone else. 'I'm not a fan, because I think he doesn't know the difference between a building and a CD rack,' says Ellis Woodman, an architect and the director of the Architecture Foundation. 'There's no sense of scale, no sense of an urban idea that the buildings are contributing to. They disregard architectural history or the character of the spaces in which they stand. [The Google building] is not a building that's interested in making relationships with things around it. The work is always the most important building on its site, whatever he's doing. There's never a sense that the role of a building might be to contribute to the definition of a space with other buildings.' Heatherwick has become a big brand in the building world, in the way that Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid did before him. Woodman says that, with the quasi-utopian ideals he set out in his 2023 treatise Humanise, Heatherwick is 'carrying on that 'architecture-as-a-marketing tool' tendency'. 'He's not seriously engaged with the problems of housing or sustainability,' Woodman adds. 'It's a succession of projects like the Vessel, which one might ask if the world ever really needed.' Others in the design world reckon that Heatherwick's regular criticism by architects stems from a resentment that an interloper could gatecrash their industry without having to go through the same formal training. 'I'm very 'pro' him. He's a very creative and inventive figure, but he's divisive because he was trained in industrial design in Manchester, not in architecture,' says Charles Saumarez Smith, the former director of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery who is a distinguished historian of art and design. 'Architects view themselves in a professional way, and so obviously have not been so enthusiastic about him being globally successful as he has been as an architect. I think that is at the root of it.' Saumarez Smith tells me that he thinks Heatherwick's Google building is 'mind-boggling' and 'vast, but in a way it manages to disguise its scale. I'm looking forward to seeing it in more detail when it's finished'. How long before the Google building is finished, and what it will be like when it is, is anyone's guess. 'You can't fully know whether something's going to work until it's finished,' Heatherwick told The Telegraph in a 2018 interview. 'Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I get worried when my team aren't worried. Worry is a useful energy.' One wonders if Heatherwick feels worried about the Google HQ at the moment. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
13-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
‘It's absolutely f---ed': Why Google's new £1bn London office is in crisis
The crowning glory of Google's new, massive headquarters in London's King's Cross is its rooftop garden. More than 300m long, with hundreds of trees across four stories and a running track, star designer Thomas Heatherwick envisaged it as a haven for the tech giant's 7,000 staff, as well as bats, bees, birds and butterflies. At least, it is meant to be the crowning glory. However, delays to the project have meant that, while it is still under construction, the building and its garden have been invaded by foxes. The vulpine skulk has taken advantage of the building's lack of human occupants, digging burrows in the manicured grass and leaving their droppings around. 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception,' a Google spokesperson said after a report on the London Centric website. 'While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' The foxes, pests though they are, may be the least of Google's problems. Today, visitors to the construction site are met with the cacophonous sounds of drilling and hammering; the sights of scaffolding and cherry pickers obscuring the view; the constant bustle of workmen coming and going. The 11-storey building, the cost of which has never been confirmed but expected to be well north of £1 billion, still appears to be a long way from being completed. Building site sources tell The Telegraph that all manner of things have gone wrong, from shoddy workmanship that was, in effect, 'hidden' because of the vastness of the project to wooden floors that became so saturated with rainwater that they need complete repairs. Much of the ground floor, which is supposed to house shops and other public spaces, remains a shell. The date for its opening, which was meant to happen last year, has been repeatedly pushed back. 'If they get this job done by the end of 2026 it would be a f—ing miracle,' one worker tells me. 'I don't think the people building it know what they are doing.' An electrician says: 'They have unlimited money so they throw out ridiculous dates. It's going to be interesting, but very stressful and long hours.' (Both Google and Heatherwick Studio declined to comment on these claims.) There is a sense of gloom among those working on site. One worker simply says: 'It's absolutely f---ed, mate.' Another, who only started working on the project on Monday, describes it as 's--t'. Some might say that Google bosses should not be surprised that building its landmark has not gone entirely smoothly. Heatherwick, 55, has a habit of designing ingenious objects and places that are later found to be impractical, from a sculpture to commemorate Manchester hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games to a New York visitor attraction later called a 'suicide machine' and London's Routemaster buses to Boris Johnson's abandoned Garden Bridge in the capital. The $2 trillion technology giant launched its quest for a London headquarters in 2013, when it commissioned a more typical office block from architects AHMM; by 2015, those plans had been binned as they were apparently 'too boring' for the tastes of co-founder Larry Page. Enter Heatherwick, who can be described as almost anything except 'boring'. He turned the concept of a giant office building (almost literally) on its head, and designed a long structure parallel to King's Cross railway platforms that is longer (330m/1,083ft) than The Shard is tall (310m/1,106ft). The finished building – dubbed a 'landscraper', as opposed to a skyscraper – will have nap pods for weary workers, as well as a 25m swimming pool and a basketball court. Plus, of course, the garden. The final design is a collaboration between Heatherwick's eponymous studio and that of Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect. The team also worked on Google's (completed) California headquarters. Heatherwick was unlikely to design a run-of-the-mill office and always makes a point of doing things differently. He had a bohemian childhood as the son of a pianist father and jewellery-designer mother, and attended two private schools – Sevenoaks in Kent and the Rudolf Steiner School in Hertfordshire – before studying design at Manchester Polytechnic and London's Royal College of Art. It was at the latter institution that he met Terence Conran, the founder of Habitat and the Design Museum, whom Heatherwick impressed by building an 18ft-high gazebo out of laminated birch that sat in his garden. Conran became Heatherwick's mentor and famously described him as 'the Leonardo da Vinci of our times'. He has had his fair share of successes, most notably when he designed the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 London Games. It consisted of 204 copper cones, one for each participating nation, attached to long stems that wowed people the world over when they came together to create one larger vessel. Heatherwick, who was awarded a CBE in 2013, was also the driving force behind Coal Drops Yard, a stone's throw from Google's King's Cross building, that is a thriving hub of shops and restaurants after decades as a derelict wasteland. But for every Heatherwick triumph, there has been a misstep. His sculpture for the Commonwealth Games – named B of the Bang – was a cluster of metal spikes coming from the top of a column to imitate an explosion, but it was completed late and over budget. More concerningly, a tip of one of the spikes fell off shortly before it was unveiled and, when others threatened to do the same, it was dismantled in 2009. Manchester City Council sued Heatherwick and his contractors; the case was settled out of court. Other notable misses include Heatherwick's Routemaster buses, which were commissioned by Johnson when he was Mayor of London, which were much more expensive than other models and had a tendency to overheat in summer months, and the aborted plan for a Garden Bridge across the River Thames, which ultimately cost taxpayers £43 million without anything to show for it. Most destructive was the Vessel, a visitor attraction in New York's Hudson Yards. The copper-coloured network of 154 staircases and 80 landings was supposed to be New York's answer to the Eiffel Tower, but it was closed down in 2021 (after less than two years) after four people had killed themselves by jumping from it. Carla Fine, a local who is an expert on the matter, told The Telegraph at the time that it was a 'suicide machine'. It only reopened last October after netting was installed. 'The project met all the safety standards, and actually it went above them. It was just an extremely tragic, sad use that the project got put to,' Heatherwick told the Financial Times in 2023. 'Nobody predicted Covid and what that would do for people's mental health.' His current projects include transforming the Kensington Olympia in West London and turning the capital's BT Tower into a high-end hotel. Not a trained architect himself (but the employer of large numbers of them at his studio), Heatherwick has said that we are in the grip of an 'epidemic of boringness', with soulless glass-and-steel buildings populating cities all over the world. Heatherwick's eccentricity, which has been a characteristic for decades, is almost designed to attract opprobrium or eye-rolls from others in the field. As he finished his postgraduate studies, rather than make a business card Heatherwick made ice lollies that had his phone number on the stick; on various occasions he has shipped a snowball to China so that somebody there could experience British snow, and taken a kebab to Italy for someone else. 'I'm not a fan, because I think he doesn't know the difference between a building and a CD rack,' says Ellis Woodman, an architect and the director of the Architecture Foundation. 'There's no sense of scale, no sense of an urban idea that the buildings are contributing to. They disregard architectural history or the character of the spaces in which they stand. [The Google building] is not a building that's interested in making relationships with things around it. The work is always the most important building on its site, whatever he's doing. There's never a sense that the role of a building might be to contribute to the definition of a space with other buildings.' Heatherwick has become a big brand in the building world, in the way that Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid did before him. Woodman says that, with the quasi-utopian ideals he set out in his 2023 treatise Humanise, Heatherwick is 'carrying on that 'architecture-as-a-marketing tool' tendency'. 'He's not seriously engaged with the problems of housing or sustainability,' Woodman adds. 'It's a succession of projects like the Vessel, which one might ask if the world ever really needed.' Others in the design world reckon that Heatherwick's regular criticism by architects stems from a resentment that an interloper could gatecrash their industry without having to go through the same formal training. 'I'm very 'pro' him. He's a very creative and inventive figure, but he's divisive because he was trained in industrial design in Manchester, not in architecture,' says Charles Saumarez Smith, the former director of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery who is a distinguished historian of art and design. 'Architects view themselves in a professional way, and so obviously have not been so enthusiastic about him being globally successful as he has been as an architect. I think that is at the root of it.' Saumarez Smith tells me that he thinks Heatherwick's Google building is 'mind-boggling' and 'vast, but in a way it manages to disguise its scale. I'm looking forward to seeing it in more detail when it's finished'. How long before the Google building is finished, and what it will be like when it is, is anyone's guess. 'You can't fully know whether something's going to work until it's finished,' Heatherwick told The Telegraph in a 2018 interview. 'Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I get worried when my team aren't worried. Worry is a useful energy.' One wonders if Heatherwick feels worried about the Google HQ at the moment.
Forbes
11-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Digital Receipts Help Longchamp Drive Customer Engagement
Leather goods house, Longchamp, best known for one of the world's bestselling bags, Le Pliage, has created a new marketing channel via digital receipts resulting in a 73% open rate and a 5.5% click rate. According to Yocuda, a leader in dynamic digital receipts, the affordable-luxury brand delivered 590,000 of them in 2024, helping the French brand to increase post-purchase engagement and lift its omnichannel experience for customers through better personalization. Longchamp—which in April reopened its flagship store in SoHo, New York with a head-turning design from British architect-designer Thomas Heatherwick—is stepping up its digital comms with customers and the boring receipt is a new avenue of exploration. Yocuda claims it can 'close the loop' on the in-store-to-online process while also reducing receipt printouts. Consumers are wary of their data being captured in-store after a surge in data breaches of late including at North Face and Cartier. However, Longchamp's experience suggests that many of them are happy to share limited information like email addresses. Longchamp—founded by Jean Cassegrain in 1948 and still family owned—first partnered with Yocuda in 2021 and has rolled out digital receipts across 135 stores in 23 countries worldwide, replacing traditional PDF receipts with ones that are dynamic and personalized. Last year the brand sent out almost 600,000, roughly half of the total it has ever sent. These receipts, are claimed by Yocuda to go beyond a simple proof of purchase by offering other features from tailored recommendations and brand content, to customer language preferences. For example, a French shopper visiting the New York flagship Longchamp store in SoHo, can opt to receive their receipt in their native language rather than in English, ensuring a more tailored experience. This is controlled by a content management system accessed via Yocuda's portal. The portal also provides detailed reporting across all countries and stores, down to individual store associates so the brand can monitor digital receipt adoption and engagement worldwide. From Longchamp's side the aim is to strengthen customer relationships post-purchase and also achieve sustainability goals. Longchamp's use of digital receipts has cut paper waste, saving 1.4 tonnes of carbon emissions in just one year. The digital receipts were integrated into the company's existing point-of-sale system and, to date, the solution has processed over 2.3 million transactions and delivered over 1.2 million digital receipts globally. Benoit Schmid, Longchamp's IT retail manager, commented: 'To improve the experience, we decided to completely redesign our store concept, and we needed to reflect that change in the digital aspect of the customer checkout as well. The customer journey no longer ends when they leave; instead we can continue to engage with them by sharing our latest products, collections, and brand stories directly in their inbox.' Edward Drax, managing director of Yocuda said that in future there would be opportunities to further enhance the digital receipt features. By leveraging this often overlooked element of the customer journey, Longchamp hopes to unlock new ways of reaching its consumers. According to Yocuda—which is part of Global Blue, the tax-free shopping refund player and data provider—its receipt solution can identify more than half (between 50% and 80%) of in-store customers and drive multichannel purchasing. So far, the company has processed over 2.3 billion receipts and identified over 225 million customers, working with brands like M&S, Decathlon, Brunello Cucinelli, Sainsbury's, Puig, and Sephora, as well as Longchamp.
Digital Trends
10-06-2025
- Digital Trends
Google has a really weird problem at its new London HQ
When Google's striking new office building finally opens in London later this year, it'll be home to up to as many as 7,000 workers … and possibly a few foxes, too. The cunning creature has taken up residence on the building's 300-meter-long rooftop garden and its unexpected occupation has been an issue for the last three years, according to a Guardian report (via London Centric). Recommended Videos The expansive roof area has been filled with wildflowers and woodland plants and is supposed to be an area for Google employees to relax and enjoy a bite to eat, or maybe even dream up the next big idea for the tech giant. But the lush garden is likely to be out of bounds if the foxes are still roaming free there. 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception,' Google told the London Centric in a statement. 'While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' But the four-legged residents have reportedly been digging burrows in the carefully landscaped grounds, with some people connected with the site having seen fox poop about the place. While London is famous for fox sightings, it's not clear how the animal managed to find its way to the roof of the 11-story building, which has been under construction since 2018. The building, designed by Thomas Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group, features the garden as a centerpiece and is supposed to be a shared space for not only Google workers but also bees, bats, birds, and butterflies. But not foxes. With the building set to welcome workers before the end of this year, there's still time to clear the garden of the pesky animal. But with foxes known to be resourceful and highly adaptable, getting rid of them may be a greater challenge than expected.
The Guardian
09-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Google battling ‘fox infestation' on roof of £1bn London office
It is intended to be an ultra-modern central London office that will serve Google for decades, but the new £1bn headquarters is beset by one of humanity's oldest-known pests: foxes. The canines have taken over the rooftop garden of the new 'landscraper' in King's Cross and had an impact on construction – although the company stressed it was 'minimal'. The infestation, first reported by the newsletter London Centric, was confirmed by sources familiar with the construction. One told the Guardian it had been a rolling three-year saga and said some foxes had begun to dig burrows in the perfectly manicured grounds. 'There's a little hole in the garden where one lives,' they said. 'We've seen her all around the building – one second she's on the fifth floor, the next she's on the garden floor. No one has been able to catch her.' Others said they have seen fox poo on the grounds of the Thomas Heatherwick-designed building. Mosh Latifi, a co-director of the London-based pest control firm EcoCare, said they could be living off rats. 'Foxes thrive quite well on rodents – we don't live more than three metres away from the nearest rat,' he said, adding that he had also witnessed foxes in building sites scouring for food left behind by workers. Leaky pipes, or even generous handouts from local businesses, could be sustaining the skulk, according to another London pest control expert, who did not wish to be named. 'London is a big playground for foxes – they will go absolutely anywhere,' they said. A Google spokesperson said: 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception. While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' According to a search using the firm's own search engine, the best way to get rid of foxes is to remove food sources, install secure fencing and fill in any gaps. It is not the first time a pricey London building has had such a problem. In 2011, a fox called Romeo was discovered living in the Shard. He survived by living off scraps left by construction workers. Romeo was captured and, after a checkup, released back on to the streets of London. Facebook had to contend with a family of foxes at its Menlo Park headquarters in San Francisco. They were eventually honoured on the social media site – being granted a set of stickers on its Messenger app. Plans for the new Google building were announced in 2013, as its first completely owned and designed company site outside the US. The 11-storey building will accommodate up to 7,000 employees. The 300-metre rooftop garden runs along the length of the building and encompasses the seventh to eleventh floors. It's believed that 40,000 tonnes of soil has been brought to support 250 trees, with a running track winding through them. The garden was designed to accommodate bees, bats, birds and butterflies. It features a space for dining, deckchairs and a fitness area. It also has an indoor pool. The nearly 1m sq ft building has been under construction since 2018, and is estimated to be completed later this year. In 2022, a topping-off ceremony which featured non-alcoholic Pimm's and luxury canapés was attended by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and Keir Starmer, whose Holborn and St Pancras constituency includes the office. 'This project represents a real vote of confidence in London, in our communities and in our flourishing tech sector,' Khan said at the time.
