While still a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art in 1993, Thomas Heatherwick had the idea of making a piece of furniture from a single material, all components extruded in one piece. He began looking for an aluminium factory to achieve this end. At the time, a visit to Alcan in Banbury got him hooked on the idea: billets of aluminium were forced into an extruding machine, and straight sections pulled out at the other end. But it was the contorted, rough end pieces that stuck in his mind. For the manufacturer, these were scrap, but these discarded mistakes now form the basis for Heatherwick’s first series of limited editions, Extrusions, that will be launched at London’s Haunch of Venison in September.
At the time, the Alcan machine was not big enough to create the L-Shaped furniture Heatherwick had in mind and endless phone calls to other factories came to nothing. But 16 years after the first experiments, he finally found an extruding machine large enough. The particular factory is in Asia and usually makes aluminium products for the aerospace industry. Heatherwick is not saying much more about it than that: he has ambitious ideas about how the technology can be used commercially to create mass-produced furniture, building facades and structure.
The five prototype benches in the Extrusions series are made from the same section incorporating the legs, back and seat. The gnarled end sections have been retained, although the extrusion could have been sliced to create a pristine section.
Moving into the world of private galleries has helped Heatherwick fund ongoing research or the project. The first steel die alone cost £60,000 to make, and every time the machine is used the cost is enormous, as it means stopping the production of items for the aerospace industry.
The only limit to the length of bench is transportation – the factory itself is 250m long and in theory a piece of that length could be made. ‘We could seat 700 people on one piece of metal,’ explains Heatherwick. In the meantime, though, until the right project comes along, he has plans for 2010 to create a sculpture of 100m of the same section that will tangle into a pile of metal, like a mound of spaghetti.
However, what fascinates Heatherwick is not the potential scale of product, but the idea of creating useful things, be it furniture or building structures, out of one single element. ‘It’s a pure idea thing,’ he says.
Extrusions is at the Haunch of Venison, W1S, 17 September-8 November
