The Bleigiessen

Today we had the chance to get up close and personal with one of Thomas Heatherwick's works--the Bleigiessen, a structure that spans all 8 stories of the atrium in the Wellcome Trust building (which is a biomedical research charity). Bleigiessen is actually a German custom on New Year's Eve where you melt small pieces of lead in a spoon and then pour it into a bucket of cold water. The hardened lead then creates a shape, whose figure is used to determine one's fortune for the next year. So, for example, if it looks like a bird, then you will have good luck coming. Apparently Heatherwick performed experiments with various materials in this same process, and after 400 tries he finally found the perfect shape that was created from pouring casting metal into spinning water to create this long spiral that this sculpture is shaped after. Heatherwick has a tendency to take everyday objects and blow them up into huge sculptures, and this is no different. The original bit of metal was actually only 20mm long, and he created a sculpture to span all 8 stories of this building. I think it's quite impressive. He used MRI scanning to examine the shape of the tiny metal cast and broke it down into layers so that he could compose this piece out of the 27,000 steel wires and 142,000 glass beads that now make up the sculpture. Our tour guide told us that each wire has from 1 to 39 beads (if I remember correctly) on it, and the inside of the sculpture is hollow, but it already weighs 15 tonnes as it is. I just think it's so amazing how Heatherwick even conceived the idea of such a sculpture and how he uses just wires and glass spheres to create this immense work of art. It's beautiful.

view from the ground floor up

one of the 142,000 glass beads

a dimple in the structure

look at all those wires and beads... awesome