Heatherwick’s London Garden Bridge bid ‘given unfair advantage’
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Version 0 of 1. The divisive Garden Bridge project across the Thames designed by Thomas Heatherwick is mired in further controversy after it emerged the competition, run by Transport for London, may have given Heatherwick questionably high marks for his “relevant design experience”. The project has already been dogged with complaints over its £175m cost and £3.5m annual maintenance bill. Heatherwick was shortlisted along with Wilkinson Eyre, arguably the most eminent bridge designers in Britain, and Marks Barfield, whose London Eye demonstrated a proven ability to deliver large scale, technically sophisticated projects. Wilkinson Eyre’s 25 bridges include the so-called “Winking Eye” across the Tyne in Newcastle, and the Peace Bridge in Derry, featured in a new set of British stamps. Heatherwick has designed just one bridge, a 12m-long steel structure that unrolls across a small dock inlet at London’s Paddington Basin. And yet, according to Architects Journal – who used the Freedom of Information Act to get previously withheld details about the Garden Bridge design competition – the 45-year-old Heatherwick was given the highest marks for design experience, despite having completed only two sizeable projects – a mall and a university learning hub in Singapore. Walter Menteth, the former chairman of the Riba procurement reform group, has called the top-marking of Heatherwick’s relevant design experience “extraordinary”, and suggested that his selection to design the bridge appeared to have been pre-judged. The latest revelations will exacerbate concerns about the cost of the new bridge, which is hefty even though the considerable expense of the 240 tons of copper alloy coating for the pleated structure has already been erased and the metal will be donated free by the commodities and mining giant, Glencore. By comparison, the iconic Sundial bridge in California and the Peace Bridge in Calgary, both by the Spanish bridge-design star, Santiago Calatrava, came in at about two-thirds of the per square metre cost of the Garden Bridge, whose landscaping, by the famous landscape designer Dan Pearson, is not a significant factor, accounting for about one hundredth of the overall cost. In other comparisons, the per square metre cost of the Garden Bridge will be about five times that of the 1.45 mile long High Line elevated landscape in New York, and almost as costly as the entire 250 hectares of the Olympic Park. There is no doubting Heatherwick’s originality, or his capability, supported by outstanding engineers, to create an extraordinary looking bridge over the Thames to connect Temple to the South Bank centre. A spokesman for Heatherwick Studio said: “This is for Transport for London to speak about rather than us, so we’re not commenting at all.” A TfL spokeman insisted “a proper and robust process was followed”. |