It’s been 70 years since Queen Elizabeth II took the British throne, and to celebrate this milestone, one of the U.K.’s most prominent designers Thomas Heatherwick has created a unique structure. Standing 70 feet tall in honor of the Platinum Jubilee, his “Tree of Trees” was unveiled outside of Buckingham Palace just yesterday, per People.
Stateside, Heatherwick Studio’s most recognizable work is probably the Vessel in Manhattan, the honeycomb shaped Hudson Yards structure that first opened in spring of 2019. Like the Vessel, the “Tree of Trees” presents a contemporary industrial imagining of an organic form, though the London structure actually incorporates that which it references. With 80 steel tube branches, the sculpture supports 350 young potted trees that are splayed out to create the silhouette of a single tree. The tree features an irrigation system that keeps each pot properly watered regardless of weather.
Heatherwick Studio’s structures tend to have some connection with nature, whether it’s the daylight-filled and solar panel-coated Google offices that the studio codesigned with Bjarke Ingels, the eye-grabbing floating park on New York City’s Hudson River, or even the studio’s first residential project, which is completely green-filled. Heatherwick is committed to the emotionality plants bring about in a space, as he explained to Architectural Digest in a 2020 interview about the residential property: “[Biophilia] is not just about plants; it’s about seeing movement, having change, hearing sound, and smelling smells, all these micro-effects we take for granted until they are missing from new developments.”
