Mr. Heatherwick's British pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai Iwan Baan

An exhibition about the designer will be shown at the Dallas museum as well as the Hammer in L.A. and New York's Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Four years ago, the designer Thomas Heatherwick set out to create a building that represented a nation.

Mr. Heatherwick was designing the British pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai. His solution: the Seed Cathedral, a 65-foot-high box structure made of protruding rods, which contained more than 250,000 seeds and nodded to the growing role of nature in British cities. The structure won the Expo's top award for pavilion design and remains a defining project of Heatherwick Studio, whose first North American museum exhibit opens at the Nasher Sculpture Gallery in Dallas on Saturday.

The 44-year-old Mr. Heatherwick, who also designed the Olympic caldron for the 2012 Games and a bridge in London that curls back onto itself to let boats pass through, calls his questions "provocations" ("How do you make a building represent a nation?" for example). They trigger a problem-solving approach to his various design projects, from furniture and Longchamp zip handbags to large-scale public works, said exhibit curator Brooke Hodge.....Continue Reading

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