ornament and the vast, unfortunately impersonal scale of a building. Heatherwick compares an earring to a building’s façade, noting that items made to use on the body are often more carefully attuned to the user.

One simile that Goldberger uses compares a café and a whale. He says that a seaside café that Heatherwick designed looks “like a beached whale.” He implicitly likens the steel strips used to a whale’s bones. Another simile compares a Japanese pagoda design to paper craft, saying the building looks “like a piece of crumpled origami paper.” Describing the interior of a New York building, Goldberger uses a simile comparing a three-story steel backdrop to cloth that was cut up into “strips like ribbons.”

Paul Goldberger's New Yorker article "The Heatherwick Effect" examines the work of the British designer, Thomas Heatherwick. The article is based around an interview with Heatherwick, and some of the comparisons in it are quotations from or suggested by the subject. The author begins by describing a footbridge which folds up into an octagonal shape on one bank of the river to allow boats to pass. Heatherwick says that he designed this bridge to look attractive both when it was spanning the water and when it was folded up, commenting that most drawbridges look "like a footballer with a broken leg" when they are open.

Heatherwick also makes a telling comparison between a building and an earring when explaining his philosophy of design. He describes the sterility of buildings by saying that an earring, a tiny object by comparison, generally has more complexity in its design than the exterior of a building. This is a strikingly effective way of highlighting the lack of complexity in the largest objects most people see on a daily basis.

The author is sympathetic to Heatherwick's aims and wants to explain his ideas on design to the reader. However, he does make some of his own comparisons, with which the designer might not necessarily agree. Describing one of Heatherwick's buildings, he says,

Last year, he completed a seaside café, in the tiny town of Littlehampton, that looks like a beached whale made of strips of rust-colored steel. It is less a building than a sculpture in which you can buy lunch.

Writing about the large- and small-scale commissions Heatherwick has accepted, Goldberger remarks,

At the large end, he is designing a Buddhist temple in Japan, which looks, from the plans, like a crumpled piece of origami paper.

The second of these comparisons might not be thought very flattering to Heatherwick, but both accord with the designer's own descriptions in being highly visual, helping the reader to imagine structures which are not illustrated (since the article contains only one photograph, showing the façade of a London hospital designed by Heatherwick). The comparisons the author uses, both Heatherwick's and his own, succeed in allowing the reader to visualize the buildings and therefore to think about the principles of design discussed in the article.