East Beach Cafe by Thomas Heatherwick

The extraordinary structure is in fact Heatherwick Studio’s first complete building. At just 35, Terence Coran's protégé has redesigned a public square in Newcastle and the Longchamp flagship in New York but the East Beach Café is without doubt his most ambitious project yet. Shaped like a vast piece of driftwood, washed-up on the shore, the rusted metal shell undulates in sections, like rings of wood that have been smoothed by the sea. The scale and material of the structure combined with its unique shape and setting, makes for an extraordinary contrast of organic and industrial, natural and manmade.