His work also includes a new take on the classic London double-decker bus.[Iwan Bann/Heatherwick Studio]

A number of Heatherwick's furniture designs are also on display. "Plank Furniture," on sale in the museum shop, resembles a plank of wood, albeit a posh one. It can be folded in several ways to become a bench or table, or remain inconspicuously plank-like.

Also in the exhibit is the rotation-molded 2011 "Spun" chair. Recently acquired for the museum's permanent collection, it resembles an enormous toy top, and has been designed for both sitting still and spinning.

Heatherwick buildings are no less imaginative. The Bombay Sapphire Distillery in Laverstoke, England, features two enormous greenhouses that appear to be poured from two high windows of a former paper mill.

His ideas do not come easily, Heatherwick explains, but "are an intense mixture of certainty and doubt, breakthroughs and dead ends, tension and hilarity, frustration and progress."