The High Line in New York is an example of genuine creativity.
It was a disused, elevated-railway line running above the streets of lower Manhattan.
In its day it carried trains delivering meat, dairy and produce, until road transport made it redundant by the 1950s.
It sat abandoned and ugly for decades, just a useless eyesore.
When Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York he tried to get it demolished, but Mayor Bloomberg later opened a competition asking for ideas on how to use the abandoned railway track, it received 720 suggestions.
By 2006 the first part of the renovation was completed.
The ‘High Line’ is now an elevated public park running through lower Manhattan, it’s 1.5 miles long and home to over 500 different species of trees and plants.
It features pleasant walks, theatre performances, music concerts, shops, restaurants, art videos, water features, paintings, sculptures, and more.
It’s become a much-loved part of New York as well as a major tourist attraction because it’s unique, which is why it’s truly creative, they took a problem and turned it into an opportunity.
The Musee d’Orsay in Paris is similar.
The Gare d’Orsay was an obsolete railway station in the centre of Paris.
It was built in the Beaux Arts style over 100 years ago, but it became too small and old- fashioned for modern trains.
The only option was to knock it down, or was it?
In 1978 a competition was held and 3 young architects came up with a suggestion for turning the beautiful old industrial building into an art gallery.
The Musee d’Orsay now houses the best French art of the 19th century including Monet, Manet, Degas, Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh.
Again, they took a problem and turned it into an opportunity.
The Tate Modern in London is the biggest modern art museum in the world.
But it wasn’t built for that purpose.
It was originally Bankside Power Station, providing electricity for businesses and homes, it became obsolete and was closed it 1981.
But instead of being demolished, the huge interior spaces, the turbine hall and tank rooms, were found to be perfect for displaying modern art, and the Tate had collected many thousands of pieces of modern art with nowhere to show them.
Putting the two things together they created an opportunity out of a problem.
Tate Modern now attracts nearly 4 million visitors a year and is the 4th most visited art gallery in the world.
So that’s how to understand creativity properly, but how do we misunderstand it?
The perfect example of how NOT to do it was the Garden Bridge over the Thames.
This was a plan to build a bridge between Waterloo and Blackfriars, that would copy New York’s High Line.
It was designed by Thomas Heatherwick and was pedestrian only, no cyclists or vehicles, it would be a park on a bridge.
But it wasn’t turning a problem into an opportunity because no problem existed.
There were already 9 bridges across the Thames on that 2-mile stretch, so this was just copying someone else’s idea.
They weren’t solving a problem, they were going to build something brand-new at great expense.
The Garden Bridge was the opposite of creativity, which is why it was a massive failure.
It never got built and by the time it was cancelled it had already cost £53 million in design fees, legal fees, etc, without a single brick being laid.
It was a massive failure because they tried to copy someone else’s idea without understanding the thinking behind it.
They didn’t try to solve a problem, they just plagiarised someone else’s execution which is how we misunderstand creativity.
And that’s how it is with our job, nothing starts with a blank sheet of paper and a brief to do whatever we like, there’s always a problem to be solved.
So the question always is, how do we turn that problem into an opportunity?
We can’t say to the client, “I can’t sell this until you go back and make it better.”
We have to look at the problem that exists and turn it into an opportunity.
That’s what creativity is.