Can a London bus be better and use 40 percent less fuel? Can you turn a paper mill into a gin distillery? Can you make a park out of the desert? Such are the questions posed by the rising British starchitect Thomas Heatherwick in his newly expanded book, Thomas Heatherwick: Making ($50; Monacelli Press). Outlining 140 projects his firm has completed in the last twenty- plus years, the hefty tome offers Heatherwick’s personal accounts of his adaptive reuse and other undertakings that work to transform commonplace fixtures—a chair, a Christmas card, a double-decker London bus—into better versions of themselves.

Click here to take a spin through some of Heatherwick’s most inspiring efforts.