Sign in

Support us

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle

Thomas Heatherwick

This article is more than 5 months old

‘Dangerously misguided’: the glaring problem with Thomas Heatherwick’s

architectural dreamworld
The designer’s new book Humanise spearheads a campaign
excoriating decades of bad building. Has he forgotten his own
expensive disasters? Our critic hasn’t

Oliver Wainwright
Fri 27 Oct 2023 16.15 CEST

T
he next global pandemic is already upon us, causing misery, sickness and poverty around the world, and even leading
to outbreaks of war. It has been a “100-year catastrophe” in the making, spreading through our cities in plain sight with
unparalleled virulence, leaving a devastating trail of depression, loneliness and crime in its wake. The name of this
cursed plague? Boring architecture.

So says Thomas Heatherwick, designer of novelty stools turned maker of quirky shopping centres, who has launched a 10-year
campaign to curb the “global blandemic of boring buildings”. Just like Prince Charles before him, whose 1989 Vision of Britain
launched a similar crusade, Heatherwick has conceived a multi-pronged multimedia attack: he has published Humanise, a big
Penguin book written with ghostwriter Will Storr, made a three-part documentary for BBC Radio 4 and created a website
exhorting the caring public to join the movement. “Sign up today,” it pleads. “Add your name to the list of citizens who demand
better.” An app has also been promised.
 Turning grey … the Blue Carpet area outside the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, designed by Heatherwick. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/The Guardian

The argument is simple, spelled out in preschool prose. After a century of tedious modernism, which has seen the world carpeted
with flat, monotonous grids of offices and apartment blocks, Heatherwick thinks we need a new generation of “visually
complex” buildings to nourish our eyes and heal our souls. Flat, straight, plain buildings, he says – citing the “evidence” of
various surveys – make us sad, stressed and antisocial. But buildings with pattern, ornament and irregularity make us happy. In
short, we need less Le Corbusier (the villain of the book) and more Antoni Gaudí (the hero) – a convenient and misleading binary
that ignores much of what has happened in architecture since the 1920s.

Over the book’s 500 pages, which are thankfully padded out with plenty of pictures, Heatherwick’s simplistic aesthetic
philosophising is boiled down to one key Humanise rule: “A building should be able to hold your attention for the time it takes to
pass by it”. Sounds reasonable enough.

In London’s King’s Cross, there is an office building under construction that flies in the face of this advice. It is as long as the
Shard is tall, stretching for over 300 metres in a repetitive, monolithic mass. It takes almost five minutes to walk its length, past
relentless rows of identical fins that cover its looming flanks, forming an endless wall that seems to swallow the entire horizon.
As Heatherwick warns: “Too much horizontality hogs our eyeline and creates deadening monotonous repetition.” The designer
of this building, which will be Google’s HQ? Thomas Heatherwick, working with Danish firm BIG.

A sense of “do as I say, not as I do” pervades the whole book, its author seemingly unaware of what his own studio is producing.
One of the most striking dissonances is his attitude to making and the importance of craft. Heatherwick devotes several pages to
his student days, explaining how he learned to weld metal, carve wood, and shape clay with his hands. He emphasises how
different he was from all the architecture students he met, who had apparently never made anything. “How could you be
responsible for making the largest objects in the world,” he ponders, “and be uninterested in making and materials?”
Heatherwick, he keeps reminding us, is a designer and a craftsman, not an architect, and so he cares much more about how
things are made.

Too much horizontal? … Google’s HQ, under construction in King’s Cross, London. Photograph: Vuk Valcic/Alamy

In Newcastle, there is a public space that looks more tatty than most. It has suffered from chipped benches, broken light fittings,
and its once-blue terrazzo paving has faded to a dreary shade of grey. Built for £1.4m, the Blue Carpet has been a continual
headache for the council, costing thousands of pounds a year to maintain. Its designer? Thomas Heatherwick.

In Manchester, there was once a large public sculpture made of big steel spikes, erected to celebrate the explosive energy of the
Commonwealth Games. The B of the Bang was plagued with safety issues and deemed so dangerous that it had to be dismantled
and sawn up for scrap. The council took legal action against its designer and contractors, settling out of court for £1.7m damages
for breach of contract and negligence. The designer in question? Thomas Heatherwick.

His blinkered campaign has the potential to

be highly influential
In New York, there stands a big basket-shaped lattice of staircases, built at a cost of $260m, as a bauble to adorn the bland, luxury
development of Hudson Yards. When the Vessel opened in 2019, bits were held on with gaffer tape, its steps and balustrades
clumsily sawn to fit, the pieces seemingly designed with little care for how they would fit together. Since the fourth person
jumped off the structure to their death in 2021, it has been closed indefinitely. The design genius behind this dysfunctional folly?
Thomas Heatherwick. The list goes on – whether it’s globular greenhouses for gin brands held up with clumsy steel struts, or
double-decker buses for hubristic mayors that become moving greenhouses in summer.

For all of his time spent welding and clay-shaping, it is hard not to think that the young Heatherwick might have benefited from
some time spent working in an architect’s office, understanding how material ideas are translated into reality, through often
imperfect procurement processes. Sadly, making complex buildings is not quite as simple as scaling up a fun idea for a sculpture,
something that both his book and studio often fail to grasp.
 B gone … the demolition of B of the Bang in Manchester. Photograph: Bruce Adams/ANL/Shutterstock

Construction details and practical safety issues aside, how does Heatherwick’s thinking work at a more urban scale? Throughout
the book, he talks of the importance of traditional, human-scale neighbourhoods, describing how “old winding streets are good
for us”, because they encourage sociability and make us feel safe. Once again, the broad principle seems like common sense, and
is largely agreed by urbanists the world over.

In Tokyo, there was once such a neighbourhood, where wooden houses climbed up a hillside in a network of narrow, winding
lanes, each building different from the next, forming a charming, lively place of the kind Heatherwick is so keen to promote. This
eight-acre swathe of the Toranomon-Azabudai district was recently bulldozed to make way for a gigantic mixed-use
development, including a coarse shopping mall that erupts from the ground in the form of a lumpen glass mountain. A bulky
stone grid galumphs its way over the building, imprisoning tiny planted terraces, while the back of the block greets the street
with a blunt cliff face of glass. There is no detail to catch the eye, no intricacy to entrance the senses. The designer of this
monolithic, neighbourhood-crushing beast? Thomas Heatherwick.

Sign up to Design Review

Free monthly newsletter

Original, sustainable ideas and reflection from designers and crafters, plus
clever, beautiful products for smarter living

Enter your email address

Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to
protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The book’s naivety and lack of self-awareness would be funny, but it is compounded by alarming pseudoscience that he wants to
impose on the rest of us. Heatherwick reveals that his studio has developed a “boring-o-meter”, a software tool that analyses the
visual complexity of a building from the point of view of a passerby, judging “how flat, plain, straight or monotonous it is”. He
wants it to be used by planners and argues that “we need to move towards a time in which cities mandate that any new
development meets a minimum complexity score”. Such logic would see every Georgian terrace in London (of the kind he praises
elsewhere in the book) outlawed. Which raises the question: is simplicity and repetition really the villain he thinks it is? Or is he
ultimately missing more important factors?

It would be easy to dismiss Heatherwick’s rose-tinted ramblings as irrelevant, but his blinkered campaign has the potential to be
highly influential. Having once charmed the former Conservative mayor-turned-prime minister Boris Johnson, with mostly
disastrous consequences, our plucky maker-turned-public intellectual has set his sights on wooing Labour, perhaps lusting after
a similar advisory role to that once held by Richard Rogers (listed as an inspiration in the book’s acknowledgments, for being “an
architect with the courage and ability to start a national conversation”).
 Neighbourhood crusher … Azabudai Hills in Tokyo. Photograph: Kimimasa Mayama/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

While Rogers at least understood the forces that shape cities, Heatherwick’s musings are dangerously misguided. Just like the
Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission before it, headed up by the late aesthetic philosopher Roger Scruton, the
Humanise movement focuses on the outward appearance of buildings at the expense of much more crucial issues. Our mental
and physical health depends less on being titillated by the design of a facade than by being able to live and work in adequately
sized spaces with decent ceiling heights, ample daylight, good ventilation and thermal insulation – something that so much of
the building stock in Britain, both old and new, so desperately lacks. The continued extension of permitted development rights is
allowing offices, shops and warehouses to be converted into homes without planning permission, leading to a grim generation of
tiny, dingy, overcrowded slums unfit for human habitation – no matter how jazzy their facades.

While Heatherwick berates architects for being too boring, he gives developers, contractors and policymakers a free pass to
continue with business as usual. Whether it’s the monopoly of the big builders over the supply of land, along with their corner-
cutting and “value-engineering”, or the government’s bonfire of regulations and the gleeful destruction of the planning system,
there are much greater dangers to people and planet than whether or not the outside of a building is entertaining enough.

Related stories

Thomas Heatherwick’s war ‘Demand interestingness’: Grassroots rebels: meet the 'We're cosseting our kids' – Welcome to
on boring buildings: ‘I’ve Thomas Heatherwick rails ‘biophilics’ who are busy the war against today's how the city
never gone against the against boring buildings greening our cities dangerously dull for luxury sk
whole industry before’ playgrounds

25 Oct 2023 19 Oct 2023 19 Dec 2021 31 Oct 2019 596 21 Oct 2019 1

 

More from Culture

Film ‘Don’t come if you are Lemn Sissay Film Pushing Bu
Warner Bros announces worried’ Surge of interest in Kirsten Dunst says she When we do
new Matrix movie helmed Former RSC boss says he Ethiopian culture boosts ‘didn’t even think to ask’ true sales fig
by Drew Goddard hates trigger warnings for case for return of treasures, about Hollywood’s gender consoles, pla
plays says poet pay gap

41m ago 3h ago 6h ago 5h ago 5h ago

Comments (196)
This discussion is now closed for comments but you can still sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion next time

Guardian Pick
Peter Barber, one of our most humane architects, whose buildings are definitely not boring, said in the FT a few days ago "Some of my best ideas have
come from Le Corbusier. He usually has an answer. If I’m really stuck, I’ll pull a Corb book down.
It's what you do with the ideas that matters.

Jump to comment

Isisst 100
27 Oct 2023 15.29

View more comments

Most viewed
 Sign in

Support us

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle

The Observer

This article is more than 5 months old

Review

Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World review – Thomas

Heatherwick’s simplistic critique of modern architecture
The designer is right to criticise boring buildings, but picks his
targets poorly and shows no inclination to confront the forces
that create such structures

Rowan Moore
Sun 22 Oct 2023 14.00 CEST

T
here are, says Thomas Heatherwick, too many boring buildings in the world. There has been “a century-long global
catastrophe” caused by “bland, vague and forgettable” architecture, a “global epidemic of inhuman buildings”, a style
of flat glass grids which, whether in Bengaluru, Dallas, Buenos Aires, Canberra or Nairobi, is always the same. “Intense
and dreadful changes,” he melodramatically declares, “have been creeping through our towns and cities for the last 100
years, bringing with them destruction, misery, alienation, sickness and violence.” Boring buildings, he says, citing the
neuroscientist Colin Ellard, cause “autonomic arousal”, a rise in stress levels in response to perceived threat.

He thinks there should be more architecture like that of Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan maestro whose work Heatherwick discovered
at the age of 18 in a book he bought for £6.99 at a student sale in Brighton. Gaudí’s Casa Milà, a nine-storey apartment block in
Barcelona, is an “unashamed festival of curves” that “undulates amazingly in the light, dancing in space… almost as if the
building itself is breathing”. It is a “generous” creation that, he says, gives “unquantifiable” joy to millions of passersby.

The blame for all this boringness, he says, lies mostly with architects – in particular with the Swiss-French modernist Le
Corbusier, who, according to Heatherwick, wanted only straight-lined mass-produced monotony. Also in the book’s hall of shame
are the American Louis Sullivan, who said that “form follows function”, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who made famous the
statement that “less is more”.
 ‘An unashamed festival of curves’: Gaudí’s Casa Milà in Barcelona. Photograph: Adwo/Alamy

Architects nowadays, says Heatherwick, have become divorced both from the physical processes of building and the wishes and
desires of the general public. They instead learn abstruse theories in their lengthy courses at architecture schools, where they are
asked to design such things (claims an anecdote in the book) as a house on the moon for a one-legged man. Heatherwick, who
trained as a designer, tells how, unlike most architecture students, he learned to bend and weld metal, carve wood, blow glass
and shape clay.

He’s right: there are too many soulless buildings in the world and the works of Gaudí are extraordinary and popular. There is
plenty of evidence in Le Corbusier’s writings and in some of his buildings that he favoured a machine-age architecture of straight
lines. The schools and the profession of architecture do sometimes foster pretentious and obscure theorising, removed both from
the realities of construction and public taste.

He doesn’t examine the singular But Heatherwick’s arguments are also head-numbingly, soul-crushingly
circumstances that made Gaudí such a simplistic. He somewhat insultingly ignores the modern architects who
remarkable one-off daily strive to create buildings that are not inhumane – the British David
Chipperfield, the Irish Grafton Architects, the French Lacaton & Vassal, for
example. He dismisses Sullivan, who was a genius at the kind of elaborate ornament that Heatherwick admires, on the strength
of a three-word aphorism. His description of Le Corbusier as the “god of boring” overlooks the ample use of colour, curves and
art in his work. When Heatherwick visits Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, which has plenty of these things, he admires it, but
this discovery doesn’t lead him to revise his initial condemnation of the man.

Heatherwick tends to see buildings as singular objects, like pieces of jewellery, to be judged by the amount of stimulation that
their surfaces offer. He underplays such things as the interaction of the look of a building with use, structure, climate and culture,
the relationships of exterior to interior and of one building to another. He does not have much to say about the value of
simplicity, the occasions when you want a building to be plain, so as not to distract from nature or the human life around, or
other more spectacular structures. The generally admired terraces of Georgian cities would score badly on his “boring-o-meter”,
an online tool that measures how “flat, plain, straight or monotonous” a building is.
 Heatherwick ‘admires’ Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp, France, though ‘it doesn’t lead him to revise his initial condemnation of the man’. Photograph: Alamy

Nor does Heatherwick inquire much into the factors that shape architecture. He praises the “generous human qualities” of the
stations of the Moscow metro, “built with human wants, needs and actions in mind”, without mentioning the relevant fact that
they were built by slave labour in atrocious and often lethal conditions. He doesn’t examine the singular circumstances that
made Gaudí such a remarkable one-off. A possible effect of this book’s influence might therefore be an outbreak of shallow
wannabe Gaudís. Which would be extremely, well, boring.

Above all, although he gives them a passing mention, he does not look too hard at the forces that make contemporary buildings
“boring” – globalised finance, the replacement of handicrafts by industrialised building techniques, the sheer scale of modern
city building. He prefers to claim that the builders of those dull blocks all over the world, largely hard-headed individuals driven
by practicality and profit, act as they do because they are in thrall to the esoteric theories of individuals such as Le Corbusier and
Mies, who died more than 50 years ago. That’s unlikely.

So this book is both a bit right and deeply wrong. It offers a critique of modernist architecture similar to one promoted in the
1980s by Tom Wolfe and the king formerly known as Prince Charles – an argument that did and will touch a chord, but was
inaccurate and out-of-date then and is still more so now. This superficiality matters. If there’s little understanding of the causes
of boring and inhuman buildings, there’s not much chance of putting them right.
 Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World by Thomas Heatherwick is published by Viking (£15.99). To support the
Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Related stories

Queer Spaces by Adam Modern Buildings in Mid-Century Britain by Architecture: From Slacklands 2
Nathaniel Furman and Britain review – a Elain Harwood; Sandfuture Prehistory to Climate Dean review
Joshua Mardell review – a phenomenal work of by Justin Beal review – re- Emergency review – how our forgotte
fascinating LGBTQIA+ gathering and observation evaluating postwar energy shaped the way we
architecture history architecture built the world

15 May 2022 3 Apr 2022 14 11 Oct 2021 12 24 May 2021 54 18 Nov 2019

 

More from Culture

Film ‘Don’t come if you are Lemn Sissay Film Pushing Bu

Warner Bros announces worried’ Surge of interest in Kirsten Dunst says she When we do
new Matrix movie helmed Former RSC boss says he Ethiopian culture boosts ‘didn’t even think to ask’ true sales fig
by Drew Goddard hates trigger warnings for case for return of treasures, about Hollywood’s gender consoles, pla
plays says poet pay gap

33m ago 3h ago 6h ago 5h ago 5h ago

 

Comments (62)
This discussion is now closed for comments but you can still sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion next time

Sort by Per page Display threads

Newest 25 Collapsed

1 2 Displaying threads 1 to 25 of 28

Amadeus1420 31 Oct 2023 10.23 0

Rowan Moore and Oliver Wainright are the two best architectural writers about; insightful, reflective, courageous. They dismantle architectural
pomposity, fadism, and fetishism with clarity.

Speaking as an architect-planner who had a twin track education through normal university training with 'pretentious and obscure theorising' and
community activism in 1970s where the reality of peoples lives particularly in relation to housing and transport was presented as 'an alternative'
View more comments

Most viewed