Is your building bad for you? How we became victims of the blandemic

“If we step back and look at what’s been built in the last 70, 80 years almost, everyone says it’s pretty terrible,” he does say at one point. “We’ve not been making good, wholesome places.”

This is the gist of it, but you can forgive him wanting to cover the totality in his answer. He has a lot to say on the subject. So much so he has written a book and launched a campaign on the subject. Humanise is something of a manifesto, one he is bringing to the Edinburgh International Book Festival this coming week. 

When it comes to new buildings, we are suffering, Heatherwick argues, from a “global blandemic.” Too much of what we build is soulless and depressing, designed for companies and corporations, not human beings, he argues. 

Why does this matter? Because, he believes, boring buildings are bad for us.

This August afternoon Heatherwick is in his studio in King’s Cross in London, “a few 100 metres away from the station,” sharing his ideas with me over Zoom.

It is fair to say that these ideas haven’t been met with total approval so far. Maybe that’s down to the fact that he’s a designer not an architect and the architecture profession doesn’t like him stepping on its toes. Maybe it’s his association with Boris Johnson, most notably on the ill-fated, much criticised Garden Bridge.

Heatherwick’s studio, it should be said, has been involved in building projects all around the world. Some have been praised, some pilloried. Heatherwick can be a controversial figure. 

That said, it is difficult to argue with his central diagnosis in Humanise. There are a lot of dull, bad buildings being built. What his critics have taken issue with, however, is what Heatherwick sees as the causes and the cure.

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The main culprit, Heatherwick argues, is modernism, an architectural style that emerged in the early 20th century, one that Heatherwick argues is now embedded in architectural education and even in the planning system. Architecture’s adherence to modernist traits, he believes, has resulted in buildings that are too flat, too plain, too straight and too shiny. They are also too monotonous, too anonymous and too serious.

There’s a wilful provocation in his argument. In Humanise, Heatherwick even describes Le Corbusier, one of modernism’s most feted architects, as “the God of Boring.” 

But the point Heatherwick is making is a little more nuanced in practice. “We ended up in this style war. You’re either modern, or you are traditionalist. But, just to be clear, modernism is now a century old. It’s a style as well. It’s an old-fashioned style.

“This isn’t a conversation about curved or traditional or square, or any of those things. It’s research showing our brains need places that engage us.”

Is he saying that modernism has produced no interesting buildings? “No, no, no, not at all. In fact one of the modernist buildings I think is amazing is the football stand in Galashiels.”

You mean Peter Wormersley’s cantilevered stand at Gala Fairydean Rovers’ ground?” He nods. “It’s brilliant, absolutely fantastic. I don’t think buildings need to be curvy or traditional or anything.”

The problem, he suggests, is architecture doesn’t listen to the public and has convinced itself that it knows best. “It’s a perfect combination that will perpetuate and perpetuate and recycle itself endlessly. And also it’s a gift to a construction industry that wants to build as cheaply as possible.”

But is this modernism’s fault? Isn’t this about an industry committed to fast and cheap? 

“Well, it isn’t in the interest of developers if they don’t have long-term engagement. It’s actually better for them if people care about the place and rent it for a long term. What we’ve had is these buildings being built in a short-term way, not even lasting 40 years since the war.

“All the buildings that got built in the 1960s were knocked down 20 years later. I mean it’s absolutely shocking. If society cares there will still be a value and it can carry on creating income. To take the site you own, kick everyone out and knock it all down it’s going to take many years until you start getting any rent again.”

Why does this all matter, you might ask? Well, Heatherwick argues, because boring buildings have an impact on us. “This is really a health conversation. Our minds need visual nutrition.”

He cites the research of a Canadian neuroscientist Colin Ellard who discovered exposure to “boring buildings” increases stress levels in humans.

So, what can be done? Build more interesting buildings presumably. He wants to see visual engagement, whether through ornament or patterns. 

What does that look like in practice, though? Maybe he can give us a specific example. One of the Heatherwick studio’s current ongoing projects is Google’s huge London headquarters in King’s Cross. It’s not finished yet, but it is going to be a huge 11-storey building with a sculpted roof garden. How will Heatherwick offer “visual nutrition” in this case?

“That building is an enormous building. It’s more than 300 metres long, so it’s the same length as the Shard lying sideways. Or the Eiffel Tower. What we did there was lift the building up by two storeys and we’re building a kind of village underneath it of one and two-storey wooden buildings.

“My point is that the bottom two floors are where the emotion is. Because it’s lifted up it means that underneath we can build variety. So, there is this series of boxes that are leaning over at different angles. They are moved in and out. They are at different heights. They have different windows and doorways and colours. So, in a way, it’s like a small village."

It's an example of visual engagement at door level. Which, he believes, is key. 

(Image: Olympia)

"So often the designing is done looking down as if you are in a helicopter and the last place where the care is is on the ground," he suggests.

“People can afford to have human details. We spend too much time worrying about how high things are and not enough time worrying about are they givers or takers? And most new buildings are takers, because the public haven’t been respected.”

Critics might see this as a call for a form of facadism. But what’s worse, I ask, boring buildings or ugly buildings? 

Oh, boring, he says emphatically. “There are places I like that I think are ugly,” Heatherwick suggests, citing the brutalist bulk of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank. “I don’t think it is beautiful, but it’s engaging when you walk around it. 

“Humans need fascination. The word awe I think is underrated. And awe doesn’t demand that something has to be beautiful. But the absence of any engagement …  means you feel nobody has cared.

“Some of the most loved streets in the United Kingdom, like the crescent in Bath or some of the streets in Pimlico,” he continues, “were designed by people who couldn’t read or write; builders who just picked up pattern books, put it together and just built it. And so I think that we need to find ways to embed culture, ornament.”

Isn’t this an argument based on a distorted historical notion of architecture, I ask? What lasts is, inevitably, what was built for the rich. There aren’t any 18th-century council estates still around, are there?

“But there are streets and streets in Scotland, bashed out by Georgians, bashed out by Victorians, that didn’t have fancy stone, used painted stucco and not very expensive bricks. But they had an amount of visual complexity, you could call it decoration, you could call it ornament, and they were bashed out in quantity. And I would be surprised if in 200 years they’re not still there.”

In all of this what is not up for debate is one of Heatherwick’s central charges: that commercially available steel and concrete are bad for the environment. “The facts speak for themselves about this dirty secret we have in the construction industry which is that we are five times the greenhouse gas emissions of aviation.”

In short, new buildings, whether boring or not, are bad for the environment. And so, Thomas Heatherwick argues, we should build them to last, not be torn down in 20, 30, 40 years. And that is very hard to argue with.

Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World by Thomas Heatherwick is published by Penguin, £15.99. Heatherwick will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Tuesday at 2pm. For more details of Heatherwick's Humanise campaign visit humanise.org/