Thomas Heatherwick’s war on boring buildings: ‘I’ve never gone against the whole industry before’
Thomas Heatherwick is sitting down with a delegation from Singapore when I arrive at his new open-plan office in central London, so I busy myself admiring the seating options in the waiting area. There are clever spinning-top chairs that his studio developed in 2010; seats removed from one of the Routemaster buses he designed; and a cluster of mushroomlike wooden stools, arranged over a welcoming layer of overlapping kilim rugs. Dotted around are models of the studio’s projects, including a miniature version of the vast Google “landscraper” (of which more later) that is being constructed opposite the Guardian’s newsroom.
Before I have time to decide where to position myself, Heatherwick has broken away from his meeting. He walks me straight back out into the street, where he begins to talk. He is still talking, having barely paused for breath, 27 minutes later. I am not sure I have ever had someone talk to me about so many things all at once in such an explosion of words. It’s fascinating and bewilderingly intense.
He wants to explain the importance of allowing passersby to peer in and observe the inner workings of his office from the street, so we stand outside the building’s huge glass sliding doors and watch the Singapore meeting continuing inside. The doors have been designed to allow a doubledecker bus to drive in; once he can source a discontinued vehicle, Heatherwick wants to park one of his Routemasters inside. He hopes that local schoolchildren will loiter at the windows to watch technicians in the studio’s workshop pouring concrete and testing materials – and realise that this is a job they might like to do.
“You can’t be what you can’t see. I’m trying to advocate that everybody who does anything vaguely interesting should put their offices on street level,” he says. He then races through a long, impassioned digression: how much he loved looking through the windows of other people’s houses as a child; the importance of getting the design of toilets right; how a lift button feels; how councils spend too much energy
on basketball and skateboarding areas, supposedly to occupy teenage boys, and never spare a moment to think about girls’ need for public spaces; and how the internet has hollowed out the high street.
None of this directly touches on his book, Humanise, which is what we are meant to be talking about. We are still out on the damp street, watched by shabby pigeons and a curious traffic warden. An assistant steps over to remind Heatherwick of the time (the first of several anxious time checks) and encourages us to use a room upstairs.
Humanise is a passionate call to arms, urging readers to get enraged about the global “blandemic” of boring buildings. “Intense and dreadful changes have been creeping through our towns and cities for the last 100 years, bringing with them destruction, misery, alienation, sickness and violence,” he writes. The outsides of buildings around the world have become “boring”. He admits this is a “rubbish-sounding” word that “doesn’t do justice to the harm it describes”, but settles with it as the best way of evoking a “century-long global catastrophe”.
His point is illustrated with pages of bleakly forgettable urban scenes from Argentina to Moscow, counterpoised by buildings he loves: Casa Milà, Gaudí’s exuberantly curved apartment block in Barcelona; the Pantheon in Rome.
He argues that boring buildings cause mental health problems and aggravate conflict, citing research from Homs in Syria that suggests inhumane architecture separated Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Christians into different anonymous housing blocks where they no longer felt any shared identity.
These buildings also contribute to the climate emergency, mostly because unloved developments are often torn down quickly and replaced by “newer but no less boring buildings”, emitting a great deal of carbon in the process. He is troubled that the average lifespan of a modern building is 40 years and calls for the construction of 1,000-year buildings.
To offset the “plague of boringness” outside, Heatherwick has worked hard to introduce joy into his own office. He points out the unusual hand-carved wooden doorbell and intercom system that a colleague has made for the new studio. He demonstrates the postureenhancing features of a granite bench he made as a student, happily perching and standing up several times in rapid succession. Heatherwick, 53, studied design, not architecture, and is fiercely critical of a process by which he believes architecture students are indoctrinated into the cult of modernism, given an education that encourages “not creativity but blind conformity” and taught to become “boring worshippers”.
His book quickly introduces its villain. An evil-looking photograph of Le Corbusier smoking a pipe is captioned: “Meet the god of boring.” Heatherwick blames him for making a generation of designers “see beauty in the mind-numbingly boring”.
He classifies boring buildings as too flat, shiny, plain, straight, monotonous and anonymous. “We need to rebel against the Turkey Twizzlerfication of our streets” and make buildings that “nourish our senses”, he writes. Just as we have understood the dangers of fast food and fast fashion, he wants us to wake up to the risks of unhealthy architecture.
It’s a fun read – and deliberately provocative. When pressed, Heatherwick concedes that he admires some Le Corbusier buildings. It’s the wave of mediocre modernism that followed that depresses him – forests of uniform steel and glass towers that can be found almost everywhere.
“Chairman Mao burned the books and destroyed the temples – it was a one-man-led stripping away of culture – whereas we’ve had a voluntary Cultural Revolution where we’ve stripped buildings of human details,” he says. This revolution has been driven by costcutting disguised as good taste. “It’s a toxic combination – it’s cheaper, but we tell ourselves we’re being more sophisticated.”
Heatherwick thinks we have become so desensitised to what is happening around us that we barely register the mushrooming of new developments. He wants architecture critics to spend more time writing about 99% of buildings – new-build tower blocks in regional towns and the sprawling estates on their outskirts – and not the exceptional 1% of flagship buildings in capital cities where the designers “have tried especially hard”. (“Don’t misunderstand this as a criticism of the Louvre pyramid in Paris, or the Gherkin or the Walkie Talkie buildings in London.”)
His thesis is reminiscent of King Charles’s call in 1987 to resist the “creeping cancer” of modernism that was making buildings “from Riyadh to Rangoon” look the same. Heatherwick is politely unperturbed by the comparison and patiently sets out how his position is different. “The solution that was proposed at that time appeared to be: ‘Just go back to the past,’” he says. “I don’t believe that we need to copy Georgian architecture. I have no bias as to whether something is curved, square, historic or whatever. I believe this mustn’t be a taste conversation.”
He is nervous about how his ideas will be received. Some of his own projects have had a much shorter lifespan than the 1,000 years he recommends (his honeycomb sculpture in New York, the Vessel, has been shut for several years after a number of suicides). “I’ve never gone against the whole industry before. It would be much easier to keep doing projects and keep your head down,” he says.
No one is going to disagree with his call for better buildings. But is it more humanity we need most urgently, or better building standards and regulations to ensure that mould doesn’t poison residents and fire doesn’t endanger their lives? Should we really be blaming brainwashed architects? Isn’t a better target the shrinking of government funding for highquality public works? And doesn’t Heatherwick’s firm also have a responsibility to get involved in pushing up standards of public buildings in the UK, rather than focusing on luxury apartment blocks in Singapore or mammoth retail parks in China?
Heatherwick is happy to engage with all of this; he wants a debate. “We know we’re in a time of crisis and resources are limited,” he says, but politicians are wrong to think “let’s just solve the whole crisis first and then joyfulness can come later. We have to be joyfully solving things as we go and not putting that off for later.”
As for his responsibility to turn away from Google, luxury brands and expensive apartment blocks, he says: “We’d love to. We’d forfeit our fees. We would absolutely love to be building schools, hospitals.”
Getting such commissions has been harder in a time of austerity and shrunken local authority budgets; he laments the retreat of local authorities from commissioning buildings directly. “It’s sad that the confidence went out of governments to create places themselves. We’ve seen that all over the world: the retreat of local authorities and governments left a void, so then commercial developers stepped in.”
Has he been talking to Michael Gove at the levelling up department about his campaign? Heatherwick is well connected to the Conservative party: he was commissioned by Boris Johnson to develop the new Routemaster buses and the ill-fated garden bridge in London. For the first time in our conversation, there is a long pause; he stumbles, looks embarrassed. “I want to reach out to everyone before speaking to one flavour of government or another,” he says. “It needs to be a national conversation, not tainted by party politics.”
He pauses again, then acknowledges that he has been talking to the mayor of London, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, who has read his book. “We’ve had very exciting conversations with people from Labour. There’s a sense of a change coming. There’s a wariness of something getting stuck in party politics and not being adopted because it’s seen as somebody else’s project.” Is he reluctant to talk to Gove because he senses that the Conservative government is on the way out? “I think …” He stops for a long while, fidgeting in his chair. “I don’t know what to say.”
Alongside his book, Heatherwick has launched a 10-year humanising campaign. He is inviting people to send in pictures of the most boring buildings in their neighbourhood, for analysis by his colleagues who have developed a “boringometer” – a software tool that measures the visual complexity of a building’s design from the perspective of the passerby. (I ask to see it working, but the person who can explain it isn’t available.) His ideas are still pouring out when another assistant comes in to make wrist-tapping gestures. He wants to harness gaming technology to gauge people’s responses to buildings – to track frowns, muscles flinching in distaste, eyes dilating in wonder. He wants to work with scientists to study how bad buildings make people ill. Mostly, though, he wants people to get angry.
“Humans are roughly the same size as we were half a million years ago, but buildings have got bigger. Modern procurement means you can get bigger pieces of glass, bigger pieces of aluminium. Buildings no longer have a human scale,” he says.
His book is dedicated to the passerby, so it feels reasonable to point out that, as a regular passerby, I am dismayed by the colossal Google site in King’s Cross, which he has designed with the architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group. I am made to feel ant-like as I walk to work beneath cranes swinging huge plates of glass into place. From my desk, I have watched the block rise over the past five years, eating up the daylight and overpowering the delicate spires of St Pancras. Heatherwick also designed part of Coal Drops Yard, a much smaller redevelopment of Victorian industrial sheds across the road, but the Google building is on a different scale. Described as a landscraper because it runs to 330 metres (about as long as the Shard is tall), it will accommodate 4,000 Google employees.
“Suspend judgment until it’s finished. There’s no question that it’s on an unhuman scale,” he says. It’s a site that would have had 30 buildings on it in medieval times and perhaps three buildings in a modern development, he says, so he has worked to add humanity by raising the building on stilts by two levels. There will be a village of wooden structures beneath that will contain “radical community projects”. “At the moment, you can’t see the bit I’m most excited about. I think you’ll find it is radically human at ground level,” he says.
Later, I try looking through a crack in the hoardings and standing on a nearby bench to get a sense of how this might work (there are no viewing windows), but for the moment there isn’t much to see except pallets of cement, brick walls and workers in hi-vis vests.
Heatherwick is cheerfully optimistic that his views about junk architecture will prevail. When he was a child in the 1970s, his mother embarrassed him by pushing vegan food on his friends when they came over; he is no longer mortified by her cooking. “The world isn’t fixed – it has shifted. What people thought was ridiculous has become mainstream. We understand nutritional value now. I’m just saying, let’s apply the same ideas we’ve brought to diet to the physical environment around us.”
He is so confident of his position that he is certain even Le Corbusier, who died in 1965, would agree with him. “He didn’t live long enough to really see what his legacy was. What he advocated, when adopted at scale, was terrible – really, disastrously bad across the world. Really smart people change their angle as they go. I would like to think that he would say: ‘I was wrong, actually.’”
It’s sad that the confidence went out of governments to create places themselves. We’ve seen that all over the world