‘Dangerously misguided’: the glaring problem with Thomas Heatherwick’s architectural dreamworld
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 “boringo-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 rosetinted 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-turnedpublic 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”).
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.
His blinkered campaign has the potential to be highly influential