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
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.
