Tackling the “Blandemic” in the Built Environment – Thomas Heatherwick Book Launch

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20 October 2023 | Updated 25 October 2023

ThisWeekinFM attended the much-anticipated launch of designer Thomas Heatherwick’s latest book, a manifesto on creating buildings that uplift and bring humanity to our towns and cities.

 

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As part of The Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival, Thomas Heatherwick, the renowned designer behind the 2012 Olympic Cauldron and Coal Drops Yard in Kings Cross, was in conversation with author, presenter and former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Ekow Eshun.

The book, “Humanise”, is an argument to rid the built environment of the uniform, the boring and the predictable, not just for our pleasure but for our health too. In Thomas’s words, the book is “a story about humanity told through the lens of our buildings.”

 

Picture: a photograph of Ekow and Thomas seated on stage at The Queen Elizabeth Hall.

 

What are “Boring Buildings”?

 

Speaking at The Queen Elizabeth Hall on Thursday 19 October, Thomas somewhat apologetically explains his defence of the word boring in the book:

“It seemed important to find a word that wasn’t a ‘beauty word’ Because we fall down rabbit holes when we start to talk about the word beautiful. It seems to have a political affiliation and provoke a conversation that it’s subjective.” However, Thomas believes that when it comes to boringness, things are more objective than we might have once thought. 

“When we actually spoke to neuroscientists, the qualities of ‘boring’ are not that subjective. Science can tell us which buildings are objectively boring when we look at what happens to people who are in proximity to them.”

He defines the anatomy of “boring”, as a building designer, as buildings that are:

 

1. Too flat.
2. Too plain. 
3. Too straight. 
4. Too shiny. 
5. Too monotonous. 
6. Too anonymous. 
7. Too serious.

 

Speaking about shininess, he notes that between 100 million and one billion birds are killed every year by flying into shiny glass buildings, emphasising the built environment’s negative effect on the natural world as well as the human.

Presenting the audience with slides of typical buildings and cityscapes throughout the world, Thomas asks: “Who would be sad if that building was demolished? Would the person who designed these actually want to live in them? If we asked children to draw their dream city - how many children would draw that?” He calls this onslaught "The Blandemic". 

 

"Boring Buildings Are Not Just Dull, but a Serious Health Hazard"

 

Referring to sections of the book where he looks at scientific evidence that boring buildings cause our health to suffer, he says that neuroscience has proved that human bodies go into a “state of stress” when around them. 

He also talks about Marwa al-Sabouni, an architect from Syria who theorises that the buildings erected in the last 80 years in the country have contributed to cultural division.

As an alternative, Thomas suggests the mantra: “A building should be able to hold your attention for the time it takes to pass by it, and urges designers and planners to consider the following:

1. Emotion as a function. Accept that how people feel about a building is a critical part
2. 1,000 year thinking. Design buildings with the hope and expectation that they will last 1,000 years
3. Prioritise door distance. Concentrate a building’s interesting qualities at the two-metre door distance.

 

“I believe we underestimate each other and certainly the construction industry has been thinking ‘oh the public don’t understand’. I don’t believe that. We all feel places and see places. Most people have spent their entire lives in buildings so we are all experts. The construction industry has been gatekeeping the conversation.`

–Thomas Heatherwick

 

Construction Industry’s Dirty Secret

 

Thomas rejects the idea that this is a conversation about “niceness” and it’s not a timely issue in our current time of crisis:

“I believe we underestimate each other and certainly the construction industry has been thinking ‘oh the public don’t understand’. I don’t believe that. We all feel places and see places. Most people have spent their entire lives in buildings so we are all experts. The construction industry has been gatekeeping the conversation.`

"There’s a national conversation about things like whether we should be eating sugar or whether we should fly to places. We’ve had nutritionally poor buildings for decades. The average age of a commercial building in the UK is 40 years. If I were a building I would have been killed 13 years ago.

"But this isn’t being discussed. In the USA they demolish one billion sq ft of buildings every year, to replace them with more buildings we don’t care about. It’s happened so slowly we’ve barely noticed.”

 

We Have the Green Premium – Now We Need a Human Premium

 

Thomas compares his desire for more meaningful buildings to the green agenda: “Buildings these days cannot be built without serious green credentials, so we just need to add this extra element. 

“We’ve got to design buildings that society will care about, and that’s broader society not just the person paying the bill on the inside, all of us. A human premium is just an extension of how we talk about green premium.”

Alongside the publication of Humanise, Thomas Heatherwick has launched a global campaign to confront the public health issues caused by boring buildings and inspire the public to demand better. Find out more at https://humanise.org/

Picture: a photograph of Thomas Heatherwick. Image Credit: Raquel Diniz

Article written by Ella Tansley | Published 20 October 2023

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