The Attention of Passersby
Image by Raquel Diniz.
Thomas Heatherwick is angry. And he wants everyone to share his fury.
The designer turned maker-of-buildings is enraged by the “intense and dreadful changes that have been creeping through our towns and cities for the last 100 years, bringing with them destruction, misery, alienation, sickness and violence.” He has launched Humanise, a campaign rallying against “boring” buildings everywhere. Humanise was kicked-off with a book of the same name, plus a string of media appearances, a website, and the three-part BBC Radio 4 series, Building Soul. There has even been a flypostering effort, adorned with a logo by creative branding agency Uncommon.
Heatherwick has steadily grown in British public consciousness. I first encountered him in the late 2000s in the form of B of the Bang: a 56m-tall steel sculpture in Manchester that resembled an enormous spiky Koosh. It was commissioned to mark the city hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games – in 2003. Construction ran over. It leaned at a greater angle than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Under a week before its eventual launch in 2005, the tip of a spike fell off. A second spike had to be removed a few months later. Weld defects were discovered. Manchester City Council took legal action to force Heatherwick Studio to pay for repairs, and settled for £1.7m for “damages for breach of contract and negligence.” In 2009 it was dismantled. The core was later sold for scrap, netting £17,000.
I knew none of this at the time. Despite the health and safety barriers blocking it off lest a steel shard slip off and impale a member of the public, it was big and bold, like nothing else I’d seen. Heatherwick was at the time a designer on the make, though it was always uncertain what he was a designer of. His start came after captivating Terence Conran following a lecture at the RCA. Conran let Heatherwick erect his graduation project in his garden, a sculpture called Gazebo, and commissioned him to make an interior display for his shop. He then made window displays at Harvey Nichols for retail consultant and TV presenter Mary Portas. He soon started winning public space commissions. The first were Newcastle’s Blue Carpet (2001) and the Rolling Bridge at Paddington Basin (designed in 2002 and completed in 2004). Neither could be described as a resounding success.[1]
B of the Bang could have been the end, but it was just the beginning. As well as the sculptures and folly bridges, Heatherwick started to produce furniture, gardens, vehicles, interior schemes and buildings. Heatherwick Studio expanded to become a 200-employee design firm. He forged business relationships with Foster + Partners and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and with the latter co-designed several structures for Google. Heatherwick himself has become arguably Britain’s best-known designer, though members of the public might be hard-pressed to name what exactly he has made since the 2012 Olympic cauldron. He certainly has a discipline-hopping trophy cabinet: a London Design Medal, a RIBA Lubetkin Prize, a Compasso d’Oro, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, [2] and even a place on GQ’s Best Dressed list.
A building in Yarmouth, UK, featured in the Humanise Campaign’s Boring Building Index (Image by John Kees).
Throughout it all, he has built an image as what The Observer’s Tim Adams calls an “elfin prodigy”, a faux-naif savant in navy blue workwear, expressing gnomic pearls of wisdom about the power of making. Try this one, from his 2012 V&A retrospective: “Everything that we start is something that we don’t know what the outcome is going to be.” His press images resemble those of a techno producer promoting an ambient album, dreamy but pensive.
Yet as the honours and plaudits continue to mount and he further entrenches himself in the public eye, Heatherwick has become architecture’s whipping boy, especially among the confederation of practitioners, educators and writers who discuss architecture on social media. It is hard not to detect an element of envy in some of their attacks. He has a star power that perishingly few architects can rival. Celebrities and public figures are drawn to him: Joanna Lumley, Sadiq Khan, Alain de Botton. Then there is his tendency to attract hyperbole from those outside architectural practice. Conran once hailed him as “the Leonardo da Vinci of our times”.[3] An architect friend of mine once described a client repeatedly asking him if they could get Heatherwick on board an already-designed project, like a celebrity signature to lend the building value. His name – English, simultaneously toffish and craft-adjacent – rolls off the tongue.
“Architects often make mistakes, from car-melting skyscrapers to slippery bridges. But Heatherwick has made a remarkable number.”
There is more to it than this though. Architects often make mistakes, from car-melting skyscrapers to slippery bridges.[4] But Heatherwick has made a remarkable number.[5] There was the new London Routemaster bus, commissioned by then-mayor Boris Johnson, which was twice the price of a regular bus. These became painfully hot in warm weather and had inoperable windows.[6] There was the Garden Bridge, also supported by Johnson, a proposed private folly across the Thames that guzzled £46m from the public purse before being dumped. Heatherwick then struck out internationally. The high point was likely the award-winning museum Zeitz Mocaa Cape Town, though some critics have noted Heatherwick’s decision to demolish most of an existing power plant structure to then rebuild it anew as environmentally irresponsible. But then there was Vessel, a honeycomb of staircases in New York’s Hudson Yards luxury development, a privately- owned and managed enclave. When it opened in 2019 it appeared unfinished and poorly- made. The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote: “[it] is a 150-foot-high, $200 million, latticed, waste-basket-shaped stairway to nowhere, sheathed in a gaudy, copper-cladded steel.” Vessel is now closed indefinitely after four people, tragically, jumped off it. This had been anticipated when the design was unveiled in 2016. “As one climbs up Vessel,” wrote Audrey Wachs in The Architect’s Newspaper, “the railings stay just above waist height all the way up to the structure’s top, but when you build high, folks will jump.” No changes were made to the final design.
Like his erstwhile patron Johnson, Heatherwick seems to keep failing upwards. The rules do not seem to apply to him. And he seems happy to break them when necessary. Of the Garden Bridge, writer and educator Will Jennings tweeted: “He helped design the fixed procurement which was a sham & tricked other firms, then designed the model to run it through a charity to avoid scrutiny over costs and management.” And yet the praise, and the projects, keep coming. Architects are the Frank Grimes to his Homer Simpson. And, like Grimes, they have a point.
“Like his erstwhile patron Boris Johnson, Heatherwick seems to keep failing upwards. The rules do not seem to apply to him. And he seems happy to break them when necessary. ”
Yet on some occasions, the criticism directed towards Heatherwick does seem disproportionate. The Architectural Review, for example, described his Coal Drops Yard shopping centre as “choreographed confections of disingenuous ‘authentic’ experiences”. That still sounds more interesting than a Westfield. He has been relentlessly attacked for working with gentrifying developers such as Hudson Yards’s Stephen Ross. But few architectural firms of any size have clean hands, desperately hoovering up work where it shows up, whether that be for property magnates, tech giants or repressive governments. This is a systemic issue rather than a particular one, and an instance where Heatherwick’s prominence exposes him to more opprobrium than others.
It is in this context that Heatherwick has released Humanise into the world. It feels in part a reaction to his many critics. The book and podcast depict trained architects as both misguided rationalists and indoctrinated cult members who see the world through a warped perspective. Heatherwick himself is untrained, and refuses the title “architect” even as he designs buildings. He salutes the achievements of fellow builders Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson, who worked at a time before formal training. The book features a section taking architecture writers to task for not reacting to buildings in a “human” manner, though is quite vague on what that might involve. At a time when creative industries in the UK are underfunded and devalued by the government and media, this attack from within carries risks.
Heatherwick sees the work of Antoni Gaudí as an example of inspiring architecture (image courtesy of Dreamstime).
Heatherwick’s main argument is straightforward. Cities used to be rugged, variable, “full of interesting lumps and bumps”, human in scale. Barcelona, especially the tightly-packed medieval Gothic Quarter and Antoni Gaudí’s art nouveau apartment blocks, is his exemplar. But now, with some exceptions such as Ricardo Bofill and Peter Barber, architects have become obsessed with “horizontal repetitive monotony”. Modern buildings, he says, often commit seven deadly sins: they are too flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous and serious. The blame for this lies with “the God of Boring”, Le Corbusier, and his “Virgin Mary”, Mies van der Rohe.[7] Modernist plans for mass-built modern cities, he says, spread like spilled ink through the minds of architects and planners. Close to a century later, architects remain in hock to these outdated ideas. They create ugly buildings which depress us and contribute to “division, war and the climate crisis”. We must demand that they stop, and start creating exciting, fun, playful buildings that hold the attention of passersby.
The Humanise campaign has been mauled on X (formerly Twitter) and by specialist journalists.[8] Rowan Moore called Heatherwick’s arguments “head-numbingly, soul crushingly simplistic.” Stephen Bayley said it contains “a lot of tosh”. It is not that Heatherwick’s call for prettier buildings is controversial in itself. Indeed, it is the conventional one. Very few people wish Le Corbusier had replaced Le Marais, a dense historical neighbourhood in central Paris, with tower blocks. His attack on a theory- heavy architecture education, too, joins a long-gestating debate. And Heatherwick makes some sensible observations. We should only create buildings that last for a long time and can be adapted for changing functions, rather than being ripped down and replaced. The media should train their eyes more on “normal” everyday buildings, rather than large-scale banner projects.
“Boring is relative: the Victorian terraces that Londoners now covet were not so long ago seen as dreary.”
The trouble starts with how Heatherwick presents his argument. Humanise was written with ghost-writer Will Storr. It employs a colloquialism-laden patter that sometimes verges on patronising. The book rails against “archibollocks”, “the Blandemic” (too soon?), the “Turkey Twizzlerification of our streets, towns and cities” and “mononononononotomy” (Heatherwick’s version of this last one is significantly longer). It has a quirky design, awash with “hand-written” notes and the underlining of key points. Sometimes the typeface changes on the same page. It is copiously illustrated. The second chapter is a globe-trotting rogue’s gallery of ugly modern architecture. A picture of a Milanese street is captioned, “Would you go on a date outside these buildings?”
Heatherwick’s argument flounders on contact with reality. He has a selective reading of architectural history. He fixates on some exceptional buildings of the past, but does not consider the humdrum that makes up the majority of cities. Boring is relative: [9] the Victorian terraces that Londoners now covet were not so long ago seen as dreary.[10] He seems to pay little heed to how streetscapes, rather than individual buildings, shape our perception of a place. Pre-modernist streets can also be monotonous – visit London’s endless suburban labyrinthine – while some modern roads have irregularly shaped structures that together from a knobbly streetscape.
A building in London from the Boring Building Index (Image courtesy of Humanise Campaign).
There is a lot of partial evidence and inconsistencies. Heatherwick attacks concrete and glass architecture, then presents eight buildings in a style he does like without explanation as to how they succeed where others fail. A particularly berserk passage of Humanise juxtaposes lengthy excerpts from Jacques Derrida’s Memoires for Paul de Man and a text by Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Moonies, and asks us to see this as proof that architecture is a cult. He cites studies from many disciplines without interrogating them. One survey by neuroscientist Colin Ellard found that New Yorkers feel happier walking past a row of independent redbrick shops than a Whole Foods in a plain post-war building. But to what extent is their emotion shaped by what lies within?
Indeed, Heatherwick explicitly states that he thinks the exterior appearance of a building matters more than its interior. He seems to see buildings as oversized public sculptures whose main purpose is to distract passersby,[11] rather than structures for living in. This seems an odd blindspot for someone who wants to make architecture more “human”. Remarkably, however, although he mentions the environmental cost of modern buildings, he pays little heed to the likely environmental cost of his own project.[12] How much will making buildings look interesting cost the planet?
Another building in Yarmouth from the Boring Building Index (Image courtesy of Viridian Solar).
Perhaps all of these things can be forgiven if one sees the Humanise campaign as a work of polemic, aiming to rouse. If Heatherwick gets more people thinking about our built world, perhaps he has succeeded. Outside broadsheet critics and the industry-facing architecture press, reactions have been less rebarbative. “Ultimately”, writes Mary Richards in Grand Designs, “Humanise is a provocative and interesting read with a kernel of truth at its heart.”
The cardinal sin of Heatherwick’s campaign, however, is its myopia towards the contexts in which boring buildings are created. He portrays architects as actively embracing cheap, ugly buildings in order to satisfy their own perverse formalist itch; clients, whose functional needs and budgetary controls so often dictate the appearance of buildings are effectively let off the hook. It is an astonishingly naive vision for a man who runs an architectural studio. Perhaps all this can be explained by his visionary reputation and plutocratic client base: Heatherwick might have had a lighter ride of it than less famous makers, whose work is as much about compromise as it is creativity.
“He portrays architects as actively embracing cheap, ugly buildings in order to satisfy their own perverse formalist itch; clients, whose functional needs and budgetary controls so often dictate the appearance of buildings are effectively let off the hook.”
There is an economic illiteracy at the campaign’s heart. The world is richer than ever, claims Heatherwick, so why can we not build only exceptional buildings? There is no analysis of why this might be the case: where this wealth lies, who has the capacity to build, the regulatory environments which lead to particular sorts of things being built. “What happens,” he writes, “when we’re forced to work our entire careers in boring offices, boring factories, boring warehouses, boring hospitals and boring schools?” He never asks if the problem is with the jobs, not the facades of the buildings they are performed within.
Humanise contains relatively few references to Heatherwick’s own practice. And just as well, because a lot of it does not fit his own strictures. There are no bustling streets of misshapen buildings in his oeuvre. One of his Google projects with BIG, currently under construction in King’s Cross, is a so-called “landscaper” that looks startlingly like the 60s offices Heatherwick professes to despise. The Bay View Google campus in California is a slightly warped version of Stansted Airport, with flat plate-glass facades. And over in Tokyo, his Azabudai Hills redevelopment is reaching completion: more steel, more glass, more shopping, this time on the site of a specially demolished neighbourhood. Once again, it is one rule for Thomas, another for all other architects. Is it any wonder so many are so enraged by him?
[1] The Blue Carpet, an area paved with glass-and- resin slabs that curve up like a rug, lost its colour quickly and attracted metal thieves. The bridge, which was designed to curve up to let traffic pass, has been inoperable for several years. It also sits across a boat-free waterway.
[2] It was fittingly presented by Broadway director Julie Taymor, infamous for the disastrous musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which like Heatherwick’s Vessel, of which more soon, was closed due to safety concerns.
[3] Perhaps there is a comparison to be drawn. Due to humid conditions and the artist’s own experimental paint choices, Da Vinci’s Last Supper has deteriorated rapidly. Only 60 years after it was completed, Giorgio Vasari described it as a “muddle of blots”.
[4] Rafael Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street (“Walkie Talkie”) was nicknamed the “Walkie-Scorchie” after it reflected a beam of light six times brighter than the sun that then melted the bodywork on nearby cars. Santiago Calatrava’s glass-bottomed Ponte della Costituzione has now been clad in stone after almost daily falls.
[5] Even the widely-praised cauldron did not escape controversy. New York design studio Atopia claimed it was “identical” to a design it had presented to the London Olympic Committee. Atopia received an out of court settlement from the London Organising Committee of the Olympics.
[6] Heatherwick’s original design did contain openable windows, but they were removed from the final vehicle. The buses began to be phased out in 2017, only five years after being introduced into the Transport for London system.
[7] Both of whom also lacked formal training. Heatherwick also takes a hit out on Louis Sullivan for the dictum “Less is more”, despite Sullivan’s own architecture being laden with the sort of ornamentation Heatherwick elsewhere salutes.
[8] Heatherwick pre-empts this in Humanise with a section that takes critics to task for ignoring the “human” elements of buildings, a bold generalisation in a book full of them.
[9] He mentions a tool called the Boring-o-meter, which ranks how boring a building is based on its flatness. Many buildings that he praises, however, would not pass muster, such as Bath’s Royal Crescent.
[10] See, for instance, P.G. Wodehouse in 1933: “Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.”
[11] He would enlist other types of artists to create buildings. “Can you imagine what a Wes Anderson office block, a Björk parliament building, a George R.R. Martin hotel or a development of 800 affordable homes by Banksy would look like?”
[12] Or perhaps not so surprising. Last year he unveiled his sculpture Tree of Trees in London, which celebrated the importance of tree-planting by holding 350 saplings in an enormous metal structure. He also built 1,000 Trees, a shopping centre in Shanghai capped by ornamental trees. Writing in Dezeen, sustainability expert Philip Oldfield argued that “the embodied carbon of the concrete planters outweighs the environmental benefits of the trees they hold.”
Words Joe Lloyd
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #3. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.