The rise of boring architecture and the case for radically human buildings

Where did all the lumps and bumps on buildings go? When did city architecture become so … dull? Here to talk about why cities need inspiring architecture, designer Thomas Heatherwick offers a path out of the doldrums of urban monotony and a vision of cities filled with soulful buildings that people cherish for centuries.

“meh” buildings

When was the last time you walked down the street in a city with new buildings? I want to talk to you about the problem that we all know exists in our towns and cities. We’re increasingly surrounded by characterless buildings. I believe we’re living through an epidemic of boringness.

With a few exceptions, we all know that new buildings will be dead and monotonous. Everywhere is the same. Dull, flat, straight, shiny. Inhuman. They’re what my daughter calls “meh” buildings. These buildings justify themselves as being functional. I’m a designer of buildings, and I’ve been told so many times that form should follow function. Meaning if I work out mechanically how a building goes together well, the outcome will somehow inevitably look good. This mantra, form follows function, is a century old. And it sounds good, doesn’t it? Who can argue with that? Surely any extra detail is just silly, unnecessary decoration.

I want to talk about the function that’s crucial that I believe is missing. The function of emotion. And when I say emotion, I mean the ability of buildings to mean something to us. To lift our spirits, to connect us. Buildings affect us. We walk around them, we look up at them. And for most of us, for the vast majority of the time, they just leave us feeling indifferent.

So if I took all of us to a city and said, “Which bit would you like to go to? Would you like to go to the old bit or the new bit?” You’ve given me my answer already. We all know instinctively, the majority are going to pick the old bit. Why? Because we all know the new bit will be characterless and boring.

So where did all the lumps and bumps on buildings go?

The shadows, the textures, the three-dimensionality, the high points of light. How did it all become so two dimensional, so simplistic and devoid of character? Well, it turns out, I’m not the only one who’s alarmed by what’s happening in our towns and cities. There’s research showing that these buildings aren’t just simplistic and monotonous. They’re harming us. They’re bad for our mental health, causing stress in our brains as we walk around them. They’re bad for our physical health, making us take longer to recover from illness inside them. And they’re also bad for societal health, increasing the likelihood of crime and anti-social behavior.

But this gets most sinister when we step back and think about the climate crisis unfolding around us. Immense emphasis has been placed on the impact of cars and aviation. And in this 2019 study, aviation was responsible for 2.1 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. But the crazy elephant in the room is that the construction industry as a whole is responsible for a whopping 38 percent. 

If I had been born as a commercial building, I would have been killed 12 years ago

And in America every year, a billion square foot of buildings are destroyed and rebuilt. That’s the equivalent of half of Washington, DC being deconstructed just to be reconstructed. And this isn’t just in the US. This is global. In the UK, we demolish 50,000 buildings a year. The average age of a commercial building in the UK is 40 years. So that means if I had been born as a commercial building, I would have been killed 12 years ago.

It’s quite straightforward. When people don’t love – and I’m using the word love – love buildings, they’re more likely to demolish them. I feel those two dots haven’t been connected together. But when you make a building, one of the most expensive things you can possibly do, there are understandably huge pressures of cost of time, of politics and egos and regulations and the status quo. These forces of soullessness are immense. And change is scary for everybody, myself included. But I’m convinced that emotion is the crucial function that’s been forgotten.

There are, however, a tiny handful of people who do understand

In France, Sou Fujimoto has designed this amazingly textured apartment building. In Burkina Faso, Francis Kéré has made this soulful health center. In Lebanon, Lina Ghotmeh Architecture has been using splendidly thick walls to make characterful housing. And in the UK, ACME Studio have been bringing personality and detail to city center buildings.

I thought I’d now show you a few examples of ways my own studio has been trying to address this too. In Cape Town, there was a huge century-old disused grain silo that was once used for storing maize from throughout South Africa that was at significant risk of being demolished. We proposed to not knock it down, but instead turned it into Africa’s first major institution for contemporary African artists. We took one of the original grain. You might get disappointed now.

We took one of the original grains of corn that had been stored in the original building. And we cut it out of the heart of that building. And around that put 80 galleries. And most of our work was about restoring and reinvigorating a historical structure. But central part of our vision was using our limited budget to create the most compelling heart possible with those gigantic tubes.

And the key thing was how we could make people not just stand at the outside and admire a structure, but how we could pull them into the inside where curiosity would then do the rest of the work. And you enter under the grain hoppers where the grain used to drop onto the conveyor belts. And we loved that by cutting through the original, historic, extraordinary structure, we could expose and share the building’s idiosyncrasies. And like these nooks and crannies, they help to give the project its soulfulness. And on the top is a sculpture garden with a glass floor. And if you see those babies on the glass just there, this is their view. The finished museum is raw, it’s rough, but it’s true. And it was an honor to bring this historic structure back into life.

New kind of tropical architecture

In Singapore, we searched for solutions for why would people be excited to learn in universities anymore? In this new digital era where you can do virtually everything online, and you can even get a PhD lying in bed, I’ve heard, why do we need university buildings anymore? Well, we believe they’re where you come together to have ideas, to meet your future business partner or the person you’re going to set up a not-for-profit with. Yet this has been the typical experience. Polystyrene ceiling tiles, no natural daylight, the least inspiring place to meet people. So to counter that, we made a corridor-less university building where the students can all see each other. 

A building which has no front and has no back. And it’s not one building, it’s actually 12 buildings. Our goal was to invent a new kind of tropical architecture that used the minimum possible energy, where you learn in corner-less classrooms. Where those professors and teachers work with you rather than dictating to you. Where people can be inspired by learning but encouraged to linger. And it’s open 24 hours. And when I was last in Singapore, I had jet lag and it was two o’clock in the morning. And so I went along and there were students there just quietly working and connecting.

In Yorkshire, in the UK, we had the chance to humanize a treatment building at one of the UK’s largest cancer hospitals. So when you think of the worst building environments you’ve ever been to, surely hospitals are at the top of that list. They’re some of the most stress and fear-inducing places you can possibly be in. So we set ourselves the mission to make a non-clinical building where you could feel vulnerable. And cry and feel protected and come together as a community. 

But our site was on the last bit of greenery at the hospital. And we didn’t want to be the ones who dropped a big box and wiped out all that greenery. So we wondered instead, could we amplify the greenery that we knew could help with healing? So just like those dinosaur models made from plywood that slot together, we slotted together giant plywood to make three structures to hold up three major gardens and make a garden building. This building has 17,000 plants, 23,000 bulbs, and actually a 436 percent biodiversity increase on that site.

Our goal was to really make somewhere where people could come together and where by focusing on the emotion of the users to really try to make an architecture of hope.

The challenge of bigness

Finally, in Shanghai, we had the chance that’s typical of our time. The challenge of bigness. To make a three and a half million square-foot site, a building project on a site that was 480 meters long. Where typically this is what would be built. The site was so big that the Empire State Building could fit on it lying sideways. So to make this cost efficient, structurally effective, we needed 1,000 columns on a grid, so we decided to not just decorate boxes, but to let the columns be our heroes and to connect with the park to one side and the art district on the other side and try to bring them together into one. The finished project is called “A Thousand Trees.”

Every one of those columns has a Chinese mountain tree, semi-mature mountain tree on top. And nourishment and drainage and lighting and moisture, and because every column is the best place to put a heavy load. And it has hundreds of outdoor terraces and it has shading and it has, we hope, the necessary complexity to create the human engagement in a project at such a scale. We also worked with local artists to embed their work into our vision, to really make a collaborative project together. And that carries through all the way to the inside. And this project opened at the end of last year, the first half of it. And we have 100,000 people going to it every day. And it wasn’t just about trees and plants, but even structural columns were our friends to humanize the project at such a scale.

So I’m not saying that there’s any one language or approach to deal with this epidemic of boring. Just like in nature, we’ve learned the vast importance of biodiversity, we now desperately need architectural diversity.

My goal is to try to help trigger a global humanizing movement that no longer tolerates soulless, inhuman places. What if our buildings inspired us to want to adapt and adjust and repair them? We can’t keep knocking down the buildings around us all the time. Let’s stop building 40-year buildings, and let’s build a 1,000-year buildings. Please join me.