Designer Thomas Heatherwick believes that the construction industry is in crisis. “We just got used to boring buildings,” says the creator of London’s revival Route manager bus, Google view of the bayand Up-to-date York Little Island. “Time and time again, new buildings are too flat, too simple, too simple, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous, too serious. What happened?” While these features can often be aesthetic in themselves, Heatherwick notes that it is their constant combination in the aesthetics of modern buildings and urban spaces that makes them oppressively boring.
He adds that this boredom is not just a nuisance – it can even be harmful. “Boredom is worse than nothing,” writes Heatherwick in her latest book: Humanize. “Boredom is a state of mental deprivation. Just as the body will suffer when it is deprived of food, the brain begins to suffer when it is deprived of sensory information. Boredom is the hunger of the mind.”
It’s not just a matter of opinion. For example, Heatherwick cites research by Colin Ellard, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo who studies the neurological and psychological impacts of the built environment. In his experimentsEllard showed that people’s moods significantly influence the surroundings of tall buildings. In one experiment, he collected data from wearable sensors that tracked skin conductance responses, a measure of emotional arousal. Heatherwick says that when people walk past a boring building, “their bodies literally go into fight or flight mode. They have nothing to connect with.
The brain, says Heatherwick, craves complexity and fascination. “There’s a reason why when you look at a forest, the complexity and rhythms of nature bring us back to attention,” he says. “We need it in buildings. Less is not more.” This is confirmed by research by psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in the 1980s Attention restoration theorywhich found that people’s concentration improves when they spend time in a natural environment.
“We weren’t paying attention to the nutritional value of the buildings around us to society,” says Heatherwick. For example, he believes that architects now prefer to prioritize the interior spaces of a building, neglecting what the building looks like from the outside. This is an error. “Buildings are the backdrop to the life of society,” he says. “A thousand times more people will pass by this building than will ever enter it. The outside of the building will impact them and influence how they feel.” Ultimately, to humanize our urban spaces, architects must think about the people who inhabit them. Heatherwick recalls a debate a few years ago among the construction industry’s elite about whether public opinion mattered. “We debated all night and then they voted no. It was unbelievable.”
This short-term thinking leads to what Heatherwick calls the construction industry’s “muddy secret”: its disastrous impact on the environment. Let’s just consider that in the USA Every year, 1 billion square meters of buildings are demolished“It’s half of Washington destroyed and then rebuilt with the same tedious buildings,” he says. In the UK, 50,000 buildings are demolished every year, with the average age of a commercial building being approximately 40 years. “If I were a commercial building, I would have been killed 14 years ago,” he says. “Building a tower in London, which is not that big by world standards, would require emissions equivalent to 92,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.” As a result, estimates indicate that the construction industry currently emits five times more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than aviation.
“We can’t have buildings that only stand here for 40 years. We need millennial thinking,” he says. “The world of construction teaches that form follows function, less is more, and decoration is a crime. It is powerful, and when you learn, it goes into your brain and brainwashes you.” However, Heatherwick reminds us that emotion is a function that should be celebrated in the construction world.
The article was published in the July-August 2024 issue WIRED Magazine UK.