Designer Thomas Heatherwick believes that the construction sector is in crisis. “We’re so used to buildings that are boring,” says the man behind the revived London building. Route Master bus, Google bay viewand New York small island. “New buildings, again and again, are too flat, too simple, too straight, too bright, too monotonous, too anonymous, too serious. What happened?” While those features may often be aesthetically appropriate on their own, Heatherwick points out that it is the relentless combination of them into the aesthetics of modern buildings and urban spaces that makes them overwhelmingly boring.
This boredom, he adds, is not just a nuisance: it can actually be harmful. “Boring is worse than nothing,” Heatherwick writes in her latest book, Humanize. “Boredom is a state of psychological deprivation. Just as the body suffers 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.”
This is not just a matter of opinion. Heatherwick cites, for example, the research of Colin Ellard, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo who studies the neurological and psychological impact of the built environment. In its experimentsEllard has shown that people’s mood was considerably affected when they were surrounded by tall buildings. In one experiment, she collected data from wearable sensors that tracked the skin’s conductance response, a measure of emotional arousal. When people walk past a boring building, Heatherwick says, “their bodies literally go into fight-or-flight mode. They have nothing to connect their mind to.”
The brain, Heatherwick maintains, craves complexity and fascination. “There’s a reason why, when you look at a forest, the complexity and rhythms of nature draw our attention back,” she says. “We need that in buildings. “Less is not more.” This is supported by the research of psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who in the 1980s developed Attention restoration theorywho postulated that people’s concentration improves when they spend time in natural environments.
“We haven’t paid attention to the nutritional value to society of the buildings around us,” says Heatherwick. He believes, for example, that architects now prefer to prioritize the internal spaces of a building, while neglecting the appearance of the building from the outside. This is a mistake. “Buildings are the backdrop to the life of society,” he says. “A thousand times more people will pass through this building than will ever enter it. “The exterior of that building will affect them and contribute to how they feel.” Ultimately, to humanize our urban spaces, architects must think about the people who inhabit them. Heatherwick remembers a debate among the construction industry’s elite a few years ago about whether public opinion mattered. “We debated all night and then they voted no. It was incredible.”
This short-term thinking is leading to what Heatherwick calls “the construction industry’s dirty secret”: its disastrous environmental impact. Consider, for example, that in the United States, One billion square feet of buildings are demolished each year. “That’s half of Washington, DC, destroyed, only to be rebuilt later with the same kind of boring buildings,” she says. In the United Kingdom, 50,000 buildings are demolished a year, with the average age of a commercial building being about 40 years. “If I were a commercial building, they would have killed me 14 years ago,” she says. “Building a tower in the City of London, which by world standards is not that big, requires the equivalent of 92,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.” As a result, estimates show that the construction industry now emits five times more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than aviation.
“We can’t have buildings that are only here for 40 years. We need millennial thinking,” she says. “The world of construction teaches you that form follows function, less is more, ornament is a crime. “It’s powerful, and when you’re studying, it goes into your brain and brainwashes you.” But Heatherwick reminds us that emotion is a function and should be celebrated in the world of construction.
This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of UK WIRED Magazine.
