“We're living through a global 'blandemic' in building design - an age of boring”, says Thomas Heatherwick, who wants emotion to return to architecture

Thomas Heatherwick in front of his studios, from Building

Star architect and engineer Thomas Heatherwick has raised a proper aesthetical-ethical stramash, in his new series for BBC Radio Four, Building Soul - particularly in the episode “The Cult of Modernist Architecture”, where he tears into the unemotional legacy of great modernists like LeCorbusier. The blurb is below:

Why and when did our buildings become so boring? Anyone exploring the streets of our oldest cities can see this wasn’t always the case.

Thomas Heatherwick argues that a cult of Modernism took hold of the architectural establishment in the 20th century, with an obsessive focus on form follows function at the expense of visual complexity and delight. Is one man, known as Le Corbusier, really responsible for creating our age of boring buildings?

Thomas challenges the architectural establishment to stop slavishly following Le Corbusier’s vision long after it ran out of steam. Thomas also argues that the legacy of modernism conveniently suits developers whose primary concern is the maximisation of short-term profits, at a huge cost to the environment as well as to our civic identity and personal wellbeing.

And here’s some Heatherwick quotes from the show:

I think we're living through a global 'blandemic' in building design. This age of boring has resulted in soulless, inhuman urban environments.

Why do the modern buildings that have colonised our towns and cities look so dull? And why can't the whole industry of people who make them see this?

There's one man who worked alongside Walter Gropius, who more than any other is responsible for the global 'blandemic' we see today – a man who came to be synonymous with the austere modernist styles that spread to all our towns and cities

Corbusier is such a paradox. Some of his buildings are the most amazing buildings I've ever seen. Buildings with curves, and amazing details and fascination. And yet what he wrote advocated mass boredom, and it was his writings more than his buildings that were so influential.

When I was a child, I had no bias over a modernist building or Georgian building or Victorian building, To me, I was seeing them all fresh.

And I could tell the modern movement went to another level. It invented buildings that were devoid of virtually all visual complexity. It celebrated the removal of the part that created the emotion.

For a contrary view, see Rowan Moore in the Guardian, reviewing Heatherwick’s new (and accompanying) book Humanise:

Heatherwick tends to see buildings as singular objects, like pieces of jewellery, to be judged by the amount of stimulation that their surfaces offer. He underplays such things as the interaction of the look of a building with use, structure, climate and culture, the relationships of exterior to interior and of one building to another.

He does not have much to say about the value of simplicity, the occasions when you want a building to be plain, so as not to distract from nature or the human life around, or other more spectacular structures. The generally admired terraces of Georgian cities would score badly on his “boring-o-meter”, an online tool that measures how “flat, plain, straight or monotonous” a building is.

Another view from Stephen Bayley in the Spectator:

There are some excellent points made in the book. Item: most modern buildings do not work at street level because architects present clients with three-dimensional models or CGI presentations emphasising the view from above. Item: every designer and contractor involved with any building should be explicitly and permanently identified on the structure. Item: architecture critics are an ultramontane priesthood in thrall to celebrity and rarely acknowledge human need. 

But there is a lot of tosh as well. How does Heatherwick know that ‘the great majority of everyday buildings were once interesting’?  He is a victim of survival bias: only the best buildings of the past remain. It is very good to have Salisbury Cathedral; but it is also very good that the mud-floored, unheated, unventilated foetid slums surrounding it have gone the way of all wattle and daub.

A final response from Heatherwick, in Building magazine, with his “humanise” architectural doctrine:

“A building should be able to hold your attention for the time it takes to pass by it”.

This is the mantra which Heatherwick uses to sum up his philosophy, something that he says is being “failed today by building designers around the world”.

“I have no interest in telling people precisely how buildings should look and, even if I did, nobody would listen,” he says, arguing that a building just needs to have enough “interestingness” to engage people who experience them.

He sets out three viewpoints of a building where this test should be passed: city, street and door.

From 40m, a passer-by should be able to appreciate the overall form of a building. “When we experience a building in this way, it’s like looking at a whole object – like a sculpture or a piece of jewellery… and that distant building has the power to make us feel something.”

From 20m away, a viewer is unlikely to be able to take in the whole building, but should be able to get a better impression of its “texture and personality… There should be enough visual interest to trigger your curiosity and make you want to look again.”

It is at a distance of 2m where a building’s materials, details and craftsmanship should “really impact you”, says Heatherwick. “A properly complex object is one that rewards your attention. The more you look at it, the more it reveals itself to you in layers of patterns.”

Two examples of buildings he says pass these three tests are the Parkroyal Collection hotel in Singapore, designed by WOHA, and the Edgewood Mews social housing estate in north London by Peter Barber Architects.