Related Articles
Thomas Heatherwick is on a mission. The world’s architects and city planners need to be driven to stop filling cities with dull buildings, the designer and founder of Heatherwick Studio believes. The health of the planet—and its population—may be at stake.
If planners keep sanctioning buildings that nobody loves, then we run the risk of creating a glut of structures that in the not-too-distant future will be wastefully torn down, as there will be no one to advocate for them. But create buildings that spark joy, build attachment, and break the mold, and we could create structures that will be maintained for centuries.
Not only that, Heatherwick says people need to better understand the emotional connection they have with the buildings around them. “People know buildings affect them,” he says. But exactly how this can be harnessed to influence design for the good of society still isn’t clear. “We’re still at the very early days of understanding the science of how our feelings and our health relate to the buildings we see.”
Ahead of speaking at WIRED Health, Heatherwick sat down to explain his campaign to humanize architecture, how widespread changes to design principles might come about, and what the real benefits of good buildings are. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Why do we need more emotionally sympathetic architecture?
Thomas Heatherwick: There’s a problem all around us. Over the last 70 to 80 years, we’ve had an epidemic of characterlessness in newly built parts of cities. This isn’t about any one individual building; it’s about a prevailing characteristic that has defined itself as being functional.
Buildings need to mean something to people, or they won’t be sustained, they’ll be more likely to be demolished. And in our environmental crisis, the demolition industry is society’s giant dirty secret.
It’s certainly not something I’ve dwelled on. How big is this problem?
Commercial buildings in the UK have an average lifespan of 40 years. I’m told that in Seoul, South Korea, it’s 30 years for commercial buildings. In China, the average age of a residential building is 34 years; a commercial building 35 years.
There’s a lot of carbon involved in designing and making these buildings—all the materials, transporting them, and putting them together, let alone then demolishing an existing structure. Two-thirds of all waste in the UK is construction waste. The US demolishes a billion square feet of buildings a year. It’s a global problem.
The construction industry is responsible for roughly 10 percent of global emissions. We have to start saying to ourselves, every building must be designed to last centuries, not a little handful of decades. We are not responsible custodians for future generations unless we do that.
How can we stop this churn?
There’s an epidemic of buildings that aren’t cared for by society. The question is, how do we change that? Because nothing is sustainable unless a society cares about it.
I believe this epidemic of not caring is caused by a lack of visual complexity. How many boring glass buildings do you walk past where you peer in, and there’s just some kind of reception desk, some leather sofas? These buildings give nothing to passersby.
Changing this doesn’t have to be expensive—you don’t have to make every building the Sydney Opera House. Vision tends to focus on the first 30 to 40 feet upwards of any built environment. That’s where I believe we need to embed character back into building design.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuCultureConfessions of a Hinge Power UserBy Jason ParhamGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidSecurityWhat You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your PrivacyBy Kate O'Flaherty
We need to make the exterior parts of buildings that people focus on more interesting, so that people want to protect rather than replace them. But most people aren’t architects or city planners—they can’t change the designs of what’s being made.
Indeed, we have a public who feel utterly powerless, and a construction industry that talks to itself but not the public. That needs to change. We have public conversations about whether we should fly on holiday and use the carbon to go to Malaga or wherever, but there’s no national conversation about the buildings that surround us.
I spoke with the former chief medical officer of Great Britain, Dame Sally Davies, about hospitals and care homes in the UK. I asked her: Why are the health environments I’ve been in so bad? She said that there’s no one in charge; separate health trusts run the buildings. The only way you’ll make change, she said, is with “patient pull.”
When patients say: “Oh, you’re building a new cancer center, have you seen the one in Dundee? Have you seen the one in Leeds? It’s really good because they put plants in, it’s made from wood,” a half-decent leader will think: We should probably have a look there.
This made me realize there’s no equivalent to patient pull in architecture. So that’s the purpose of the Humanize campaign—to start this public conversation.
Making buildings more engaging, and so more long-lasting, has obvious environmental benefits. But does this benefit individual people directly?
We’ve done some polling. In the UK, we found that 76 percent of people we asked believe buildings affect their mental health. And yet building design is seen very much as an art—not something to do with health.
But buildings are different from art. With a piece of music you can take the headphones off. With a painting you can walk away to another gallery. Buildings are the backdrops to all of our lives.
So the Humanize movement we’ve started also focuses on the need to look at the impact of the outside of buildings with more scientific eyes. While people say buildings affect their mental health, there’s virtually no analysis of this, so the construction industry isn’t equipped with useful information that it can use to make better designs.
What evidence is there that changing the outsides of buildings really could improve people’s health?
We know that exposure to nature can de-stress you: This is the attention restoration theory, developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in the 1980s and '90s. And we know that visual exposure to greenery helps people recover quicker in hospital.
On the other side of it, a scientist called Colin Ellard has researched the impact of flat, straight, monotonous, plain, shiny buildings on groups of people. He’s found that levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, rise when we’re next to buildings that are straight, smooth, and serious compared to buildings that have texture, shadow, and difference.
And in my experience, often the places people really love have dirty lines, surprises, and unexpected things. I think that science will start showing us more that our minds need to be nourished with interestingness, emotion.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuCultureConfessions of a Hinge Power UserBy Jason ParhamGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidSecurityWhat You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your PrivacyBy Kate O'Flaherty
But there is zero hard research about this for design students to respond to. We’re still at the very early days of understanding the science around how our feelings and our health are related to the buildings we see.
It feels like for a long time we’ve taken for granted—and haven’t interrogated—the potential impact of the structures we see around us.
Cities and towns are so important. The digital revolution we thought would bring us all closer has in certain ways made people further apart. Covid has really shifted society, accelerating things to the point where you can stay at home. Algorithms divide us and create echo chambers.
We need togetherness more than ever. People can speak incredibly poisonously to each other online, but if you put them in a room together, more civility, empathy, and understanding of others’ backgrounds or perspectives often breaks out. And so physical meeting spaces, the streets and squares of our cities and towns, are really needed for the health of society. Buildings are the walls of those public rooms.
I know I sound romantic when I say that, but I really believe it. Society has to be designed so people respect each other and bring each other together, and those buildings are part of the kit.
Hear Thomas Heatherwick speak at the 10th anniversary of WIRED Health on March 19 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at health.wired.com.
