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Humanizing: A Maker’s Guide to Urban Design
Thomas Heatherwick
Simon & Schuster | $30.00
If we believe what Thomas Heatherwick says in his new book Humanizing: A Maker’s Guide to Urban DesignMost architects and design professionals are blinded by their pretentious and outdated ideologies from seeing how simple things really are. Contemporary architects hide behind incomprehensible jargon and “architectural language,” misleading the public in the name of art and engaging in arrogant and self-indulgent experiments. That is, except for one designer.
Heatherwick has been campaigning against boredom for several years. In 2022, he gave a TED Talk titled “The Rise of Boring Architecture—and the Case for Extremely Human Architecture,” in which he compared the tedium of modern architecture to past work (as well as his own) Compared. He denounced the “popularity of boredom” and juxtaposed images on the screen, asking viewers which one they preferred – an “old” pedestrian street in a shopping district of a small historic European town, or a “modern” street in a large city. Central business district lined with modern glass curtain walls.
Expanding on Heatherwick’s TED talk, the following points Humanize Here’s what it looks like: Somewhere along the way, architectural design stopped being people-centered. In contrast to a building like Gaudí’s La Pedrera, which Heatherwick sees as a formal influence—full of visual complexity, curves, textural interest, and variations in materials and decoration—that is designed today Buildings and places mostly look the same, a problem he describes as “boring”: “Buildings are too plain, too shiny, too nameless or too serious.”
If you spend time reading about architecture on social media platforms like X, this argument will sound familiar. You’ve seen many advocates of “traditional architecture” decrying some lost craft and juxtaposing photos of traditional buildings with modern ones. Various claims follow, which in turn may seem self-evident. Like TED talks, images rule these platforms, allowing account administrators to cynically exploit preconceived notions of beauty to make a point.
HumanizeNearly 500 pages of 14-point font and illustrations can be considered the culmination of this press conference and a clear attempt to capture this virality. In addition to the internet memes that the book seems to have most inspired, the work’s spiritual lineage also runs through that of Leon Creel, Christopher Alexander, and others. pattern language, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, and Alain de Botton’s YouTube channel The School of Life. Judging from these, Humanize Inheriting a populist simplicity – think aphorisms and doodles that make a point in a cartoon way. Maybe there’s a real audience for this kind of stuff compared to something more lengthy and theoretically rigorous.
exist Humanize, the blame lies mainly with modern architecture and its followers, primarily Le Corbusier. According to Heatherwick, the enduring popularity of his modern style was due to its low cost of construction. Over time, Le Corbusier’s straight lines and flat facades were adopted by developers who saw an opportunity to eschew expensive ornamentation and flourish creatively under the guise of modernist theory. Profit becomes more important than beauty.
Putting aside the inaccuracies in his retelling of architectural history, let us accept this premise for now. It is true that the client’s financial considerations are a major constraint for architects, but is boredom the worst consequence? Indeed, the high-end design market in which Heatherwick works is rife with developments for purely speculative investment, where novelty is valued. Heatherwick focuses too much on such more subjective qualities as housing affordability or adaptation to climate change (both issues here second only to boredom), only the health and social consequences of boredom he cites earlier in the book. It’s the negatives that really prove it. .
But his arguments rarely follow logically from the specious scientific evidence on which the book’s urgency rests. Heatherwick claims there are studies showing these new buildings are harming us, but references that work in a TED talk (where citations are optional) don’t stand up to scrutiny.
For example, Heatherwick claims that “a major British scientific study found that ‘people who are bored are more likely to die younger than those who are not bored.'” The following quote points to a paper titled ” “Boredom Proneness: Its Relationship to Mental and Physical Health Symptoms,” a study of how participants’ health is affected by it trend boredom, rather than whether their environment was boring (all participants were undergraduate students at a university in the southeastern United States). Further cited sources aimed at establishing a correlation between negative health effects and boredom essentially ignored all causes of boredom mentioned in the cited material, which appeared to have been gathered through keyword searches. Sources explicitly dealing with the topic of buildings or the built environment rely primarily on evidence of dubious scientific value, such as measuring skin conductance as a proxy for boredom.
But the problem with spending too much time on details is that it would be a mistake to deal with Heatherwick on his own terms.While flipping through the book, it is clear that the intended audience is not architects, planners, or construction professionals: the book is intended to be placed next to the museum gift shop wabi said For artists, designers, poets and philosophers, or have potential clients sit in Heatherwick Studio’s waiting room to take the call. It was an audition for a guest spot on Joe Rogan’s podcast and a cover letter for a major project in the well-capitalized oil state.
But that might not even happen because the book fails even as self-promotion. By the end, Heatherwick simply couldn’t bring himself to be a designer. Achieve a “you know it when you see it” approach to identifying non-boring architecture, and nearly every job at a company with at least some visibility qualifies. His criteria for boring architecture are too vague to be useful, and in the end it’s unclear what exactly he’s objecting to. His studio’s proprietary “Boringometer” is said to neutrally “evaluate a building’s facade, measuring different types of complexity” and assign it a score from 1 to 10. But due to the complete lack of evidence or methodology, it’s hard to believe it’s just a Mechanical Turk. At one point, while arguing for the necessity of non-architects such as himself, he speculated that if Wes Anderson designed an office tower, Björk a capitol, George R.R. Martin a hotel, or Bank What would it look like to design an affordable housing complex?
It all sounds telegraphed, and he’s clearly afraid of making any explicit statements to back up the bold claims at the heart of this book. The only architects he dared to criticize by name are long dead, and he mostly refers to his enemies in terms such as “cult of modern architecture” or “moderates.” After outlining his criteria for architectural blandness, he immediately points to examples where these flaws could be assets. “Boredom” is a useful word here because, while fraught with negative associations, it describes a subjective experience that’s flexible enough to mean anything that suits Heatherwick. Ultimately, his solution to the brutal efficiency of neoliberal design was a “human premium,” the rationale for his own company to charge five to ten percent for “human versions” of its proposed designs.
Heatherwick could not have believed what he said in this book. If he did, this forgetfulness should disqualify him from designing the large-scale projects for which he is famous. Heatherwick may be right to think that Rem Koolhaas or Patrick Schumacher’s model of architect knowledge is dead, but if that’s all he has to offer, his shameless pandering won’t replace it it.
Michael Nicholas is Edited at failed architecture.
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