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.