Humanise campaign launched to stop the spread of boring buildings

In a bid to improve people’s mental health, Thomas Heatherwick has launched a 10 year global campaign to stop buildings from looking so dull. 

Recent studies have shown that being surrounded by boring buildings increase cortisol levels, which lead to higher stress levels. New research from Thinks Insight has found that three out of for people (76%) in the UK think that the way a building looks impacts their mental health.

However, designer Thomas Heatherwick, who was behind the creation of the 2012 Olympic cauldron, is calling to stop the spread of depressing architecture. He said: ‘We need to fearlessly demand interestingness. We need to rebel against the blandification of our streets, towns, and cities, and make buildings that nourish our senses. Human beings deserve human places.’  

On Thursday last week, Heatherwick launched a campaign and a book, both called Humanise, as a way to encourage the replacement of dull structures that spark no joy.

In the novel, Heatherwick praised interesting structures such as the John Lewis department store in Leeds and the Diamond at the University of Sheffield, as examples of how buildings can elicit pleasure.

Within the book, Heatherwick outlines what he regards as the seven characteristics of a boring building:

1. Too flat – the flatness and lack of depth found on modern buildings prevents surfaces that light and shadows can play on
2. Too plain – a lack of ornamentation leads to boring buildings. Even everyday buildings should incorporate intricate designs
3. Too straight – straight lines at scale create repetitive horizontality, at odds with nature, where nothing has straight lines or angles
4. Too shiny – smooth, flat materials like metal and glass become desensitising when used too densely, providing nothing for our senses to latch on to
5. Too monotonous – modern buildings that take the form of rectangles made up of smaller rectangles appear both monotonous at a distance and closer up
6. Too anonymous – buildings with no sense of personality or place. A far cry from buildings that used to tell a story and celebrate their surroundings
7. Too serious – buildings that are too intimidating, evoking negative emotions

In addition, Heathwick has also outlined that boring building designs are having detrimental effects on the environment. 11% of annual global carbon emissions come from construction and building materials: five times the entire aviation industry. Currently, in the UK, 50,000 buildings are knocked down per year, generating 126 million tonnes of waste. However, if structures were better to look at and improved people’s mental wellbeing this may not be the case.

Image: Patrick Tomasso

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