The Rise of Boring Architecture -- and the Case for Radically Human Buildings
@Thomas Heatherwick
When was the last time you walked down the street in a city with new buildings? I
want to talk to you about the problem that we all know exists in our towns and
cities. We're increasingly surrounded by characterless buildings. I believe we're
living through an epidemic of boringness.
With a few exceptions, we all know that new buildings will be dead and
monotonous. Everywhere is the same. Dull, flat, straight, shiny. Inhuman. They're
what my daughter calls "meh" buildings. These buildings justify themselves as
being functional. I’m a designer of buildings, and I’ve been told so many
times that form should follow function, meaning if I work out mechanically how a
building goes together well, the outcome will somehow inevitably look good. This
mantra, form follows function, is a century old. And it sounds good, doesn't
it? Who can argue with that? Surely any extra detail is just silly, unnecessary
decoration.
I want to talk about the function that's crucial that I believe is missing. The
function of emotion. And when I say emotion, I mean the ability of buildings to
mean something to us. To lift our spirits, to connect us. Buildings affect us. We
walk around them, we look up at them. And for most of us, for the vast majority
of the time, they just leave us feeling indifferent.
So if I took all of us to a city and said, "Which bit would you like to go to? Would
you like to go to the old bit or the new bit?"
You've given me my answer already. We all know instinctively, the majority are
going to pick the old bit. Why? Because we all know the new bit will be
characterless and boring.
So where did all the lumps and bumps on buildings go? The shadows, the textures,
the three-dimensionality, the high points of light. How did it all become so two
dimensional, so simplistic and devoid of character? Well, it turns out, I'm not the
only one who's alarmed by what's happening in our towns and cities. There's
research
showing that
these
buildings
aren't
just
simplistic
and
monotonous. They're harming us. They're bad for our mental health, causing stress
in our brains as we walk around them. They're bad for our physical health, making
us take longer to recover from illness inside them. And they're also bad for
societal health, increasing the likelihood of crime and anti-social behavior.
But this gets most sinister when we step back and think about the climate crisis
unfolding around us. Immense emphasis has been placed on the impact of cars
and aviation. And in this 2019 study, aviation was responsible for 2.1 percent of
greenhouse gas emissions. But the crazy elephant in the room is that the
construction industry as a whole is responsible for a whopping 38 percent. And in
America every year, a billion square foot of buildings are destroyed and
rebuilt. That’s the equivalent of half of Washington, DC being deconstructed just
to be reconstructed. And this isn't just in the US. This is global. In the UK, we
demolish 50,000 buildings a year. The average age of a commercial building in
the UK is 40 years. So that means if I had been born as a commercial building, I
would have been killed 12 years ago.
It's quite straightforward. When people don't love -- and I'm using the word love
-- love buildings, they're more likely to demolish them. I feel those two dots
haven't been connected together. But when you make a building, one of the most
expensive things you can possibly do, there are understandably huge pressures of
cost of time, of politics and egos and regulations and the status quo. These forces
of soullessness are immense. And change is scary for everybody, myself
included. But I'm convinced that emotion is the crucial function that's been
forgotten.
There are, however, a tiny handful of people who do understand and are trying to
address this. Here's a few of them. In France, Sou Fujimoto has designed this
amazingly textured apartment building. In Burkina Faso, Francis Kéré has made
this soulful health center. In Lebanon, Lina Ghotmeh Architecture has been using
splendidly thick walls to make characterful housing. And in the UK, ACME
Studio have been bringing personality and detail to city center buildings.
I thought I'd now show you a few examples of ways my own studio has been
trying to address this too. In Cape Town, there was a huge century-old disused
grain silo that was once used for storing maize from throughout South Africa that
was at significant risk of being demolished. We proposed to not knock it
down, but instead turned it into Africa's first major institution for contemporary
African artists.
You haven't seen it yet.
We took one of the original grain -- You might get disappointed now.
We took one of the original grains of corn that had been stored in the original
building. And we cut it out of the heart of that building. And around that put 80
galleries. And most of our work was about restoring and reinvigorating a
historical structure. But central part of our vision was using our limited budget to
create the most compelling heart possible with those gigantic tubes.
And the key thing was how we could make people not just stand at the outside and
admire a structure, but how we could pull them into the inside where curiosity
would then do the rest of the work. And you enter under the grain hoppers where
the grain used to drop onto the conveyor belts. And we loved that by cutting
through the original, historic, extraordinary structure, we could expose and share
the building's idiosyncrasies. And like these nooks and crannies, they help to give
the project its soulfulness. And on the top is a sculpture garden with a glass
floor. And if you see those babies on the glass just there, this is their view. The
finished museum is raw, it's rough, but it's true. And it was an honor to bring this
historic structure back into life.
In Singapore, we searched for solutions for why would people be excited to learn
in universities anymore? In this new digital era where you can do virtually
everything online, and you can even get a PhD lying in bed, I've heard, why do we
need university buildings anymore? Well, we believe they're where you come
together to have ideas, to meet your future business partner or the person you're
going to set up a not-for-profit with. Yet this has been the typical
experience. Polystyrene ceiling tiles, no natural daylight, the least inspiring place
to meet people. So to counter that, we made a corridor-less university
building where the students can all see each other. A building which has no front
and has no back. And it's not one building, it's actually 12 buildings. Our goal was
to invent a new kind of tropical architecture that used the minimum possible
energy, where you learn in corner-less classrooms. Where those professors and
teachers work with you rather than dictating to you. Where people can be inspired
by learning but encouraged to linger. And it's open 24 hours. And when I was last
in Singapore, I had jet lag and it was two o'clock in the morning. And so I went
along and there were students there just quietly working and connecting.
In Yorkshire, in the UK, we had the chance to humanize a treatment building at
one of the UK's largest cancer hospitals. So when you think of the worst building
environments you've ever been to, surely hospitals are at the top of that
list. They're some of the most stress and fear-inducing places you can possibly be
in. So we set ourselves the mission to make a non-clinical building where you
could feel vulnerable. And cry and feel protected and come together as a
community. But our site was on the last bit of greenery at the hospital. And we
didn't want to be the ones who dropped a big box and wiped out all that
greenery. So we wondered instead, could we amplify the greenery that we knew
could help with healing? So just like those dinosaur models made from plywood
that slot together, we slotted together giant plywood to make three structures to
hold up three major gardens and make a garden building. This building has 17,000
plants, 23,000 bulbs, and actually a 436 percent biodiversity increase on that site.
Our goal was to really make somewhere where people could come together and
where by focusing on the emotion of the users to really try to make an architecture
of hope.
Finally, in Shanghai, we had the chance that's typical of our time. The challenge of
bigness. To make a three and a half million square-foot site, a building project on
a site that was 480 meters long. Where typically this is what would be built. The
site was so big that the Empire State Building could fit on it lying sideways. So to
make this cost efficient, structurally effective, we needed 1,000 columns on a
grid, so we decided to not just decorate boxes, but to let the columns be our
heroes and to connect with the park to one side and the art district on the other
side and try to bring them together into one. The finished project is called “A
Thousand Trees.”
Every one of those columns has a Chinese mountain tree, semi-mature mountain
tree on top. And nourishment and drainage and lighting and moisture, and because
every column is the best place to put a heavy load. And it has hundreds of outdoor
terraces and it has shading and it has, we hope, the necessary complexity to create
the human engagement in a project at such a scale. We also worked with local
artists to embed their work into our vision, to really make a collaborative project
together. And that carries through all the way to the inside. And this project
opened at the end of last year, the first half of it. And we have 100,000 people
going to it every day. And it wasn't just about trees and plants, but even structural
columns were our friends to humanize the project at such a scale.
So I'm not saying that there's any one language or approach to deal with this
epidemic of boring. Just like in nature, we've learned the vast importance of
biodiversity, we now desperately need architectural diversity.
My goal is to try to help trigger a global humanizing movement that no longer
tolerates soulless, inhuman places. What if our buildings inspired us to want to
adapt and adjust and repair them? We can't keep knocking down the buildings
around us all the time. Let’s stop building 40-year buildings, and let's build a
1,000-year buildings. Please join me.
Thank you.