"Thomas Heatherwick's Humanise campaign is an incredibly reductive way of assessing the built environment"
Thomas Heatherwick's Humanise campaign fails to identify the causes of poor-quality architecture or ways to tackle them, writes Owen Hopkins.
"How do cities and buildings make you feel?" asks a promotional video for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, which opened on Friday under the curatorial direction of Thomas Heatherwick.
Across exhibitions, events and installations – including a massive centrepiece twisting wall featuring work by an international roster of architects – the biennial argues for architecture and cities that, to quote its title, are "Radically More Human".
The arguments put forward by the Humanise campaign claim to rest on hard neuroscience
The biennial is the latest vehicle for Heatherwick's Humanise campaign, which since its launch in 2023 has seen a book, two BBC radio series and various stunts, including UnLandmarks, which made "boring" versions of UK landmarks, and Bland Castles, a series of high-rise sand castles on Morecambe beach in north-west England.
That cities need to be "humanised" is, the campaign contends, the result of "A hundred year catastrophe… a lost century of harmful architecture [that's] made us more stressed, more angry, more scared, more divided – it's sickened our minds and sickened our planet." Quite a list of charges.
It is no coincidence that those hundred years neatly correlates with the advent of the modern movement, but this is not the campaign's target per se, rather the "blandness" of the built environment it supposedly helped bring about. Although there are strong echoes of longstanding attacks on modern architecture, the Humanise campaign is arguably even more damning. "Bland buildings starve your soul... They cause stress. They make us antisocial. They change how we feel and how we behave."
In short, boring buildings are actively bad for our health and wellbeing. In contrast to the politically motivated attacks on modern architecture, especially housing, in the 1970s and 1980s from the likes of Oscar Newman and Alice Coleman, the arguments put forward by the Humanise campaign claim to rest on hard neuroscience, which apparently shows that plain or repetitive architectural forms are harmful to our mental health.
Now, I am not qualified to assess the validity of these claims. But irrespective, it's an incredibly limited and reductive way of assessing the quality or otherwise of the built environment.
A building's function, surroundings, associations, its degree of upkeep, the basic fact of whether we are experiencing it alone or communally – these are just some of the myriad factors that shape how we see or feel about the built environment, and all are far more consequential than whether we respond to visual patterns in a controlled test in a particular way.
As a manifesto for the built environment this is about as woolly as it gets
While the Humanise campaign's target is seemingly clear – even if the reasons for it are not – what it advocates as a remedy is decidedly fuzzy. Critiques of modernism have generally argued for a return to traditional styles (and values), but Humanise instead argues for more creativity: buildings that "hold your attention", "draw us in" and exhibit "More complexity. More emotion. More humanity."
As a manifesto for the built environment this is about as woolly as it gets. The only point of consistency – of both critique and remedy – is this relentless, almost monomaniacal focus on a building's appearance. Of course aesthetics should be one of architects' chief concerns, but they are meaningless unless they reflect and engage with a building's social, cultural, historical, geographical, environmental and above all political contexts.
This takes us to the fundamental problem with the whole Humanise campaign, of which the focus on aesthetics is only the symptom: that it is utterly without politics. A built environment that is aesthetically pleasing or stimulating is vital – and not something we need neuroscience to tell us – but it is worth nothing unless it is truly public, democratic and reflective of the collective culture and identity.
A "human" built environment, to use the campaign's parlance, is one that provides housing for all, that offers high-quality and inclusive civic amenities and genuine public spaces available to everyone. To focus solely on aesthetics is fiddling while the city (in some instances quite literally) burns.
It goes without saying that implied in the campaign is Heatherwick's belief in his own work as an exception to the perceived blandness of the contemporary built environment and as an exemplar in making it more human. The campaign's resultant almost messianic zeal has predictably rubbed many architects and critics up the wrong way.
They have been keen to point out that Heatherwick's own work often doesn't reflect the values he is espousing, whether in the faceless groundscraper Google HQ in London or Vessel in New York, which stands amid one of the most overscaled and generic developments of recent memory. Then, there is the irony that the UnLandmarks and Bland Castle stunts, which were meant to create something "boring", ended up creating something, dare I say, quite interesting.
We can only dream of a world where architects have that much power and agency
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that one of the world's best-known and highly sought-after designers would shy away from any kind of systematic analysis of the how the built environment is produced and sustained, given the success he has garnered from the system as currently constituted. Yet, it should not be too much to expect a campaign with such lofty ideals to be supported by an analysis that at the very least acknowledges the profound differences between a city like London, where Heatherwick lives and works, and, say, Seoul, the Humanise campaign's home for the autumn.
Moreover, to attribute the problem to architects' or even developers' lack of imagination or creativity massively overestimates the influence that either have in shaping what gets built, given the almost total financialisation of the building industry over the last 40 years. We can only dream of a world where architects have that much power and agency.
To give him his due, Heatherwick has without a doubt put his finger on the urgent need to improve the quality of design in our built environments – though of course he is hardly the first to do so. But it is simply hubris to expect the campaign to achieve anything remotely close to its aims in its current form.
To change the built environment in a way that's truly radical requires going beyond buildings' exteriors and grappling with the forces – political, economic and cultural – that determine what gets built and how. A more human built environment requires organising at a grassroots level, commitment from politicians, fundamental shifts in development models and the methods and materials of construction, and, yes, architects being – or rather being allowed to be – bolder and more creative.
Now that's a campaign we could all get behind.
Owen Hopkins is an architecture writer, historian and curator. He is currently part of the curatorial team for the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale and was previously senior curator at Sir John Soane's Museum and architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is the author of eight books, including Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain (2017) and Postmodern Architecture: Less is a Bore (2020).
The photo is by Nat Barker.
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