Building Soul - With Thomas Heatherwick, Why Boring Buildings Are Bad For Us

This transcript was exported on Oct 12, 2023 - view latest version here.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
If you were to go to any city in the world, head to its newest parts and ask the first person you saw what
they thought of the buildings around them, what would they tell you?
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Not much. Really. This is quite ugly. It doesn't have a lot of character compared to some of the old
school buildings does it?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
And they all kind of look
Speaker 2 (00:26):
The same nowadays. I don't know this place
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Anymore and they used to live here.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Just a lot of windows, there's a lot of glass and a lot of windows.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I won't work.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I've done recorded, but I'm not a big fan. I think it's time to state the obvious. Most modern buildings,
those shiny, flat, smooth, rectangular, serious anonymous blocks found all over the world are just
boring. My name is Thomas Heatherwick. I'm a designer from London who's created a number of things
you might recognise. I designed the Olympic cauldron in 2012. One great flame of unity in the centre of
the arena. I designed London's new bus.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, I have to say this bus has become a bit of a tourist attraction here. A lot of people looking around
it at the moment.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I'm also a designer of buildings and public projects that can be found all over the world. From Shanghai
to Cape Town to New York to Singapore
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Last month, world famous designer Thomas Heatherwick was named as the person who will oversee its
redevelopment Today he's been to visit the city,
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Building Soul - with Thomas Heatherwick, Why Bor... (Completed Page 1 of 12

10/12/23)
Transcript by Rev.com
But I believe we are living through a global emmic in building design and I'm on a mission to put a stop
to it and bring back buildings that aren't soulless. And this isn't a call to return to the architectural styles
of the past. Many new buildings are fantastic. It's just the vast majority really aren't, and I think that's a
serious problem. Now, I'm not an architect, I'm a designer, and as you'll hear in this series, some people
disagree with me when I make this argument that our buildings are just too boring. They're definitely
much B blender in their use be, but I just think there's a valid reason behind it. I'd probably heavily
disagree
Speaker 2 (02:49):
With a lot of Thomas's views.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Apologies to Thomas because he is not going to like this. But I'd like to ask the question, do boring
buildings actually serve a purpose?
Speaker 1 (02:58):
But I passionately believe that the quality of our built environment really matters. I'm going to show
how boring buildings have a hugely detrimental impact on our individual health.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
The
Speaker 5 (03:12):
Kinds of buildings that we're talking about
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Have done harm
Speaker 1 (03:15):
On our communities.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
We have to look at the crimes of modernism,
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Even the planet.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
We are in a very weird, exceptional moment in the history of architecture.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
But I also want to get to the bottom of why our buildings are so boring. And I think one man is
responsible more than any other men, women, and children of the world

10/12/23)
Speaker 5 (03:40):
Live where they should not live, work where they
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Should not work. Later in the series, I'll be showing you how this individual is still revered in the
architectural world today, but I don't want to just look at the problems. I want to propose and find
solutions, practical solutions that are achievable so that we can create more engaging human
environments built with the needs of the public in mind.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
I found it really beautiful. It's like the limits are the sky.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
You are listening to building Soul on Radio four with me, Thomas Heatherwick. This programme is for
the passerby episode one, why boring buildings are bad for us. You might well be thinking this is a
subjective argument. Who am I to be listening to this London designer telling me what is or isn't boring?
So I want to start backing up this argument by drawing upon the latest scientific research.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
My name is Sanja Chatterjee. I'm a neurologist by training. I direct the Penn Centre for Neuroaesthetics,
and my official title is Professor of Neurology, psychology and Architecture.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Neuroaesthetics is a field of research that explores the biology behind our aesthetic judgments.
Speaker 4 (05:22):
I got interested in studying aesthetic experiences a little over 20 years ago, and I'd say in the nineties,
cognitive neuroscience was taking off, especially with new technologies of being able to have some
insights to what's going on in the brain while people are doing certain things.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Neuroaesthetics can help show us how people respond to different kinds of built environments,
something Angen thinks architects could use more.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
One of the that has been striking to me is how little up until relatively recently, how little architects
actually thought about the people in their buildings, which is an extraordinary thing. It seems architects
have been particularly preoccupied by abstract notions of space and how do you configure space? There
has been relatively little thought to what happens to actual individuals, to people in these environments,
and most of us in the materially developed world spend 90 plus percent of our time in the built
environment. We aren't surrounded by this, we're clothed by this. And yet there has historically been
little attention to this issue.
Speaker 1 (06:42):

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Angen decided to correct this by showing people images of different buildings
Speaker 4 (06:47):
Whilst in
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Something called
Speaker 4 (06:49):
A functional M
Speaker 1 (06:51):
RI
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Scanner. And at the time we were asking a very straightforward question, which is when people
appreciate the beauty of the built environment, are we tapping into the same parts of the brain that we
associate with primary rewards like food and sex? And the short answer is yes, that these parts of the
brain in those ventral medial prefrontal cortex in those areas, there's more activity to images that
people found attractive.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
The next challenge was to work out what made people find certain buildings more engaging than others.
Professor Chatterjee worked with a young researcher studying at Cambridge University called Alex
Coburn.
Speaker 6 (07:39):
Hi Thomas. It's great to meet you. So my name is Alex Coburn and I'm a physician and a researcher with
a background in architecture, and my research examines how the design of the built environment can
impact human experience such as how we feel and behave. The goal of our study was to find some
common psychological or emotional states that most people experience when they interact with
architecture and to see whether those mental states also correlated with specific regions of brain
activation.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Alex showed over a thousand people the images from the previous study and asked them to rate them
in different ways.
Speaker 6 (08:17):
We were able to find that there were three underlying psychological dimensions that explained about
90% of the variants in the data of how people were evaluating buildings.
Speaker 4 (08:27):

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There seems to be three, four components or dimensions to how people respond to the built
environment, coherence, fascination, and holiness. Coherence is the notion of how organised a space is.
How legible is it? When you look out into the space, is it easy to comprehend? Fascination is something
that has to do with informational richness. How complex is the environment? Does it draw you in? And
holiness is the idea that you feel comfortable in the place you feel like you belong there? We could go
back to their F M R I data and in that study we found that there are different parts of the brain that were
responsive to these three components. These
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Studies tell us that these
Speaker 4 (09:25):
Three qualities,
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Coherence, holiness, and fascination are what people innately want from their environment.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
When you look at a lot of
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Contemporary
Speaker 6 (09:38):
Design, I think at best it might have a high level of coherence, a sense of order and control. But I think
what it tends to really struggle with is creating this either a sense of fascination or a sense of cosiness.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
And I think these are two
Speaker 6 (09:54):
Qualities that we really need fundamentally in our buildings and cities.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
But the big slogans are less is more and ornament is a crime and form follows function. And this is flying
against that completely saying complexity is needed by humans. Why do we need complexity?
Speaker 6 (10:18):
Thinking about evolution is sometimes a useful way of framing this.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
Our modern brains largely evolved during the Pleistocene when for the vast majority of time, we as a
species were kind of nomads and hunter gatherers and weren't really settled into the kind of built

10/12/23)
environment that most of us find ourselves in. So we are an old brain trapped in a new environment.
We're not really evolved for what we are surrounded by.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
There's a school of thought that says our built environments should match the complexity found in
nature, something known as biophilic design.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
So for example, just having plants in the room, patterns that mimic nature using natural materials, so
wood for example, and brick as opposed to steel and concrete, having more natural light, the kinds of
ways you would experience nature. If you can incorporate that into the built environment, this would be
helpful. We do find that if you have people in spaces that have these biophilic features that they do find
those spaces more both coherent, fascinating, and homey.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
And I was talking recently to one of my friends
Speaker 4 (11:49):
And lives in Brooklyn,
Speaker 6 (11:51):
And he just was sharing with me that noticed how
Speaker 7 (11:54):
There's
Speaker 6 (11:55):
Tonnes of new modern buildings going up around his neighbourhood and he notices
Speaker 7 (12:00):
Whenever
Speaker 6 (12:00):
He sees the most kind of minimalistic structures within a few weeks of them going up, they get tagged
by graffiti artists. I think that's one way. Graffiti is a really interesting way that people notice this void in
our culture and then try to correct it.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Now let's pause for a second. Perhaps you are outside listening to this on headphones. Just stand back
from the building in front of you for a moment, making sure there's nothing behind you that's going to
knock you over and look across and look up slightly. Is it an old building full of decoration or is it perhaps
a more modern thing that's sleeker? When you look at the building, how does it make you feel?
Speaker 7 (12:50):

10/12/23)
You stand on the street and watch from afar at how people behave in settings where there's lots of
monotony and blandness compared to places where there's lots of richness and variety. You can see
obvious differences in things like even people's posture in the speed with which they walk, their
tendency to pause in place.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Colin Ard is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He argues not just that
we don't like the design of many modern buildings, but that their design is doing serious harm to our
health.
Speaker 7 (13:32):
We've done studies in a wide variety of settings in cities throughout the world, wiring people up with
sensors that measure their bodily states and in some cases even their brain states as they inhabit
settings with different levels of facade complexity.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Colin tests the strength of people's emotional response or arousal as they traverse different built
environments.
Speaker 7 (13:56):
And if you put people into a bland, sterile street scape, you can see those levels of arousal just plunge.
They just flow out. People are not only as far from arousal as it's possible to get while still being awake
and alive, but also if you ask them about their emotional state, they describe a fairly abject misery. They
clearly don't like to be in those kinds of places. There is this integral relationship between healthy levels
of complexity in our environment and how we feel and what we do. But it's no exaggeration to say that
that facade design is actually a matter of public health. They cause stress. And when we're chronically
stressed, then our bodies begin to do other kinds of things to us, for example, to over secrete a
hormone called cortisol. And if cortisol is chronically high, then that leads to metabolic disorders.
Cardiac disorders essentially attacks. We know that in other circumstances, boredom can produce a
range of apparent behaviours. For example, self-harm drug use. For example, one of the main causes of
relapse at addicts is feeling bored. The great message is those who design buildings and people who
plan cities and streetscapes in cities, given the science, the people who do that have an absolute
obligation to be mindful of the impact of those settings on human life and human wellbeing.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
So boring buildings are not just dull, they're a serious health hazard, even leading to heart attacks. But
what about the impact on communities?
Speaker 8 (15:49):
My name is Maro Al. I'm an architect and author from humps Syria. Humps is the third largest city in
Syria. It's the city which came to the attention of the world because it was the first city to corrupt in
violence in the recent Syrian war, and it made headlines for many years.
Speaker 7 (16:15):
The shelling is relentless, indiscriminate artillery against residential areas.

10/12/23)
Speaker 8 (16:29):
Over half of the population, the original population had left the city. More than 60% of the city is mass
destroyed.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
AWA has written two
Speaker 7 (16:39):
Books called
Speaker 1 (16:40):
The Battle for Home and Building for Hope. In those books, she makes a very provocative argument.
Speaker 8 (16:48):
War has many reasons, political, economic and so on. But there is a major, major role that architecture
and urbanism have played, which is overlooked
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Can the way we design our cities at the extreme end really fuel war.
Speaker 8 (17:11):
This is the soundtrack in the old city of homes now in the ancient soup between 3000
Speaker 1 (17:17):
To
Speaker 8 (17:17):
4,000
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Years
Speaker 8 (17:19):
Old, workman
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Clearing up the rubble,
Speaker 8 (17:23):
The hums is built around an old core. The city dates back to 2,300 BC and until the 20th century, there
was this sense of continuation in how the city was built. So the city evolved around before there are the
markets and there's churches and mosques built back to back. And around those urban landmarks, there
were a network of housing and work buildings that weaved a social life that was reflected in the urban

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fabric. So this closeness, this coherence, the form of those buildings with embodying certain values that
were present for the people who lived in that city. Basically the fifties were the years of radical
transformation of the Syrian landscape.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Maa argues that people were relocated from the ancient city into new banal tower blocks on the
perimeter buildings with no connection to the place in which they were built or its history. Buildings that
separated communities that had for generations lived side by side and buildings whose residents took
little pride in
Speaker 8 (18:43):
That vandalism of the city left no point of attachment between the people and the place and between
people and each other. Modernization revolves around the idea of replacing anything that brought
people together, replacing things that were built organically. It's about how destruction of meaning lead
to emptiness that will be occupied by some kind of conflict. And in our case, it was an extreme
expression of conflict.
Speaker 9 (19:17):
The shelling is constant. Now we're hearing an impact every few seconds and in reply, you can also hear
a little bit of Kalashnikov fire. It's a pretty futile gesture.
Speaker 8 (19:29):
I must make it clear. I'm not saying it's the only reason for conflict, but it's a major leading factor.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Mawa thinks that what happened in Syria should act as a warning to the rest of us
Speaker 8 (19:42):
All over the world. We have the same problems. Now the main problem is that people have lost the
sense of home and this loss must be regained.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So solace buildings damage our health and our communities. But not only that, the environmental
impact of these structures is colossal. And in my view, we're not talking about this enough. We are
talking about the huge wastage in the world of fast fashion, but we aren't talking about the wastage in
the world of fast buildings. Almost two thirds of all the waste generated by the UK is produced by the
construction industry. Construction and building materials contribute 11% of annual global carbon
emissions, five times that of the aviation industry. Given the impact, it's vitally important that what we
do build stays up for a very long time. And yet over the past century, a huge number of unloved
developments have been demolished only to be replaced by newer but no less boring buildings. Jane
McKenzie writes the nooks and corners column for private eye.
Speaker 10 (21:06):
From an environmental point of view, building buildings and knocking buildings down are both quite
carbon intensive processes. So once a building is there, there is what's called embodied carbon. The

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building has the carbon in it and it's not in the atmosphere. Once you knock it down, that's all going to
be released. And then building a new building with all those carbon intensive things like
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Concrete production,
Speaker 10 (21:31):
Absolute disaster. So if you can get a good building that lasts a long time, it is environmentally a good
thing.
Speaker 11 (21:38):
The biggest issue facing us now is getting away from fossil fuels and therefore rethinking our energy use
in architecture.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Barnabas Calder is a professor of architecture at the University of Liverpool.
Speaker 11 (21:52):
I looked at the energy consumption of the biggest of the ancient monuments, the pyramid of CFU in
Egypt, and found that if you added up all of the 78 million days of human labour at cost to build it, they
come to the lifetime energy consumption of less than seven contemporary Americans. And realise at
that point that we are in a very weird, exceptional moment in the history of architecture, in the extreme
energy hunger that fossil fuels have allowed us to indulge in.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
I know that the average age of a commercial building, I think in the UK is 40 years. So if I was a
commercial building, I would've been killed 13 years ago. And in the US they demolish about a billion
square foot every year, which is half of Washington DC buildings built within the last 50 years or 60
years. Why are they the buildings that we are wanting to demolish?
Speaker 11 (22:52):
I guess there are fewer people who care.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
I fully understand that there are powerful economic arguments for the need to put up buildings at speed
and at scale, some of which we'll hear later in the series. But if we're building things only to knock them
down again in a few years, it's clearly a false economy for the sake of the planet. We need to make
buildings that stand the test of time, but that's significantly harder to do if nobody loves them. Jane
McKenzie.
Speaker 10 (23:26):
There can be a kind of patronising attitude to the public that all they love is neo Georgian and
Poundbury and extremely twee vernacular, toy town buildings. But people do love a good building and
there's a lot of dreadful and a lot that people just don't engage with because they're so boring.

10/12/23)
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Here's neuro aesthetic researcher Alex Coburn. Again,
Speaker 6 (23:50):
If we create structures that people don't love and that people are not emotionally connected to, we are
wasting our resources and we can do all the financial analysis that we want in terms of maybe that
saved a little bit of cost on construction compared to a more complex building, but in the end, if you
have to demolish it in 10 years, that is going to blow the equation out of the water. And so I think that's
a great example of the essential, literally economic value of the importance of a in architecture.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
The conversation around design of buildings has put so much focus on the insides of buildings and not
the outsides of buildings. I'd like to see a revolution in how we think about the buildings we build around
ourselves in our towns and cities. And that's got to start with the science. I believe we're coming to an
extremely exciting time where we will be able to measure people's feelings that will not be dismissible.
It's a time for the data to reinforce everything and move away from this ludicrous idea that it's
subjective. Boring is not subjective. Beauty maybe is, but boring isn't. We all know we are talking about
making buildings that have a necessary amount of humanity, complexity and interest. And if that
mindset can shift and the whole industry can respond to the science, I think we are going to start making
a future that is good for our health and is good for the planet and really bring society together again.
And surely every building designer actually wants to build places that people will love and can't be in
some perpetual form of battle where they're telling people they should be loving something who aren't.
We need to find ways to make places that just more of us can care about enough.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
If we once made buildings with love that were visually complex, that we're able to stand the test of
time, why don't we do that anymore? What happened?
Speaker 6 (26:15):
Why is it that the design of buildings changed so dramatically in the fifties? I do think it relates to this
question of love in a way, and we created this very detached approach to design that was very non-
emotional.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
What might shock you though is that actually many of the people designing our blandest buildings don't
think they're bland at all.
Speaker 12 (26:41):
There is generally a attempt to purify the over ornamentation of the 19th centuries. Just with one stroke
erased
Speaker 1 (26:50):
In the 20th century, a new set of ideas captured the minds of building designers ideas that remain
dominant to this day. And I think there's one man who's responsible more than any other.

10/12/23)
Speaker 13 (27:05):
You must take 2000 people together, built a big house with one entrance only for 2000 people
Speaker 1 (27:15):
To find out who and why. Join me, Thomas Heatherwick next time on Building Soul.

10/12/23)

Building Soul - With Thomas Heatherwick, Why Boring Buildings Are Bad For Us

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This transcript was exported on Oct 12, 2023 - view latest version here.

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