A manifesto for architectural populism
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ROBERT BEVAN
HUMANISE
A maker’s guide to building our world
THOMAS HEATHERWICK
496pp. Viking. Paperback, £15.99.
THE CELEBRITY DESIGNER Thomas Heatherwick’s Bible-thick book about the blight of “boring” buildings, Humanise, was launched with considerable fanfare – not least a BBC Radio 4 series to promote his manifesto against the “global blandemic” and an accompanying website through which to trumpet his call to arms to the masses. His argument is a well-trodden one: we are victims of a “hundred-year catastrophe” foisted on an unwilling public by a global elite of modernist architects who have turned form-follows-function into a design cult that is out of touch with popular opinion and passers-by who have to live with their ideology made material.
This environment, he declares, has “made us more stressed, more angry, more scared, more divided – it’s sickened our minds and sickened our planet”. Contemporary buildings, he says, are too horizontal, too shiny, too smooth, simplistic, repetitive and devoid of ornament to snag our attention, to the detriment of our mental health. Buildings should be more fun, more rounded or spiky, more crafted – even if that craft now has to be the product of 3D printers and laser cutters. Gaudí is Heatherwick’s hero; Le Corbusier his scapegoat in chief.
As arguments go, so far so boring. We have heard variations on this theme many times before – Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), for example, or the then heir to the throne’s A Vision for Britain (1989).
Heatherwick is a designer, not an architect – a professional title protected in law – and he appears to disdain architects viscerally: their training, their supposed gatekeeping hold on construction, their highbrow tastes and aesthetic decisions. Unfeeling architecture critics who he predicts (correctly) will loathe this book also get a pre-emptive ticking off in its pages.
Not a few have responded by pointing out, in the face of the book’s cranky self-promotion, the many failings of Heatherwick’s own studio – public art that falls apart, London buses that overheat, a proposed “garden bridge” across the Thames that cost millions in public money and was championed by the capital’s then mayor, Boris Johnson, before it hit reality’s buffer. A particular hypocrisy is the Google HQ for London, which is under construction in King’s Cross. As long as the Shard is tall, this is a relentless horizontal wall of stick-on modelling, designed by Heatherwick in conjunction with the Danish architecture practice BIG. It is everything he professes to hate.
Humanise redefines tilting at windmills. Although Heatherwick poke
