There are, says Thomas Heatherwick, too many boring buildings in the world. There has been “a century-long global catastrophe” caused by “bland, vague and forgettable” architecture, a “global epidemic of inhuman buildings”, a style of flat glass grids which, whether in Bengaluru, Dallas, Buenos Aires, Canberra or Nairobi, is always the same. “Intense and dreadful changes,” he melodramatically declares, “have been creeping through our towns and cities for the last 100 years, bringing with them destruction, misery, alienation, sickness and violence.” Boring buildings, he says, citing the neuroscientist Colin Ellard, cause “autonomic arousal”, a rise in stress levels in response to perceived threat.
He thinks there should be more architecture like that of Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan maestro whose work Heatherwick discovered at the age of 18 in a book he bought for £6.99 at a student sale in Brighton. Gaudí’s Casa Milà, a nine-storey apartment block in Barcelona, is an “unashamed festival of curves” that “undulates amazingly in the light, dancing in space… almost as if the building itself is breathing”. It is a “generous” creation that, he says, gives “unquantifiable” joy to millions of passersby.
The blame for all this boringness, he says, lies mostly with architects – in particular with the Swiss-French modernist Le Corbusier, who, according to Heatherwick, wanted only straight-lined mass-produced monotony. Also in the book’s hall of shame are the American Louis Sullivan, who said that “form follows function”, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who made famous the statement that “less is more”.
Architects nowadays, says Heatherwick, have become divorced both from the physical processes of building and the wishes and desires of the general public. They instead learn abstruse theories in their lengthy courses at architecture schools, where they are asked to design such things (claims an anecdote in the book) as a house on the moon for a one-legged man. Heatherwick, who trained as a designer, tells how, unlike most architecture students, he learned to bend and weld metal, carve wood, blow glass and shape clay.
He’s right: there are too many soulless buildings in the world and the works of Gaudí are extraordinary and popular. There is plenty of evidence in Le Corbusier’s writings and in some of his buildings that he favoured a machine-age architecture of straight lines. The schools and the profession of architecture do sometimes foster pretentious and obscure theorising, removed both from the realities of construction and public taste.
But Heatherwick’s arguments are also head-numbingly, soul-crushingly simplistic. He somewhat insultingly ignores the modern architects who daily strive to create buildings that are not inhumane – the British David Chipperfield, the Irish Grafton Architects, the French Lacaton & Vassal, for example. He dismisses Sullivan, who was a genius at the kind of elaborate ornament that Heatherwick admires, on the strength of a three-word aphorism. His description of Le Corbusier as the “god of boring” overlooks the ample use of colour, curves and art in his work. When Heatherwick visits Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, which has plenty of these things, he admires it, but this discovery doesn’t lead him to revise his initial condemnation of the man.
Heatherwick tends to see buildings as singular objects, like pieces of jewellery, to be judged by the amount of stimulation that their surfaces offer. He underplays such things as the interaction of the look of a building with use, structure, climate and culture, the relationships of exterior to interior and of one building to another. He does not have much to say about the value of simplicity, the occasions when you want a building to be plain, so as not to distract from nature or the human life around, or other more spectacular structures. The generally admired terraces of Georgian cities would score badly on his “boring-o-meter”, an online tool that measures how “flat, plain, straight or monotonous” a building is.
Nor does Heatherwick inquire much into the factors that shape architecture. He praises the “generous human qualities” of the stations of the Moscow metro, “built with human wants, needs and actions in mind”, without mentioning the relevant fact that they were built by slave labour in atrocious and often lethal conditions. He doesn’t examine the singular circumstances that made Gaudí such a remarkable one-off. A possible effect of this book’s influence might therefore be an outbreak of shallow wannabe Gaudís. Which would be extremely, well, boring.
Above all, although he gives them a passing mention, he does not look too hard at the forces that make contemporary buildings “boring” – globalised finance, the replacement of handicrafts by industrialised building techniques, the sheer scale of modern city building. He prefers to claim that the builders of those dull blocks all over the world, largely hard-headed individuals driven by practicality and profit, act as they do because they are in thrall to the esoteric theories of individuals such as Le Corbusier and Mies, who died more than 50 years ago. That’s unlikely.
So this book is both a bit right and deeply wrong. It offers a critique of modernist architecture similar to one promoted in the 1980s by Tom Wolfe and the king formerly known as Prince Charles – an argument that did and will touch a chord, but was inaccurate and out-of-date then and is still more so now. This superficiality matters. If there’s little understanding of the causes of boring and inhuman buildings, there’s not much chance of putting them right.
• Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World by Thomas Heatherwick is published by Viking (£15.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
