There’s a problem. Almost everyone can feel it. The outsides of most new buildings are soulless and depressing. Except for a few exceptions, most of them are boring.
Boring is not about whether a building is traditional or modern, curved or square, iconic or everyday. It’s about an absence of visual complexity.
To be really clear, what I’m talking about is the outsides of buildings. Typically, in my experience, the interiors of most new buildings are pretty good. But these interiors are often paired with a street presence devoid of any interest; which is weird because every day a thousand times more people pass by the outside of a building than the inside.
You might be thinking this is just a sentimental, backward-looking, moan about the absence of ‘niceness’. But it’s much more problematic than that.
There’s now scientific evidence showing that plain, flat, featureless buildings profoundly affect our mental health. They lead to physical and societal problems. They cause serious stress to people’s brains and bodies.
The impact of boring buildings on the environment then takes that problem to another level. Buildings that nobody loves get demolished and replaced, and demolished and replaced, over and over again, because nobody cares.
This vicious cycle generates extraordinary waste and massive carbon emissions. 11 per cent of annual global carbon emissions comes from construction and building materials.Five times the entire aviation industry!
The truth is, the outsides of buildings form the backdrop of our lives. They are our commons. Our public living rooms. But astonishingly, there is almost no data about the impact of buildings on the passer-by. On the people who walk past them, week after week, year after year.
So at my studio, we’ve gone out and asked the public what they think, and here are the results. Three quarters of the UK public (76 per cent) say that boring buildings affect their mental health. Two thirds (67 per cent) think it’s important that new buildings look interesting on the outside. Over half (52 per cent) of people want to get involved with how buildings in their area look.
And what’s fascinating is that in London these figures are even higher. Londoners feel more knowledgeable about the design of buildings, more of them want to be consulted, more of them regret not getting involved – and a much higher percentage say that boring buildings affect how they feel.
As a city, London definitely cares! So how do we change what gets built?
The issue here is that we, the public, have become completely de-sensitised to an endless wave of soulless buildings at the same time as feeling utterly powerless to affect what is happening around us. If we could start a national conversation about the outsides of buildings, inspiring each other to see with fresh eyes and demand much better, I’m convinced we would get more of the meaningful, interesting buildings this city deserves.
Politicians come and go. And even if government policies are good, they’re frequently ignored. The only thing that works is when there’s a real shift in the public consensus about what is acceptable. It’s happened on smoking, sugary drinks, pesticides and plastics. Now we need it on building design.
This is why we've launched the Humanise campaign. It’s a 10-year initiative to change the way people think about buildings and cities. And as part of the campaign, we’ve just launched a Boring Building Index. It’s designed to create a public census of the problem. Like a heat map of what you find dreary and depressing.
Everyone is invited to send in a picture of a building from your street or your city. The Index will be live for six months and then all the submissions will be analysed to better understand what you, the public, think and want.
The truth is, what we build shapes our lives. It’s madness to surround ourselves with boring, soulless buildings. We need to demand interestingness.
We need to rebel against the blandification of our streets and make buildings that nourish our senses, such as the deeply human Edgewood Mews by Peter Barber Architects and the reimagined 8 Bleeding Heart Yard by Groupwork.
This is not a problem for later. It’s not even about architecture. This is a public health issue. A societal agenda. And we can do so much better.
