Thomas Heatherwick believes Le Corbusier to be “the god of boring” and blames him for a generation of flat, shiny, plain, straight, monotonous and anonymous buildings (Thomas Heatherwick’s war on boring buildings: ‘I’ve never gone against the whole industry before’, 25 October). Really? I’ve visited Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille and I’ve walked through the wonderful cross section of the building, housed in the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris. I know Le Corbusier designed buildings to serve people’s needs – real, human needs.
I’ve also seen plans and models of Heatherwick’s monstrous Google “groundscraper” in London’s King’s Cross and have walked past the construction site.
Given a choice between Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” and Heatherwick’s “machine for making money”, I’d go for the god of boring over the god of mammon every time.
Michael Mattinson
London
• If Thomas Heatherwick were not so dismissive of Le Corbusier, we might have been spared some of the stupidities of his redesigned Routemaster bus. Had form followed function, we wouldn’t have had rear doors that trapped people and an “air-cooling system” that, since there were no opening windows, stifled us in hot weather. Both these have been partly remedied by retrofitting.
But two aspects can’t be fixed: the lower-deck seat layout, which works against people with limited mobility, and that from most parts of the bus you can’t look out of the back to see whether the bus you want to change to is following you. I suspect that, given most bus-users’ views of them, he may find it easier to “source a discontinued vehicle” than he thinks.
Jill Cramphorn
London
• It is disappointing to read that Thomas Heatherwick (among others) subscribes to the generalisation that “You can’t be what you can’t see”. Tell that to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Valentina Tereshkova, Shirley Chisholm and Amelia Earhart. Incidentally, the streets around the then City of Manchester Stadium became a little bit more boring in 2009 after bits of his B of the Bang sculpture dropped off and it had to be dismantled.
Ruth Eversley
Paulton, Somerset
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