Thomas Heatherwick: ‘The look of modern buildings is a catastrophe’

Thomas Heatherwick is standing in his London studio, dressed in a shirt and shoes almost no one else would wear, surrounded by models almost no one else could have designed, explaining he is not — as appearances suggest — an exhibitionist. “My whole background has been: don’t show off.”

We’ve only just met, and I’m already confused. Heatherwick’s ambition led Sir Terence Conran to describe him as the Leonardo da Vinci of our times. He designed the spectacular cauldron for the London 2012 Olympic Games, and bombastic constructions from New York’s Little Island to Shanghai’s 1000 Trees. And didn’t he once package up a snowball and ship it to China, so the recipients could experience English snow? He admits he did, adding: “I once took a kebab to Italy for someone.” It all screams show off.

But those are projects. Heatherwick the man is different. “I am a partial introvert,” insists the 53-year-old, citing a recent psychometric test. He is not a trained architect, and he is certainly not a raving starchitect. He has a kindly, sincere manner, like a school chaplain who is taking your dog’s death worse than you are.

He gestures at his studio’s new facade. He hopes passing schoolchildren will look in and see their future in design. “The most important thing for the 11-year-old to see is he is normal,” he says, referring to himself in the third person.

Heatherwick’s reticence makes his latest work more surprising. He is launching a 10-year campaign against the “catastrophe” of how buildings are built. Our cities, he argues, are in the grip of an “epidemic of boringness”. Most modern buildings are too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous and too serious. They make us unhappy and ill, they make us not want to come into the office.

In his book Humanise, out on Thursday, Heatherwick derides architects as members of a modernist “cult”, which indoctrinates them during their seven-year training into thinking they don’t need the public’s approval. The result is the UK’s commercial buildings are so unloved that they have an average lifespan of perhaps 50 years, leading to huge carbon emissions as they are replaced.

Not since Prince Charles said architects “talk by the yard, and should be kicked by the foot” has a leading public figure launched such an assault on the profession. “That’s almost 40 years ago!” He claims he’s taking the lead reluctantly. “Richard Rogers is no longer around, who’s going to do it?”

The Thatcher Britain I came into didn’t seem to be based around ideas . . . The word inventor had ‘mad’ stuck in front of it

This is bound to annoy people; Heatherwick always does. At the end of his masters degree, instead of a business card, Heatherwick made ice-creams with his phone number on the stick. You can imagine his contemporaries both licking their lips and rolling their eyes.

Today few doubt the beauty and inventiveness of his designs. But they are irked by his boyish dreaminess and habit of endearing himself to powerful developers and politicians (notably Boris Johnson). Even though Heatherwick is not really an outsider in architecture — his studio has collaborated with firms such as Foster + Partners, and won Riba awards — his name is liable to provoke sighs of exasperation. The critic Jonathan Meades disdains Heatherwick as “a capable exterior decorator”. Slamming modernist icons such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe will only deepen the scorn. “You ought to have more respect,” says one architect.

Heatherwick argues the public is on his side. “Every single person is an expert in buildings.” He is sympathetic to Nimbys, saying local people could be better involved in the planning process. He even thanks planners for helping to improve Coal Drops Yard, his development in King's Cross.

At the same time, he argues complaints often miss the point. “In London, people talk about the Gherkin or the Shard [or the Walkie-Talkie]. But they’re not talking about the building just behind it, the cynical one, the one that didn’t even try. Who’s the developer? Who said yes to it? Who designed it? Who built it? What we actually need to talk about is the 99 per cent, which are just seeing what they can get away.”

There are, he says, lots of well-meaning architects. But he has a message for the profession: “Don’t just tell me you care. Would somebody conclude that you care?”

Heatherwick tries, Heatherwick cares. He never really had a choice. He grew up in a bohemian family: designers, makers, lateral thinkers. “In a way I’m a very obvious outcome of experiences I had.”

As a child, he had to walk through a workshop with “kilns, enamelling, toxic powders” to get to his parents’ bedroom. His father, a pianist turned educator, wore Birkenstocks in the 1970s. “There was only one shop in the UK that sold them. But that also taught me about how society does shift: anyone who wore Birkenstocks would be called a hippy — look now.” In a neat parallel, Heatherwick himself buys unusual shoes, with laces down to the toes, from Germany; he blames his large feet.

He didn’t excel academically, so he made the world of invention his own. “Then it confused me that the Thatcher Britain I came into didn’t seem to be based around ideas . . . The word inventor had ‘mad’ stuck in front of it . . . I felt alone.”

He is no longer alone. Heatherwick Studio employs 250 people. Revenues hit £24mn in the year to March 2022, Heatherwick has taken dividends of £1.8mn over two years. We sit down in his workplace at the heart of it; the room includes a fluffy chair, a spade, a large gourd and a sculpture of a cat. Heatherwick is particular about words. It is always the studio, never the office. The people who work there are studio members, never staff. He likes to call buildings “objects” — not “spaces”, the preferred term of most architects. As for the word architect, “it isn’t a verb”, says the design graduate, pointedly. “You don’t architect a building. You design a building.”

Heatherwick likes designing things that other people do not. “My interest is in gaps,” he says. He converted a disused grain silo in Cape Town into the home of Africa’s biggest repository of modern art, the Zeitz Mocaa. He shows me a slatted table which can stretch from a circle to an ellipse and which took 16 years to develop.

There have been mishaps. The Routemaster buses, championed by Johnson, launched in 2012 and became intolerably hot in summer. Transport for London and the manufacturers, Wrightbus, were responsible. “Their brief to us was that the windows weren’t allowed to open. We challenged them many times.” In 2015, TfL relented. “The original Routemaster bus, which people go misty-eyed about, it took 14 years till they ironed out all the glitches. Fourteen years! But we look back as if day one everything’s right.”

Then there’s the Vessel, Heatherwick’s public sculpture cum viewing platform in Hudson Yards, New York. It opened in 2019 but has been closed since May 2021, when a fourth person jumped from it to their death. Did no one foresee the suicide risk? “The project met all the safety standards, and actually it went above them. It was just an extremely tragic, sad use that the project got put to . . . Nobody predicted Covid and what that would do for people’s mental health.” The studio is working with the developer to “bring the extra safety features”. Will the Vessel reopen? “Certainly.” Has its troubles taken a toll on him? “I can’t say how responsible I feel for every project that I do.”

Heatherwick says he accepts the criticism — “I know I get too much praise [too]” — but contrition is not a speciality. Johnson’s proposed Garden Bridge, on which he worked, cost more than £40mn of public money for no end-product. It “was an amazing idea . . . In the end all the money was raised for it. Most of that money was from abroad. But this country’s politics decided to not make that happen. I can only work with the time I’m in and the politics of that time.” In fact, by the time it was cancelled, the bridge was short of £70mn in capital. “It’s still a strong idea. I’m just a designer.”

He turns to Little Island, a park built over the Hudson River that opened in 2021 at a cost of $260mn, thanks to the deep pockets of US businessman Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg. “I hope that you’ll mention that,” he says, sincerely.

In Humanise, Heatherwick rails against the value placed on money. Is that a bit rich? Although he has spoken of designing prisons, his buildings are often in luxury developments. “My job is to work with whoever is making projects.” But he argues wealth and public joy are not at odds: Gaudí’s Casa Milà is itself a posh apartment block, whose facade is a “backdrop to millions of people’s lives”.

He cares about aesthetics because more people experience buildings from the outside than the inside. “You could say I’m saying it selfishly. Would I rather a project was experienced by 2,000 people or 2mn people? . . . I’m more interested in doing something that connects with the public than I am with the customer. I’ve just lost every client I’ll ever work with!”

It’s typical Heatherwick. On a trade trip to Dubai, a sheikh once asked him to sketch a possible bus. According to a person present, Heatherwick declined, saying: “I don’t just have a little bag of ideas.” The person recalls: “He doesn’t modify his behaviour to suit his target. He gives the impression that he doesn’t care if he gets the business or not.”

Heatherwick takes his phone to show me one of the projects he is “most happy about”: curbs for wheelchair users in Hong Kong. Rather than angle a piece of curb into the concrete, as is typical, the studio created a more elegant solution, a single curved stone. “No one will overtly notice that, but you subliminally feel whether anyone cares.”

Heatherwick Studio finishes four or five projects a year. It’s not enough. “I’ve learnt that projects are less influential than you think.” Even the best one doesn’t stop boring buildings being built next door.

Hence his campaign to create bottom-up pressure for change. The modernist ethos was that less is more, ornamentation was wasteful. But Covid has shown that buildings’ emotional impact is one of their functions. “If a workspace doesn’t connect with a team, they’re more likely to call in sick and say, can I work from home? Think how many thousands of plants have been bought in the last couple of years to try and make workspaces softer.”

For Heatherwick, buildings need to have visual complexity, because that is what humans are evolved for. This used to come naturally from the building materials, but now, with glass and aluminium dominant, it has to be created. The problem is that the construction industry does not even measure how buildings “actually connect with” the public. He wants to harness smart watches so designers can monitor people’s stress “at scale”.

His solution is not a King Charles-esque pastiche of the old; rather, he wants a focus on how buildings look and how they make people feel. “If you got 20 different artists and laid their work out, imagine how different it would be. If you now got 20 British [architectural design] firms, [excluding] one or two main companies, it would be like almost the same firm did everything. How do we get that diversity?”

“Somebody said, ‘I disagree with Thomas. Cities are like a fruit loaf. You’ve got the raisins and you’ve got the loaf. Thomas is saying everything should be raisins.’ That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying the loaf bit in between needs to have some nutritional value.” He promises to devote his rest of his life to “this war”.

Actually, I’m a very slow thinker. With my team, what we start by doing is really analysing [a problem]

Architects point out that the profession has moved on from modernism, but that not everyone has the budget of, say, Google, another Heatherwick client. “We say how expensive it is to build buildings. It’s a useful excuse,” he responds. “It wasn’t cheaper in the past: society just chose that it mattered. We’ve chosen the equivalent of fast fashion. We’ve chosen fast architecture.” Heatherwick often proposes two options to clients: the most affordable one, and a more ‘human’ version costing perhaps 5 or 10 per cent more. He argues that human buildings are cheaper in the long run, because they aren’t knocked down.

Do aesthetics and climate action really fit together so neatly? Shanghai’s 1000 Trees includes concrete planters containing trees. A critic estimated that the emissions required to make the planters was far greater than the emissions the trees could store. Heatherwick’s response is that “people will care for the things they value”, so the trees have “social sustainability”.

When he was a student, Heatherwick realised most architects only start designing whole buildings in middle age. He took a short-cut, dedicating the final year of his degree course to making a pavilion. The final construction used 2km of Velcro. “Theory doesn’t do that.”

Lord Norman Foster still works at the age of 88, Frank Gehry at 94. Will Heatherwick similarly keep on designing? “I don’t think of it as design.” Translation: it is life. “I’m only just getting started. It takes a long time to be trusted . . . I don’t idealise stopping at all. I was never around people who had normal jobs.” His partner, Cong, is a designer at the studio. His father worked there too. The studio “is like an expanded version of the bedroom that I had when I was nine years old. In some way, I wanted this to be a home, a warm place.”

Suddenly, I understand the job ad to be his personal assistant, which appeared in 2021 and went viral. According to the ad, duties would include “managing the completion of Thomas’ house . . . managing Thomas’ household staff (housekeeper and nanny); assisting with children’s schedules when required . . . remembering birthdays and buying gifts.” If work is life, and studio is home, you’d struggle to anticipate the mockery.

Humanise’s rule of thumb is that a building should be interesting enough to hold your attention for the time it takes to pass by. This has been tested by one of his forthcoming projects, Google’s King's Cross HQ. It is longer than the Shard is tall. “There is no facade that any designer can do that’s interesting for four and a half minutes walking along next to it.” So the building has been raised up, leaving a ground floor that can be divided into pop-up shops and the like, which will grip pedestrians’ attention.

He anticipates those who will see it as just another project for the 1 per cent: “This area was never public — it was industrial land.” The developers are committed to linking up with deprived communities nearby: the ground floor could be a “radical community centre, facilitated by a technology company”. It is “a building that is there for, I hope, centuries”.

What would he do with the Palace of Westminster, whose refurbishment is estimated at £22bn? He waffles about modernism’s quickness to reinvent. “You’re getting a funny insight into how we work,” he adds apologetically. “Actually, I’m a very slow thinker. With my team, what we start by doing is really analysing it.”

He says he wants to fight against “the myth of the person with all the answers”. Indeed, Heatherwick is not an easy interviewee. His answers are like government construction projects — they go on and on, and frequently fail to deliver what was originally requested.

He insists he is more at ease listening and bouncing around ideas. As a student, he felt he had a “disability — that I needed others”. Since then, he has discovered collaboration makes designs “genuine”. The studio process is a group activity: “like a Ouija board.”

He invites me to sit in on a project review. An architect flashes up a few options for a high rise in the Netherlands on a big screen. Heatherwick gets to his feet and starts pointing. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” By now, I understand that is a true compliment.