The prolific British designer Thomas Heatherwick has launched a Humanise campaign to spark a debate on the emotional dimension of buildings in our environment. 

A 10-year global campaign, called Humanise, is aimed to spark a global public debate, aiming to "confront the public health issues caused by boring buildings and inspire the public to demand better."

Announced on Heatherwick's website, the designer has also created a platform pointing out three major titles: The Problem, The Future, and Join Us. 

The Humanise platform supports the importance of the movement by collecting extensive research papers, analyses, studies and essays in one place. 

Considering emotion as a function, the designer will pave the way for public health and demand for better by discussing how the buildings around us make us feel.

Heatherwick Studio designed Little Island, a park and performance venue supported by 132 concrete 'tulip' columns set into the Hudson River in New York. Image © Little Island

"We have spent 100 years making buildings that few people love," said Thomas Heatherwick. 

"They get demolished and replaced, and demolished and replaced, over and over again because nobody cares. And that generates extraordinary waste and massive carbon emissions," Heatherwick added.

Calling this attitude as urban crisis, the designer believes that "demolishing and replacing over and over again" and designing a building that could only a few people love, should be stopped. 

The campaign emerges as a concrete, yet transformative action that supports and explores the subject more deeply in relation to Heatherwick's newly published book, titled Humanise – A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World.

Heatherwick Studio completed the new Maggie’s Centre hidden under plants and trees within the campus of St. James’s University Hospital in Leeds. Image © Hufton + Crow

"Studies have shown that being surrounded by boring buildings which lack visual complexity increases cortisol levels, causing higher levels of stress," said Heatherwick Studio in its website. 

"There is now strong evidence from the world’s leading psychologists and neuroscientists that our physical surroundings profoundly impact our wellbeing, and new opinion research from Thinks Insight shows that three out of four people (76%) in the UK think that buildings have an impact on their mental health," the studio added.

Another goal of the campaign is to "examine the connections between boring buildings and the climate emergency." According to the studio, "11% of annual global carbon emissions comes from construction and building materials: five times the entire aviation industry. In the UK, 50,000 buildings are knocked down annually, generating 126 million tonnes of waste." 

"In the US, this rises to around 1 billion square feet of buildings demolished and replaced each year, the equivalent of half of Washington D.C."

The global campaign sets three major criteria to assess the "boringness" of buildings for the planners and developers who want to make a difference: Emotion as a function - the criteria "accepts that how people feel about a building is a critical part of its function."

The second criteria is 1000 year thinking - it looks at the "design of buildings with the hope and expectation that they will last 1,000 years." 

Lastly, the third criteria is Prioritise door distance - it "concentrates a building’s interesting qualities at the two-metre door distance."

Heatherwick redesigned the Zeitz MOCAA - the transformation of a disused grain silo into a new museum for contemporary art in Cape Town, South Africa. Image  © Iwan Baan

The success of the campaign will be considered to have reached it goal when it creates 10 million discussions all over the world. "With millions of people talking about ways to make buildings and cities more joyful and human, we will stand a chance," stated in the Humanise platform. 

In WAC's exclusive interview in 2019, Heatherwick had said "I believe we defined function too narrowly and we treated function as the most basic of things: does it provide electricity? How's it going to floor? Could you look out? Can you load boxes?."

"But the emotional dimension, treating emotion as a function was so important," Heatherwick told WAC.

In addition to the campaign and the book, Heatherwick has shared his thoughts in a three-part documentary series, called Building Soul, run by BBC Radio 4. In the new documentary, the designer discusses his radical vision with what ways our approach can change "boring, soulless" architecture, by largely focusing on the needs of the passers-by of the street.

Heatherwick has designed many controversial projects around the world - some of which were even unbuilt, including the Garden Bridge project in London. His another controversial project is the Vessel in New York; the building - consisting of nearly 2,500 individual stairs - was closed after four consecutive suicide cases.

Top image a screenshot from the Humanise platform. 

> via Heatherwick Studio

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