In Praise of Heatherwick and 'Humanise'

?There’s a lot of commentary on Thomas Heatherwick flying about at the moment (June 2024), much of it negative. It comes in response to the recent news that Heatherwick’s ‘Humanise’ campaign, generated in the wake of the publication of his book of the same name last autumn, is working with Loughborough University on a Master’s degree due to start in autumn 2025 that? ‘hopes to foster a generation of architects who will "inspire joyful architecture", in line with the goals of the movement…’. The publication of the studio’s proposals to turn Seoul’s Nodeul Island into a public park has also met with brickbats.

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I won’t ennumerate the largely sneering and condescending comments on ?the stories, mostly from architects; it’s too dispiriting. But I will quote one: ‘Anyone who has read anything written by Heatherwick or seen his oeuvre will instantly recognise how ridiculously intellectually moribund this MA course will be.’

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Shame on you, commenting person.

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Heatherwick set the cat among the architectural pigeons for sure with the publication of Humanise. Oliver Wainwright, reviewing it in The Guardian, really weighed in,? using phrases like ‘Heatherwick’s simplistic aesthetic philosophising’ and claiming that the designer’s professed commitment to craft was ‘a striking dissonance’, in view, for example, of the shoddy workmanship in the building of the Vessel, the much-maligned tourist destination tower in New York’s Hudson Yards that closed after it gained a reputation as a suicide jumping off point (it just re-opened with mesh covering the openings). As if the designer of said building had control over the quality of joinery from 3000 miles away.

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Wainwright makes the same mistake of which he accuses Heatherwick: he misses the point. The Humanise movement, he says, focuses on the outward appearance of buildings at the expense of ‘much more crucial issues’ that concern the inhabitants of buildings; ceiling height, ventilation, insulation. Heatherwick’s point –?‘The Humanise Rule’ is that ‘a building should be able to hold your attention for the time it takes to pass by it.’ Many, many more people experience buildings as passers by or fleeting viewers than those who live and work inside them. The issues are separate.

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Enough reiteration of the complaints, many –?most - of which are from architects invested in their 7-year training and threatened by a non-architect who challenges the prevailing modernist orthodoxy. I have known and engaged with Heatherwick’s work since his radical and astonishing treatment of Harvey Nichols’ windows in 1997. A glance at that piece tells anyone disposed to look that here we have a most unusual – not to say unique - imagination. I am delighted to welcome him to the upcoming edition of the Design Shanghai Forum, where he will present the Chinese edition of ‘Humanise’, and engage in a panel discussion with an architect, a developer and an academic about how the book’s ideas will translate in China. (We are also celebrating the Dezeen Awards China’s second iteration.)

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The reasons why I enthusiastically praise and promote Heatherwick’s work and consider him one of the most important figures working today are manifold.

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1.??? Craftsmanship. The book’s subtitle reads: ‘A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World’. Many an architect draws things – buildings, even - without enough practical knowledge of how they will go together, how they will actually stand up. That’s why they need engineers. Thomas Heatherwick is different. He is a craftsperson, familiar with a range of techniques and materials including wood, metal, plastics and clay. He is the owner of ‘intelligent hands’, a concept dear to my heart, having myself spent 10 years as a cabinetmaker. As a craftsperson I am deeply committed to the necessity and value of what Matthew Crawford calls ‘The Case for Working With Your Hands’ – other writers on craft have touched on this subject, notably ‘Intelligent Hands’ by Charlotte Abrahams and Katy Bevan in 2023, and 2018’s ‘The Intelligent Hand’ by David Savage, a furniture maker whose work I published many years ago.?

2.??? Heatherwick is an explorer, an adventurer, a rule breaker, a game changer, a risk taker. He makes ideas happen. We need people like this, and how many are practising architecture today?? Yes, some of his experiments – the B of Bang, the Garden Bridge, the Vessel – have run into trouble: a structural engineering mistake, a political football and a high-profile urban ornament that sadly attracted more than its share of darkness and tragedy; but better surely to push the envelope and risk failure than take the tried and tested – the boring – route.

3.??? Heatherwick is a polemicist. The book is scholarly enough – he makes no claims that he has not researched, even in some cases commissioning his own research into, for example, the relationships between buildings and mental health – but part of its function is to galvanise, to provoke. As a (dismally failed) book publisher, I respond with delight to his subversion of the book form itself; he breaks all the rules of graphic design, switching from font to font and using apparently random, spur of the moment photography. Penguin Random House, bless them, were happy for him to fiddle with their own logo, while I, as an obsessive self-appointed custodian of the English language, wince when he mangles it with words like ‘boringness’ and ‘interestingness’. The joke’s on me; surprise surprise, he has his a very good reason for using them?– a desire to use the everyday language of ordinary people, or ‘pre-school prose’, as the disdainful Wainwright would have it.

4.??? He is accused of self advertisement. Check the pages of ‘Humanise’ (have you read it?) for pictures of his own work. This is not a monograph. Ah yes, there’s a couple of images here and there; the Coal Drops roof, the Glasshouse, 1000 Trees in Shanghai. All there to illustrate his point. Is this self advertisement? It is not.

5.??? Most important of all, Thomas Heatherwick is a humanist. His studio’s designs are driven by an understanding and a love for people. He thinks about what they like, considers that important, and does not put himself on the pedestal of the 7-year trained architect who thinks he/she knows what is ‘good’ better than do the uneducated masses.

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Shape up, ladies and gentlemen; step back a minute and consider what ‘this guy Heatherwick’ is doing. Not for the architectural profession, that can take care of itself. But for people. People who experience buildings every day, who know what they like and what they don’t, and whose tastes and opinions are so often dismissed by trained architects who ‘know better’ and have the arrogance and temerity to impose their refined ideas on the uneducated.

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What Loughborough University – the initiative came from there, not the Heatherwick Studio - wants to do with this course, and the Humanise campaign generally, is generate an ethos – a language - of building design that recognises and respects the way people live and the way they want to live. Having worked with architects for 30-odd years, and often suffered the frustration of dealing with their self-important attitude that they know better than the people who will live in, work in, play in – and numerically far more importantly, just look at – their buildings – I’m pitching my lightweight, sustainable, no-footprint tent in the Heatherwick camp. We need him. He is unique in our generation, and uniquely important.

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? Aidan Walker, Programme Director, Design Shanghai and Design Shenzhen Forums

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