{"id":451,"date":"2025-10-01T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T09:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scientificmediagroup.com\/?p=451"},"modified":"2025-10-02T16:09:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T16:09:54","slug":"thomas-heatherwicks-humanise-campaign-is-an-incredibly-reductive-way-of-assessing-the-built-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.scientificmediagroup.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/01\/thomas-heatherwicks-humanise-campaign-is-an-incredibly-reductive-way-of-assessing-the-built-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"“Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise campaign is an incredibly reductive way of assessing the built environment”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Humanise<\/div>\n

Thomas Heatherwick<\/a>‘s Humanise<\/a> campaign fails to identify the causes of poor-quality architecture or ways to tackle them, writes Owen Hopkins<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“How do cities and buildings make you feel?” asks a promotional video for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism<\/a><\/strong>, which opened on Friday under the curatorial direction of Thomas Heatherwick.<\/p>\n

Across exhibitions, events and installations \u2013 including a massive centrepiece twisting wall featuring work by an international roster of architects \u2013 the biennial argues for architecture and cities that, to quote its title, are “Radically More Human”.<\/p>\n

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The arguments put forward by the Humanise campaign claim to rest on hard neuroscience<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The biennial is the latest vehicle for Heatherwick’s Humanise campaign, which since its launch in 2023 has seen a book, two BBC radio series and various stunts, including UnLandmarks<\/a>, which made “boring” versions of UK landmarks, and Bland Castles<\/a>, a series of high-rise sand castles on Morecambe beach in north-west England.<\/p>\n

That cities need to be “humanised” is, the campaign contends, the result of “A hundred year catastrophe\u2026 a lost century of harmful architecture [that’s] made us more stressed, more angry, more scared, more divided \u2013 it’s sickened our minds and sickened our planet.” Quite a list of charges.<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that those hundred years neatly correlates with the advent of the modern movement, but this is not the campaign’s target per se, rather the “blandness” of the built environment it supposedly helped bring about. Although there are strong echoes of longstanding attacks on modern architecture, the Humanise campaign is arguably even more damning. “Bland buildings starve your soul… They cause stress. They make us antisocial. They change how we feel and how we behave.”<\/p>\n