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[Music] today on the podcast we're joined by one of the world's leading designers Thomas heatherwick has created many of the world's most striking new public spaces and buildings heatherwick studio is behind culture defining projects like
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the vessel in New York's Hudson yard and London's coldrops yard in King's cross where we're recording today's podcast they've also designed iconic cultural moments like the London 2012 Olympics Cadron and cultural landmarks like the reimagined double decker bus in London
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from Cape Town's coolest building to Google's new offices Thomas is building daring Urban Landscapes that will outlive all of us Diane von firstenberg called him a genius Boris Johnson compared him to Michelangelo our cities and our buildings have such a profound
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impact on our lives but often we don't have time to really think about why that is and how things could be so much better today Thomas joins the podcast to talk about why we need to humanize cities he's even written a book called humanize which talks about exactly this
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we also cover the surprising health and climate consequences of not taking this ambition seriously enough we'll cover why design matters for you how to put the soul back into buildings and why we've got cities so badly wrong for a century Thomas welcome to the giant
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ideas podcast when did the idea that a building could uplift and Inspire human being first strike you well thanks thanks for having me it's I'm really excited to be here chatting together and I suppose it's a very good question and it's a good one because it
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bends your brain as to really dig back into your upbringing and I was brought up in North London and when I was about 11 my father um took me and we we came out at Picadilly circus tube and we walked down Hay Market straight from Picadilly
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circus past there was a sport shop called Lily whites that was there I remember it well and and just there on the left there was a big sign that said the design center and it was free and the doors were open and so this was 1981 and you went in and inside I remember
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seeing a model of a city of the future which was huge it was must have been six seven meters long and that city was called Milton keing um which is subsequently being built there were electronic knitting machines and that was fascinating to see that were working there were robotic
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arms that didn't use electricity okay and then there were also products for kitchens that were pieces of furniture but they were all inventive pushing ideas trying to create progress and it didn't differentiate what was called architecture what was
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called Master planning what was called product design what was called landscape design what was called engineering it was just all at a place called The Design Center that was set up by the design Council and I would go back there as a teenager as and it gave me a North
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star I know that sounds maybe a cliche but I was uh I was good at drawing I was fascinated by inventors and invention and had books with old patents and ways of making new kinds of elevators ways of holding mustaches out of drinks ways of cooling people down ways
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of stopping them being seasick at Sea uh there seemed to be a world of ideas and then there was also a dimension of how ideas looked and felt and suddenly I saw what how those two things could come together and I hadn't really enjoyed school at all and I
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didn't really enjoy the other schools I went to but I had an allar I had a thing going that's what I want to be that's it and they shut it down about 24 years ago oh no now people are buying online learning online working online meeting dating all these funny things you can do
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suddenly streets have lost a bit of that energy that drove them and streets become dangerous when there aren't lots of people on them actually funnily enough you're safer there are lots of people there and so reflecting we realize what are we doing why are we
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hidden away how does a little 11-year-old know that anyone designs tallest sculpture in the UK or the London bus or an Olympic cauldron or or Olympia or a piece of China or Soul um an island in Soul or whatever those things are those you need to see it you
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can't be what you can't see kind of logic and so our new studio is on the street we squid the workshop so it goes all the way to the pavement so that an 11-year-old could look through the window and see people making things not just made things and we have
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got the biggest program of any architecture or design firm in the UK of work with 11 to 14 year olds so we've had 600 children coming through the studio but the children who no one in their family's been to University before Thomas it's funny my first trip ever to
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Central London was also to Picadilly circus with my late father and I couldn't say padil circus so it was to pick a dicki circus also to Lily whites but I remember also coming out from the tube and looking up and this feeling of complete Wonder at the various
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architectural gems and and in some cases monstrosities um so very funny to to hear you talk about your your memories of that you mentioned there some fairly mundane architecture as a child looking at some of these buildings and just wondering why you've now written a book
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about it and you feel I believe very passionately that so much of what we build and the cities and the buildings that we build are fundamentally boring for for want of a better of a word what went so badly wrong with architecture and why well I think I should just sort
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of start by saying the problem is a a kind of problem that I think people don't realize is as big a problem as it actually is and I think if we'd had a conversation 40 years ago about nutrition or about air quality you would have looked at me with
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a slightly funny look like really do we really need to worry about the air in our streets like come on it's not a big deal shouldn't we be worrying about something else and 40 years ago if someone was eating seaweed for example you would have thought they're a
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freak um and brown rice and um but now look at us everyone has realized that ultr processed food was much worse for us than we realized and we didn't we didn't know and so there is a conversation happening in society about nutrition and a realization that that has a meaningful
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impact on our life but the world of buildings has stepped to one side and it's said no no no there's it's about style it's style Wars where you prefer old-fashioned I prefer modern or whatever that is and that this is an art and but if you actually look at the
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statistics 76% of people say buildings affect their Mental Health okay and there is zero training in mental health about the buildings around us and I'm talking about not just the buildings you go inside but we are all passers by and look at the epidemic of soullessness
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that is everywhere you go every city you go to the 99% of buildings I'm not talking about the Fancy Pants opera house or the art museum that's twisted or not talking about the Sydney house anything like that or the bbow Guggenheim we're talking about the 99%
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of buildings it's the everyday buildings all around now there is a mental health Dimension and so I talk about harmful boring and you might think what isn't that opinion isn't this subjective there are researchers who are starting to properly gather data showing
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that our bodies go into stress when buildings don't have a necessary visual complexity so notice I'm not using the word beautiful it's about things that are are able to have a necessary amount of Fascination and engaging us because humans are actually
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infavor as in we our brains need in visual information yeah and when you have buildings that are so when you have buildings that are so flat so plain so shiny so serious so Anonymous so monotonous add those together and you you will conjure up in your mind and and
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the listeners will have seen probably a million buildings like that when you put all of those things together our bodies actually go into stress which is really interesting and not about your opinion so using skin conductance um uh data if you put someone in front of a building
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with no infant visual nutrition basically your body starts your stress level your cortisol level rises so there's a serious Dimension to society's um well-being in health but even if you said well actually you know what Thomas I still don't care this is an
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architectur Desy talk is you know don't really let's put that to one side there's a dirty secret around us at the moment and we look at what Society talks about Society does talk about the environmental impact of the aviation industry and we all have a kind of
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should we fly should we not fly and that's a almost every family has had that kind of a conversation and that's in the air the dirty secret is that the construction demolition construction Dem mition industry is five times the green greenhouse gas emissions of the aviation
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industry right the average age of a commercial building is 40 years in the UK so if I was a commercial building I would have been killed 14 years ago giving away my age um and the average age in Soul for for quite a while was 30 years okay in China it's just over it's
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about 34 years for a residential building 35 years for a commercial building the carbon in a building it's unbelievable how much carbon it takes to build a building so suddenly it sounds really sentimental but Love Actually matters unless people care let's not use
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the word love let's just say care enough to think don't knock it down let's repair it let's adjust it let's adapt it the carbon is just off the charts and it's the dirty secret because people feel powerless they think oh well that's not I have can't impact that it's
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only um Engineers Architects developers city planners politicians who impact that even quite wealth wealthy people feel powerless and we have had an industry that isn't it talked itself into a mindset that the public are a bit ignorant and this is a style thing and
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if you ask the public they just want oldfashioned stuff and what's so interesting and our research showed this it's not true of the 10 top um buildings of the last century the most popular of the buildings seven of them in the world are buildings built within the last
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century in the UK two of the top 10 they're new buildings right but they're not boring buildings so suddenly this word that seems like what you're talking about boring you've written a whole book about boring um it's actually a book about
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Society the the fabric of society that we wrap ourselves in and too often we talk about buildings about how much light there is inside them how the daylight how the atrium is good circulation and talk about the architecture intern and we are not talking enough very
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privileged people are the ones who go inside most new buildings but a thousand times more people are going past the outsides and there is no client for the outside in simple terms it's a sort of uh the client and you speak to any building designer they say my client
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wants this and you're happy you pleased your client and but the the outsides who is your client it's actually all of us it's the people who will never go inside that building who have no voice and even our industry and I speak on behalf of
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that industry our industry doesn't even ask the public what they think and if they don't like it we think they're stupid it's outrageous so there's no public conversation in a way it's the smallest idea but that giant small idea is there's no public conversation you
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you are not an AR I take I not um but I guess you've lived in buildings your entire life right so you and I have lived in buildings our entire life yeah so how can I say you don't know about buildings right you may not have trained in that but you're
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you're a smart person under statement of the year but you you know you you will have feelings and intuitions and the idea that you are ignorant about buildings and we shouldn't be building buildings that need you to go to a lecture to start to appreciate them the
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challenge is unless we have a public conversation and demand from an industry and from each other that we must make buildings more human nothing's going to happen I love it you work all around the world Thomas so you were just showing me before we recorded this some amazing
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work you've done in Japan and Korea and to me in a good way the buildings look human but also animalistic in a very good way as well they sort of come to life they're living breathing amazing things you do work right across the world who is getting this right so if we
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think about now you know Europe people come to Europe to look at architecture from two three 400 years ago almost like a a museum and and partly is because you know they really appreciate the architecture of of that that era in two or 3 hundred years time where will
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tourists be going around the world to look at things that have been built today um I my honest answer is in general terms no one's getting it right okay there is nowhere in the world where there are where 99% of buildings are more human- centered and
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engaging there are these kind of clumsy moves which I think to some extent give the world of building design a bad name in that there's an art museum being built someone thinks oh an art museum it should be artistic rightless of a competition oh and then suddenly you get
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this art museum that is special and engaging but as if and the word culture is used it's a culture building I don't believe that culture is Arts I believe culture is everything that surrounds us that we live our lives and the recycling center that you go and
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take your fridge to when it's come to the end of its life or mattresses too can be an extraordinary social experience I remember seeing uh one of the lead singers from the specials in North London when I went to the kentish town recycling center and we there's a
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social Dimension and you and why is that why why can't the recycling center have care and attention and engaging us isn't it so obvious the place that has art inside that isn't it too obvious that it should be artistic on the outside why why the buildings we cherish from the
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past for example in King's cross where we are now the we you know we are here in a place that's really loved as a a newly developed area but look where we are we're inside an industrial Warehouse right the victorians weren't even trying
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this these were their Ikea sheds of the day but there were things where the out come of that making left qualities that are humanly engaging and have a an amount of Fascination they have a a quality which means that as they get older they get a bit better but I'm not
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advocating that we go back to the past and copy Victorian buildings we don't need to do that we can use our brilliant brains and there are so many well-intentioned incredible people in the construction industry there's also incredible in industrial
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processes available to us but we need to harness them to make more human places but there is a mindset problem throughout an industry that has a base that's over academic and that talks to itself like every new building that you walk past is probably award-winning but who's it winning the
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award from it's winning the award from the other building designers you know that's totally wrong I learned that from Dame Sally Davis who was the former Chief medical officer for the UK and I'd been speaking at something and someone
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had asked what would my dream project be and I said a hospital because they're the worst places I'm paraphrasing what she said but my understanding of what she said was she then said you'll only make change in healthcare with these buildings is with patient pull and I
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remember thinking what does patient pull mean and so what I understood her to mean was that those managers are all doing their best with the resources they've got they're busy their brain is full but if the patients if there's a new building being built and the
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patients say oh you're building a new Cancer Care Center have you seen the one in Dundee we using wood or have you seen the one in leads with plants on the roof a a good leader in effect a good leader doesn't really lead a decent leader listens but it only works if the
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patients speak now patients think they're powerless yeah but actually if Society speaks change happens simple I found it really influential for me in realizing actually I I'm very lucky with my Studio's work to be busy we've we're 250 people doing projects around the
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world but that I needed to devote a a Chun of my life to trying to help that conversation to happen because real change won't happen with my four projects five projects a year that I finish that's nothing Well Thomas you are you are you know your you you your
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projects are are all encompassing they're a grand scale but also they they touch lots of people my favorite example of you putting humanity and soul and and emotion into your work is the London bus where this this idea of putting warm lighting into these buses which was was
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so sterile in in terms of their environment and lighting so that people look good on on the way back from a date you know your skin look great your your girlfriend or boyfriend skin look great and probably something that no one had ever thought about in bus design ever
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tell us more about just that particular example well that comes back to emotion emotion is a function and I I remember hearing our client from within Transport for London saying that they'd had the person who designed the buses for many
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years before in and say I must design the new bus because I've designed loads of I've designed all the other buses on the street and they went that's why you're not going to design this bus and we were brought in we had spent a lot of time in Hong Kong i' I'd been looking a
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lot at the trams there which are very refined that they are the absolute minimum you need but they're so loved the the trams that go around with wooden seats two staircases and we' had a fun form follows function mindset again with our London buses but
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forgetting that one of the functions is in motion and so we'd ended up in these plastic I'm not sure fully if that's a verb but plastic boxes where you could look around and you think why are the hand Poes nuclear warning yellow why what's that big lump why is
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one guy sitting lonely under a staircase like what's going on and why does it all look all this plastic everywhere looked like someone had it in their mouth sucking it for a year and then put it back out this sort of and why are the seats purple and there was no sense of
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cohesion yeah and looking back it was 50 years earlier that the London built bus had been conceived in its entirety and what had happened since with these sort of incremental bodges and sort of randomize moves you could diagnose if you sat at the back of the
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bus as a designer You' look at those hand Poes and think no one would choose that and then you'd think hang on ah must be a regulation a new regulation came in about the contrast level visually and so you could see someone overreacting you say you want contrast
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I'll give you contrast and you get nuclear warning yellow and you could see there must have been a regulation about light levels and someone's gone light levels you right there's a regulation about light levels I'll give you light levels so it's like a battery chicken
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farm the lighting which as you say you look terrible your partner looks terrible to each other like it's the most unflattering thing so our in a way our mindset I'd never used the word dignity before I thought it sounded really pompous to use words like dignity
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but it really felt like the right word was it felt that the buses were not lifting you in your life and if you're going to spend 30 years going to work sitting on a bus for 40 minutes and then coming back and the next day going there coming back going there that is a big chunk of your
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life does that add something to your life is that just neutral to your life or is that actually somehow deadening your life a little bit it's part of the fabric of society and you you share that with the other people on the bus but I was always sort of fired up in my
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stomach because you knew that a rich person I mean typically buses were seen as the lowest run it's like almost a bus is a working class thing and the tube is the middle class thing to travel in and I remember hearing uh actually it was the head of
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Transport for London saying that a really good city is a city where the rich people take public transport and I I actually thought that was beautiful yeah because that says so much that means that that implies safety that's implies togetherness and getting rid of
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the kind of of separating uh kind of brackets in society which I hate and so you you suddenly felt super empowered because a super rich person could have a Ferrari and they could drive around the city and they can look around at London London arguably one of the most
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important cities in credible cities of the world but the front of a double-decker bus you cannot compare no matter what Ferrari you're in or whatever there is no better view of London Prime spot than the front seat at the top of a double-decker bus and that sort of was
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our route and just thinking right we need let's have two staircases to maximize the ability to move people unload and and load quickly with three doors which the old buses that people are romantic about only had one door and one staircase so you can more uh
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reliably in time terms unload and load and so a bus is more likely to be on time uh but the staircases you know a staircase a fiberglass staircase you know we we can call it composite but essentially it's fiberglass which doesn't lift anyone's spirits to say
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those words felt like how can we make that evoke almost like you're in a stately home sweeping down a grand stair even though it's narrow so the stairs at the back for example we made the windows follow you well both staircases so that you'd get the best view out of London
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and equally you would be seen so you would feel there's a safety and that you can see people whenever they're in the bus and so it was really just thinking how do we evoke feelings and make and just think about not just what people call function but the true function
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which is a a mix that incorporates how you feel as well amazing amazing Thomas I want to ask you in the book you have this wonderful boring ometer okay which for our viewers and listeners basically tries to help people understand is a
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building boring or not and I was having a go at it and trying to understand how it would work and I am clearly not doing it right but when I was working through the criteria it struck me that a beautiful Brownstone Street in the West Village in New York or a lovely
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Victorian cent in Notting Hill in London might be perceived as boring if you're applying those tests I'm sure that's wrong though so tell us a little bit about how you view you know some of the the beautiful buildings to to to to use my word about those buildings from the
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Victorian here for example yeah yeah um well the the boring ometer is a a real thing that we developed in the studio uh but it's also a provocative thing many uh aspects of my construction industry just would have a style the designers had one style and they did it
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everywhere and you thought how rude yes in a way surely you want to grow something for each place but one key Insight or sort of backbone of my uh drive has been anti flat the things we tend to like are more 3D yes and the things we tend to feel less about are
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flatter yeah and we have certainly had uh we call it a bland demic and the blandest buildings tend to be flatter yes and repeating too much and so what the boring ometer in the book is looking it it it it was actually an idea that grew out of thinking a bit like those
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pin toys you know the pin toy where there are a whole lot of little pins metal pins it's sort of an executive toy that maybe some of your listeners might have on their desk or would have 20 years ago or 30 years ago but you push your face into it or your hand and all
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the little pins go around your face or your hand yeah and then you take your hand away and there's your hand or there's your face so it's the equivalent of a tool digitally that you can take any building built or unbuilt still to be built yes and digit
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push these pins in pull it away and then you can measure the how much it deviates from Flat okay and you can measure how much there is repetition without complexity because the the in the research that we've been doing the main thing we've been finding is places that
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we like have an amount of three-dimensionality an amount of repetition but they also have an amount of complexity not just dumb repetition and so absolutely the brown Stones you're talking about they're 3D okay you know you you if there's a
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window the window isn't flush with the wall outside the window goes in there there is there isn't just a hole cut in a wall there's a sill that sticks out right there isn't a roof that's just a straight line the roof goes up and down the roof doesn't just start at the top
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of the wall there are eaves the building overhangs the staircase that jump those the Brownstones have these spectacular Stoops I think they big stairs going up and railings and so there's a lot of three-dimensionality going on so the the
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boring ometer would capture that it's trying to objectify yes and move away from the style conversation so instead of saying oh do you like modern which means you like Square stuff and I like um oldfashioned or whatever it's style neutral okay it doesn't care right and
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so I think we need to have a more open-minded creative look at how do we harness the industry that exists the technology all the things we now have but combine that with understanding our brains okay and then and believing in Joy because ultimately that book is about joy and
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that Joy is actually the only sustainable thing because if something gives Joy you and you have an obligation to create Joy if you are making buildings happen and unless society says oi stop making nutritionally poor boring buildings because those are the
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buildings we knocked down again after 40 years yes yes and an example is the a a tower in the city of London so by global standards that's not a big tower yeah but in London reasonably big tower uh it takes 4 kilos of carbon to make a Big Mac it takes 250 tons to um make to put
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a rocket into space and it's I think it's 92 uh let me just get this right I think it's 92 million um tons of carbon to build one of these major Towers wow which is equivalent of 23 million big Maxs wow Thomas we've got um I think about four minutes I'm going to
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ask you two questions which could take another four hours each but we'll try to cover them in in two minutes the first you export britishness around the world I guess because you happen to be British what is unique about British culture in
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your view it's it's a brilliant question and I I do me and my team work all over the world and I hadn't realized how deep and how passionate I was actually from a British perspective it's it's deeper in me than I realized really and the other day I had to talk about
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this and I realized how incredibly privileged I was I wasn't brought up privileged in financial terms at all but I was brought up in London which is endowed with the most incredible institutions and vast variety of places and people and I could only think of it
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almost like Pete you know that we have the the the layers of culture that we have the chance to stand on to give me confidence the key thing to do anything worth doing is confidence and for me all those layers many many centuries of this deep older culture
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have empowered me and it's a funny one when I go around the world and you talk to people and the people say what's unique about Britain and I I had to ask that question when I built the British Pavilion at the World Expo in 2010 I had to represent the
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UK and I spoke to a friend of the studio and she looked at me and she travels all the time all around the world and she just looked at me and went eccentric and she said that's what's different and I didn't tell the British government but it superpowered me and I
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thought where does that come from that's confidence it to go against the grain comes from I'm not speaking about me I'm talking about thousands of incredibly creative people who base themselves here and it's the that deep cultural Pete coming back to Pete I don't know how
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many of your listeners know what Pete is but that that layer things up that you allow you to LEAP from that place and dare to think of ideas or push for them in with a confidence that I think many people have ideas but it's your your standing on the ground that's necessary
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to take ideas and really um argue for them make a place for them and make them affordable and logical to people I know Thomas that you feel very passionately that we need in this country more creative confidence I know that when we were inputting both of us into the
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incoming labor governments policy discussion in a nonpartisan way that you struck me as saying there might not be much money around but we do actually really badly need some creative confidence back in this country if we're going to achieve anything of of any
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Merit well well the thing that real creativity is is actually Ingenuity and I I hate the association always that creativity is somehow luxury and that it's a sort of over and above to me it's when you are fighting for your survival that's when you need need the greatest
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Ingenuity and that's when you need to be bravest and there are challenging Economic Times around us and that's when we need the confidence but so much of human nature thinks oh no that's for later actually it's for now we need to build millions of new homes it's for now
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now we need to build the homes that we won't want to knock down which we did build millions of homes that have already been knocked down after the second World War and loads of places catastrophic use of vast amounts of concrete instead of making places that
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we could cherish and adapt and adjust and it needs cunning clever brilliant conversations to drive that forward the thing I really want to emphasize is that the world of building design has seen itself as the art above all other Arts about as hierarchically
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looking down on society more broadly and actually the big shift we need is to see ourselves as servants in public service and that our job is to It's s of servant servant architect ship uh for the world around us is that we're serving so we
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must be fascinated by each other we're making the walls of public life what an honor what a responsibility that needs Ingenuity and often it's in times of challenge that the big breakthroughs come and if if anyone can think of those things it's it's this creative community
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that exists and I also believe many people are creative this isn't the sort of elite you have to have studied to be the only people who are creative yeah this has been a cunning clever brilliant conversation well let's end with a question we ask all of our amazing
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guests on this show we don't ask them are you an artist but I would also like to sneak that in there are you an artist do you consider yourself an artist and fundamentally what is it about Thomas heatherwick that has allowed you to become the person the success that you
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have become what question um the I don't consider myself an artist I consider myself a designer I you and I you don't architect a building you design it and I do believe believe that artistic thinking is needed but I you know for years I've I've met people who
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set up incredibly creative businesses and they say oh you know I wish I was creative like you and you're looking at them thinking what do you mean the idea you had for that business is a creative move and so you are being creative it's arguably it is Artistic it's the
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thinking of the unexpected thought and so I suppose I see what I do as very practical and down toe in many ways which is to just think about what would engage other people I don't see it as some Voodoo funny mystical thing and I think the art
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World loves to create a kind of bubble of uh sort of extra power I suppose I I don't mind the sort of downto Earth of saying I feel what I do is solve problems but I also spot problems and by spotting them that the biggest creativity in a way is spotting spotting
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what might need to be done and I hope that I can keep being trusted to do that it takes a long time to be trusted with a billion dollars of construction or you know some of our projects it's the the trust that's put in you is so massive so I feel incredible
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responsibility and so I suppose I feel my job is to convene and clarify bring together so that we can kind of hold hands and take uh and Des Des scarify uh making Futures that aren't copying the past that's a lovely way to end and I really think that of all of
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our guests who come on the show who do have these giant ideas I think probably your ideas will Outlast all of them they'll be here in hopefully hundreds of years time and I think that's a wonderful thing having experienced some of them all around the world
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uh we're we're very lucky to have you in the world and very lucky to have you on the Giant ad is podcast thank you for joining us tomm thank you so much Tommy if you've enjoyed that episode do share it with a friend and we'd love to share more giant ideas with you wherever you get your podcasts