A Philosophical Blandemic?

Does Thomas Heatherwick's _Humanise_ apply to philosophy?

I recently read the book Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World, by the designer Thomas Heatherwick. The book is a manifesto against what Heatherwick calls a “blandemic”: a plague of boringness that has taken over architecture, resulting in inhuman urban landscapes composed exclusively of flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, and serious buildings. Here is one of them: Vancouver Harbour (the asterisk points to what Heatherwick calls the “single interesting roof” in the skyline—the Marine Building):

The Marine Building is human. It isn’t flat or plain—the surface is highly ornamented. It includes some curved lines. It isn’t anonymous: the many decorations tell a story about the building’s place, purpose, and history.

Two wide revolving doors are framed with gold, and a rising sun throws out great shining beams over a wooden-hulled ship with billowing sails and a crucifix at their centre. High on top of the sun fly six huge Canada geese. Almost every surface in the parts closest to people on the ground has complexity either carved into it by hand or present in the natural appearance of its material (44).

And it isn’t serious: the building is full of whimsical touches and whispers of a dreamworld beyond the glass-plated corporate boxes surrounding it.

The Marine Building exemplifies how humans have sought to build throughout history. In De Architectura Vitruvius listed three pillars of architecture. The first two are strength and utility, but the third is “venustas”: “the word refers to Venus, the Roman goddess who was the embodiment of beauty. Vitruvius was saying the final essential quality of buildings is that they should give joy” (161). I would add that John Ruskin’s “seven lamps of architecture” include the lamps of beauty and life.

So what happened? Why do so many of us now live like this:

?

Heatherwick’s explanation of how this has happened is complex, so you’ll have to read the book. He also gives a number of reasons to be concerned about the boringness of buildings. Boring environments are shown to cause health problems, reduce feelings of community, and can even lead to conflict and war. Moreover, boring buildings have no lasting power: people don’t like them, so they usually get knocked down after a few decades. Since 11% of annual global carbon emissions come from construction and building materials, there is something deeply perverse about making unloved buildings only to soon knock them down and replace them with equally unloved buildings.

But one striking part of Heatherwick’s explanation is this. While humans in general have been shown, in countless studies, to dislike boring buildings intensely—to the extent of suffering health problems if exposed to them too much—architects like them.

To be clear, Heatherwick has nothing against Modernist buildings, straight lines, plainness, shininess, etc. What he opposes is our practice of making nothing but such buildings. Looking at a boring urban landscape, you might think that the whole explanation of it lies in considerations of cost-efficiency, profit-seeking, availability of materials, and inflexible regulations and standards conjured up by bureaucrats who have never built anything but presume to legislate building for an entire nation. All those are part of the story. But it is also important that: “Modern architects think boring buildings are beautiful” (261).

More importantly, they seem to think that only boring buildings are beautiful. Early in the book, Heatherwick recalls a conversation in which an architect responded to his studio’s decision to put a slight curve at the top of a window: “Wow, you’re brave”. He wasn’t talking about the collapse risk of depending on compression strength rather than tensile strength. He was thinking of the wrath of the architectural Magisterium.

Heatherwick (perhaps overreaching) presents modern architecture as a cult. Studies show that first-year architecture students tend to have similar aesthetic preferences to the general population. But by their final year, they all converge on a preference for “unadorned right angles, straight lines and flat surfaces” (265). This comes about by a process Heatherwick calls “brainwashing”. Students who don’t have the conventional preferences are subtly shamed and snubbed by the senior members of the community until they learn to like the right (-angled) things.

To illustrate these cult dynamics, he describes the notorious “crit”: a rite of passage in which architecture students are required to “pin up their work in front of an audience of tutors, visiting experts and peers, and then defend it as it’s publicly critiqued” (266). Students describe this experience with words like “‘dread’, fear’, ‘devastating’, ‘scary’, ‘stress’, ‘confrontation’ and ‘hell’”.

The dynamic of the crit is not confined to the crit. Heatherwick knows well that simply questioning the monoculture of modern architecture will provoke condemnations: one is ignorant, unscientific, ego-driven, a far-right reactionary, etc.

At this point, I began to think of philosophy. Has philosophy also suffered a blandemic? I’ve written about the blandness (as I see it) of most contemporary peer-reviewed publications in philosophy. The words Heatherwick uses to describe boring architecture—flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, and serious—seem readily extended to much contemporary academic philosophy. I have also written about how peer-review—a “crit” run on every piece of philosophical writing—functions to bring about this result:

Anything daring or original is filtered out, either through preemptive self-censorship or in the process itself. What is left is a bland broth of featureless, technocratic, box-ticking.

So the question of whether Heatherwick’s story might apply to philosophy emerged in my mind as I read. It intensified when Heatherwick recounted how different his own experience—he had been building and working with materials since childhood—was from the that of the architecture students he met, who had never mixed concrete, done wood joinery, laid bricks, or welded. This resonated with my experience of academic philosophers, seeking to influence policy without ever having written any, making hortatory pronouncements about renewable energy without understanding DC-to-AC conversion or knowing what a synchronous condenser does (let alone having ever worked on a pylon), or talking volumes about “oppressed groups” without knowing any of their members.

The question intensified as I came to the description of the “crit”. And then I came upon Heatherwick’s story about when he himself was invited to participate in one of them:

As I arrived in the architectural school, I had no idea about the work I’d be judging. I walked into a lecture hall to find seventeen nervous students preparing to defend their work to their tutors and me, the visiting expert. When I sat down I was told we’d be assessing their latest project. I wondered what it might be.

Had they been working on a block of flats in an environmentally sensitive location? An inner-city school on a tricky plot of land? A hospital on half the standard budget?

‘What’s the project’ I asked tentatively.

‘A house on the side of a cliff face in the zero-gravity context of the moon'.

I had been pondering the question of whether modern architecture suffers from some of the same pathologies of academic philosophy. I didn’t think to ask whether they are in fact two different things at all. Even the scientific inaccuracy of the outlandish thought experiment (zero gravity?) was painfully familiar.

I know that philosophy is much less important than architecture. But in some ways, I think, philosophy is the architecture of the mind. Citizens and scientists all live and work in a built environment of concepts designed by philosophers. Recent academic philosophy has built an environment of clean lines and abstract examples—sterilised thought produced by pure thinkers who have rarely got their hands dirty in the ordinary business of the world: the conceptual equivalent of a house on the Moon. Peer-reviewed publications are plain, shiny boxes, ephemeral because they are interchangeable (up-to-date scholars know to cite Jones 2024 rather than Smith 1996 for the most cutting-edge version of the exact same idea). Like modern architecture, recent philosophy seems to have confused a modern and scientific attitude with the expulsion of all ornate and grotesque elements. Again, degenerate funding models and bureaucratisation have played their significant part in this. But, again, the preferences of us the participants play their part too.

A boring, inhuman conceptual environment saps and demoralises the spirit just as a boring physical environment does. It leaves the mind’s eye casting hopelessly for stimulation around blank surfaces and repeated shapes.

Perhaps Heatherwick’s humanise campaign should be carried over from the attribute of Extension to the attribute of Thought.