From conceptual work to photographs and videos to drawings and more, the jury is reviewing entries to Architizer's 2025 Vision Awards. Keep tabs on the world's best architectural representation by clicking here.
If you work in architecture or design, you’ve probably had someone ask why we can’t just build the way we did 150 years ago. Why can’t we have Victorian townhouses, balustrades, cornices — a sense that a human hand was involved? Why concrete, why brutalism, why is everything glass and grey panel?
In these types of situations, my instinct has always been to reach for history. To explain the post-World War II housing crisis, the rupture of fascists who had weaponized neoclassical aesthetics, and the genuine idealism of the modern movement. But all these explanations are entrenched in architectural discourse; the other explanation, one that is ever-present, isn’t about style or architecture at all. It’s about land value, development finance, procurement models, and the fact that many buildings cost money to build but don’t generate revenue. Architects, in other words, have interesting ideas that fall on deaf ears.
In recent years, Thomas Heatherwick’s book, Humanise became a hot topic of conversation amongst designers. Yet, architects and designers who assumed the book was addressed to them, or blamed them for the ‘boring’ buildings it critiques, missed the point. Many didn’t realize that the publication was simply the jumping-off point for a larger campaign aimed at generating social and policy change in the coming decade.
“We’ve got this big goal of sparking 10 million conversations,” says Abigail Scott Paul, Global Head of Humanise. “By that I mean engaging 10 million people worldwide in the issue — evidence that there are individuals and organizations demanding change.”
Edgewood Mews by Peter Barber Architects, London, England | Image Asif Salman
Though set up by Heatherwick Studio, the campaign operates as its own entity, separate from his practice. It has three focuses: research, action from those with money and power, and public debate.
Because the strapline of the campaign is that human beings need human buildings, the debate has mistakenly been framed as something stylistic or aesthetic. Yet, the research element documents efforts to quantify the argument. Through 80 global studies looking at neuroscience, cognitive science, environmental psychology and urban studies, it draws together key themes on how the shape of buildings impacts our brains, our bodies and behaviors.
A great deal of resources have been expended on the study of the public realm or on interiors, but Humanise is focused on the threshold area where building meets street. Most people experience buildings passing by them. So, while architects and culture at large have derided façadism, it’s been a blind spot in terms of research and design impact. (Biophilic design rests on quantified claims about what greenery and daylight do to stress and cognition. Applying the same rigor to the generic building is hardly reductive; it’s overdue.)
La Confluence, Lyon | Image dvoevnore
This research is then mobilized to address two key audiences: the first is developers, city leaders and commissioners. Yet, as Scott Paul articulates: “We don’t necessarily think it needs loads more legislation or regulation. It’s really about our mindset shift and this idea that emotion is a function of design, that buildings do impact people in ways that affect their well-being.”
How does the public feel about their community? How do they feel themselves in that place? Do they feel connected? Do they feel a sense of pride or a sense of joy about where they live?
More people are fed up; we’re watching our social bonds and communities erode as the flames of division are fed by algorithmic content. Meanwhile, the sense of lack of pride in where we live is starting to spill into public life.
The 21st century has seen the rise of the mayor, with the public increasingly aware of what good city governance can do for daily life. And in the UK and other places, spatial planning authority is devolving to metro mayors, who can set the standards and expectations for a better type of development.
To this end, Humanise’s recently published The Mayors’ Guide: How to Build Back Joy and Belonging, which aims to address the severe lack of design capability and understanding in many mayoral authorities. While they’re not responsible for the design of individual buildings, public officials can craft a long-term vision for how a place should feel and let it shape spatial development strategy. They can embed real design expertise in mayoral teams, potentially through a City Architect and use public investment, land and procurement to set the standard rather than merely hoping developers will.
Kidbrooke Park Road, London by HTA for Greenwich Council Image HTA
The second audience is the public (those are the 10 million conversations). Alongside materials and forms, communications and media have significantly changed the public perception of buildings. Thirty years ago, architecture was consumed in print, not on screens, and places like RIBA had a press office with dedicated architecture and design correspondents.
With the rise of social media, we’ve seen a seismic change in how the public consumes and assesses design. Yet, we’re now witnessing the disappearance of criticality. People scroll past thousands of images of buildings and public spaces daily without stopping to really consider the implications of what they’re seeing. How do we reengage them? The profession needs demystifying, and public awareness will be crucial to push for building the cultural conditions in which city leaders and developers are pushed to act.
Most of the discussion around the built environment happens behind closed doors, and the campaign seeks to change that. Using public surveys, the team behind Humanise is genuinely trying to surface what ordinary people think. In one of their public attitude surveys, three in four people in the UK said buildings impact their mental health.
At the end of the day, “Heatherwick Studio works on, I don’t know, maybe the 1% of buildings,” Scott Paul says, “The campaign is very much about the 99%. It’s not about the iconic or the big, the expensive. It’s very much about how we improve the everyday buildings and get them a bit better.”
The campaign ran a poll with three different versions of an imaginary new town: One based on a traditional Edwardian look (top); a standard design today (middle); and a more contemporary version of the traditional brick façade (bottom). The results were 50-50 — people liked the old (top) and the new (bottom), but no one wanted the one in the middle.
By now, we’re all aware of the outsized carbon impact the AEC industry has on the planet. If we ever want to be truly sustainable, no number of solar panels or geothermal heating will allow us to reach that bar; that will only happen if we can break the demolition and rebuild cycle. To do that, we should be designing buildings that will both last and that people love. Decades in the future, would you fight to preserve most of the buildings going up in your neighborhood? People need to care about architecture to adopt this mindset.
We spend a great deal of time in this profession studying movements that tried to imagine other ways of building. We look at the idealism of modernism or the radicality of the Metabolists, then we ask why nobody is doing this today. Rather than a speculative drawing or a verbose manifesto, Heatherwick Studio has built out an advocacy campaign complete with a research program — a decade-long commitment to changing the conditions under which buildings get commissioned rather than just the buildings themselves. By turning the conversation from what architects want to what everyone deserves, the campaign gives the profession a rare tool: a shared vocabulary for what better looks like.
Architects love to lament those design details that are cut due to client budget; part of the job is trying to convince those on the other end that they should care about good design. Heatherwick’s Humanise campaign isn’t advocating that everyone design one-off monuments in his style; rather, it’s about educating users, clients and stakeholders to ask for more and expect more of their built environment.
From conceptual work to photographs and videos to drawings and more, the jury is reviewing entries to Architizer's 2025 Vision Awards. Keep tabs on the world's best architectural representation by clicking here.
Top image: La Confluence, Lyon; image by dvoevnore
