Designer Thomas Heatherwick has a book coming out this week that is about how most buildings suck:

Heatherwick’s reticence makes his latest work more surprising. He is launching a 10-year campaign against the “catastrophe” of how buildings are built. Our cities, he argues, are in the grip of an “epidemic of boringness”. Most modern buildings are too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous and too serious. They make us unhappy and ill, they make us not want to come into the office.

In his book Humanise, out on Thursday, Heatherwick derides architects as members of a modernist “cult”, which indoctrinates them during their seven-year training into thinking they don’t need the public’s approval. The result is the UK’s commercial buildings are so unloved that they have an average lifespan of perhaps 50 years, leading to huge carbon emissions as they are replaced.

I haven’t read it yet, but something tells me that I’ll probably agree with some/many aspects of the book and be annoyed by others.

What I’ll likely agree with is that our cities should be more playful, beautiful, and creative. They should be more human. And we should be more daring.

But what I’ll likely be annoyed by is the impracticality of the proposed approach(es). There are markets. There exists money. And there are reasons why many of Heatherwick’s projects are “luxury” ones.

Or maybe I’m just being cynical and I should wait and see.

Here’s a link to the book.