Designer Thomas Heatherwick seeks to humanise architecture: he built the British Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and says Hong Kong’s boring buildings are ‘saved by nature’ – interview

Thomas Heatherwick wants to banish boredom from the built environment. “We’re living through a quiet, global catastrophe of boring buildings that make us sick, stressed and depressed, while simultaneously destroying our planet,” reads the homepage of the English designer’s Humanise campaign, launched in October 2023. His book, Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World, was published the same month.

In Hong Kong last December for Business of Design Week (BODW), Heatherwick delivered the keynote “Humanising Cities: A Thousand-Year Vision”. He also held a book signing supported by Hong Kong designer Kai-yin Lo, who describes herself as “an admirer and friend” of the founder of London-based Heatherwick Studio.

On the sidelines at BODW, Style put it to Heatherwick that humanising cities is a noble goal, but how does it stand up to the commercial considerations omnipresent in our world? When it comes to “the commercial side and the public-quality side”, Heatherwick says: “I refuse to see them as in opposition because I think that it can only make business sense to make places that are loved by people.”

As he made these remarks, China-based developer CR Land and Heatherwick Studio were on the verge of launching the Xi’an Centre Culture Business District (CCBD), which opened in December 2024 in the northwestern Chinese city.

The studio’s designers were inspired by Xi’an’s famous Terracotta Army to use Chinese ceramic tiles as cladding across the project’s major structures. Textured and patterned, the tiles’ unique glaze has a “hand-finished fascination” when viewed close up, adds Heatherwick. And while paving “tends to be very gridded”, he says, for the Xi’an CCBD, his team drew inspiration from the organic form of ginkgo leaves to produce paving stones resembling “fans that welcome you into doorways”, but also, “create a bigger textural pattern that’s softer”.

The “heart of the development”, he says, is the Xi’an Tree – an 18-storey vertical park. To create the park’s multiple gardens, Heatherwick Studio selected seven types of plant from the seven regions of the world connected by the Maritime Silk Route.

The concept ties into Xi’an too: as the capital of the Chinese Empire for more than 1,000 years, it was an important stop on the Silk Route, a major overland link between China and Europe for centuries. “On that route are seven different biomes with different types of plants – so we made seven different types of garden,” Heatherwick explains.