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. That sense of place is typical of the designer, who describes the features of his built environment – such as the rounded drop kerbs at Hong Kong’s Pacific Place – as intentionally warm and welcoming. Heatherwick has long had strong links with China. He’s been to Hong Kong more than 100 times, and one of his studio’s most famous projects to this day is the British Pavilion he designed for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Dubbed the Seed Cathedral – and resembling a fluffy dandelion seed head – the building housed 250,000 seeds, held in pods at the tips of 60,000 transparent rods. Projecting inside and outside the structure, the rods quivered in the breeze, only increasing the resemblance to a dandelion. The seeds were sourced from Yunnan province’s Kunming Institute of Botany, a partner in London-based Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank project. “We had half the budget of the other Western nations, and we were told that out of 250 pavilions, we had to be in the top five,” he says. “We hyper-focused, tuning in to what we imagined people would be feeling when walking around a vast expo site with – in effect – 250 museums. You could spend a week looking around just one of the main museums in London. And so you had 250 museums, telling you too much.” Heatherwick says the team were successful because they followed key principles: choosing one thing to showcase, and showcase well (in this case, the Millennium Seed Bank project); and avoiding clichés. “Don’t talk about Sherlock Holmes again; don’t talk about the queen again, or castles, or red buses … And it’s not even true that it rains all the time in Britain. Let’s say something fresh, and let’s only say that one thing. “We managed to make the British government be brave and understand that if we did what they thought was safe, it would have been the riskiest thing you could do because people wouldn’t come.” Not only was the British Pavilion one of the most popular at the expo, it also scooped the gold award for best pavilion design (in the largest size category) bestowed by the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions. Above all, the pavilion prefigured the Humanise campaign, which Heatherwick says, “is all about trying to really tune in to what has meaning for people – what connects, what fascinates – and to not see that as a luxury”. Sustainable design doesn’t have to mean breaking the bank either, according to the designer, but rather, “using the money we have better”. “There is a misunderstanding in construction. People say, ‘Oh, it’s more expensive than ever to build buildings’ – and that’s not actually true,” he says. “Relative to the money in society, buildings are cheaper than they’ve ever been – a bit like ultra-processed food … We didn’t have roads, cranes, lorries in the past; labour is more expensive now, but there are all these other factors.” One thing human beings make a habit of is learning how to make things more cheaply, whether food or buildings. “We also discovered that cheaper food isn’t actually good for our health – and we haven’t got there with buildings,” Heatherwick notes. “Cheaper buildings are not good for the planet and they’re not good for our health, and actually we need to spend a little bit more – but only a little bit – and I think the next few years are about really proving that we can make buildings radically more human for only a little bit more money.” He adds that making buildings environmentally sustainable also means spending just “a little bit more” – but that a building is only sustainable when people “care enough to sustain it”. And what about Hong Kong: how guilty are we of erecting “boring” buildings, according to Heatherwick? “Well, in Hong Kong, you’re blessed with your mountains,” he says. “There are some really boring buildings sitting against the most gorgeous mountain, and the mountain saves it – just saves it. It creates drama, and it creates a human scale at door distance just because of the plants, because of the topography, the three-dimensional landscape. “My breath is taken away often when I’m going around Hong Kong and you come around the bend in a taxi and there’s the drama of technically a boring building, saved by nature.”