Pearl Lam: Good morning, Thomas. So nice to have you here today. And congratulations for your, for your baby. Twins. Now, I think I know you, many of the people knows about you, but can you give a brief about yourself to the, to the people watching this who don’t know about you?

Thomas Heatherwick: So, my name is Thomas Heatherwick. I’m a designer and I’ve had my studio for 29 years. And we design mainly buildings, but also we’ve worked on the London bus. We’ve designed bridges and products, but we’re very and increasingly interested in cities and the buildings that surround us and their impact on us. And more and more we’re getting chances to work at a city scale and think about how people will feel when you make new districts.

Pearl Lam: When you look out here, you have Tower of London, which is built in 11th century and then redone in 16th century by Henry VIII. So, and then you have the Tower bridge and then you have the shard. What do you think about these buildings?

Thomas Heatherwick: I think we’re talking about amazing buildings. And the thing is that when we talk about architecture, we so often talk about the amazing examples rather than focusing on the everyday buildings that are all around. So, I mean, the Tower of London is coming up for its thousandth anniversary, which is pretty amazing. And it’s been a zoo, it’s been a jail, it’s been so many different things. It’s been able to adapt and change. And, I mean, it’s very extreme because it’s a palace, but it’s a good provocation as to how do we make buildings that are worth keeping for a thousand years.

Pearl Lam: Before I jump into your book, humanize, I want to first ask you about your most famous London bus. I remember there were days we were talking about it and I told you, what is nice about the bus is when the doors are open, you just jump in into the bus. And I remember when your bus start rolling around London, I went on the bus to try it out and I love it. So tell me all about the bus before we went and talked about our big topic today.

Thomas Heatherwick: Well, we were thrilled when we were asked to design the bus. And it’s interesting because the buses that used to exist seemed to support the dignity of the passengers. And then for most of my lifetime, the buses that were being made, you could see that the priorities of the leaders of the transportation authorities was just how many people you got across to a certain place at a certain time. They weren’t really thinking about the feelings of those people and many people, their emotions and thinking of emotion as a metric that you needed to care about. And imagine someone who works for 30 years and takes the bus there every day, spends half an hour on a bus there, half an hour on the way back for 30 years. Does that experience add to their life or be nothing, or actually take something away from their life? And my passion is the public bits of the world we share around us. And it seemed that even the lighting had become like a battery chicken farm. And there were lessons from interior design that are totally normal for any interior designer that weren’t being applied to buses. So the thing I’m actually proudest about is that we put warm light that makes your skin tissue look good to your girlfriend and your girlfriend looks good to you. I mean, why wouldn’t you do that? But there were all the different regulations and they’d started to dominate and people had forgotten that you can meet regulations, but be human at the same time.

Pearl Lam: Your now very famous book, highly controversial show, is humanized. Tell me more about that book.

Thomas Heatherwick: Well, I suppose in the past, manifestos tended to be pushing one style or another style.

Pearl Lam: Explain what I mean.

Thomas Heatherwick: I don’t feel that I’m pushing any style, and I’m not arguing that less is more and form follows function and ornament is a crime. I’m really looking from the human perspective at human’s need for more diversity, not more homogeneity. And in the past we’ve had manifestos that push that it should all be one way or all be another way. I’m arguing for more diversity. And we’ve got into some weird kind of mindset that the buildings being produced are astonishingly similar. And the repetition of flatness, shininess, monotony, and the terror of using anything other than a straight line and has combined with cheapness and I a narrative that this is how you make cities. And I know that in the world of art, I mean the world of art, that you know better than anybody, the work of different creative people is so varied. But when you come to the world of architecture in general, and I’m not talking about shards and Sydney opera houses, the 99% of all the other buildings are almost look like they’re made by the same firm.

Pearl Lam: But don’t you think that this is confined by budget? And I understand that when you did your Cape Town, this amazing museum, you were given very little budget, but you still make a fascinating architecture structure there. But I think a lot of the developers actually managed the architect, gave them very limited budget and tell them that they have to build for every square, they have to utilize every square feet. And that is why they have all these square buildings, no curve, and then because they want to have cheap construction. Don’t you think this is one of the biggest problem, that after the second world War, we use modernism to mass produce architecture? Because you just have to be building fast architecture. I mean, buildings to house people. And that becomes the trend.

Thomas Heatherwick: Well, you put your finger on it. You said fast architecture, fast architecture. And we now know the downsides to fast fashion. And we’ve had exactly the same going on with buildings where if we talk about nutrition, we now understand better than ever that the nutritional qualities of food really matter. And society, from having accepted very low nutritional, mass produced food, is now much more picky and understanding. We have to be careful what we put in our bodies. But in a sense, this same thing is now something I’m trying to sensitize. And there are lots of other people too, not just me, that in the world around us, buildings have nutritional value for our minds.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely.

Thomas Heatherwick: And buildings that aren’t nutritionally valuable for our minds. And we are talking about, even royal family is talking about mental health, but we haven’t discussed that in relation to our buildings. But the buildings that these fast buildings also get pulled down fast. We’re in London. The average age of a commercial building in the UK is only 40 years. So if I was a commercial building, I would have been killed 13 years ago. And the greenhouse gas emissions involved in construction are five times that of aviation. We talk about aviation industry and debate whether to fly, but we do not debate whether we are making buildings that are worth society saying, no, don’t knock that down. And we’ve got to remember that when we design a building, it won’t be me saying, don’t knock it down in 40 years. How do I design something that people I don’t even know now, possibly, who aren’t even born, will fight to say, well, maybe don’t knock that down. Why don’t you repair it or adjust it, or adapt it, or extend it? Because imagine demolishing these two thirds of the waste in the UK is construction waste. I know it’s phenomenal, but nobody knows. It’s like this dirty secret that isn’t discussed.

Pearl Lam: I was thinking, hey, you know, our lifestyle is always changing. Technology affects our lifestyle, buildings before we have Wi Fi, all of a sudden we have Wi Fi. Things has been knocked down, down and built in with Wi Fi. Our life, you know how, you know, before the houses are much bigger, now it’s smaller. So obviously this gives all the reasons for people to knock down something and to rebuild it.

Thomas Heatherwick: What we actually need is flexible buildings

Pearl Lam: I love it. Flexible buildings

Thomas Heatherwick: One expression used in the architectural profession is long life, loose fit and think about warehouse buildings. Some of the most loved buildings to work in, to live in, and they weren’t even designed for humans to occupy. They were there to store cinnamon or to store bananas, but they were flexible and they had good quality materials and we recycle and reuse those buildings because they have decent ceiling heights and they’re just robust. They’re robust. So it’s not about. So it’s about building buildings with enough character but also enough flexibility that it’s worth adapting. And, you know, if you ask people what they would want, I mean, I’m just trying to think of a good example like McDonald’s. If you ask McDonald’s for their dream shop, and I’m not an advocate or anything for or against them, they might say a certain ceiling height, how big they want the glass, and say, you know, you have to give us that. But then you go to some of the historic town centres and see one of the 400 year old buildings where McDonald’s has squeezed into it.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely.

Thomas Heatherwick: And they’re some of the most special of that well known international food chain because we actually love to adapt. Humans are adapters. And this building of generic, boring, characterless buildings, weirdly, that we can think they’re being flexible, but if nobody loves them, they at some point are much more likely than a building that has personality and character to be taken down.

Pearl Lam: But, Thomas, don’t you think that to have a great building, you need to have a great developer who create this communication with you and inspire and then you work together to create a great building. But most of the developers today, you know, they just want to make money, right?

Thomas Heatherwick: I think that developers know, I mean, it makes commercial sense in many ways to make places that people might love. There is no formula for what love looks like, but utter characterlessness nobody’s going to care about. Even though you think you’re making something for everybody, you’re not. So the book is for city planners, it’s for property developers, but most of all, it’s for all of us, because they will listen if they feel that we’re all speaking us all as the public together. Because one story that’s been told, and this really bugged me every time I felt it was the construction industry spoke as if the public are ignorant, always like. And there was even a debate in a London club of top leaders in the world of architecture and they debated do the opinions of the public matter? And they debated it. And at the very end they took a vote. And just by a few votes, the vote that won was that the opinions of the public don’t matter. How can you possibly say that? I mean, actually, every single one of us is an expert on buildings. We’ve spent our entire life in buildings in and around them, but we may not be articulate. So I suppose at the root of this humanized direction and campaign is the logic that emotion is a function. This slogan, form follows function is very powerful. And I believe in that. I follow that too. But I realized, and the act of writing the book made me realize that more clearly than ever, emotion is a function. You know, I’m interested in how things function, but you won’t make a functional place if you don’t think about the emotion of the users. Function isn’t just stopping the rain coming in and giving you good daylight.

Pearl Lam: Forms follow. Function is an, is built as an objective over 100 years ago. And when there’s no computer, no software to create all these amazing designs with curves and all that, do I believe forms for a function? No, I don’t. Today you don’t need forms for the function. Do you have a computer for software? How would a friend, Gary, create this Bilbao museum without a software? So really forms for the function? Up to today, we’re still talking about it. I think it’s a little bit passe. You know, some of the things that I read, some of your, some of the media comments, they talk about Mies van der Rose, but all that was so long ago. I mean, our contemporary life is changing, our lifestyle is changing. Why are we still following an architect ideas or manifesto more than 100 years ago? So I think what I mean,

Thomas Heatherwick: Guess we’re following it because it’s cheaper.

Pearl Lam: Yeah.

Thomas Heatherwick: So we’ve had this perfect story that we can tell ourselves. Property developers can tell themselves, city officials can tell themselves, and the designers of buildings can tell themselves, but it’s like a cultural revolution.

Pearl Lam: So I thought that your book, at least what they are doing is it brings attention and makes people aware of what is going on. And it’s great that people are actually discussing about it.

Thomas Heatherwick: That’s great. I don’t mind if people don’t agree with everything that’s in the book.

Pearl Lam: Of course it is.

Thomas Heatherwick: The purpose is to make architecture books normally go to the echo chamber of building designers, talking to building designers. And so society is left out of that because of this sort of emphasis on professionalized language. And it became inaccessible. So the book is deliberately hyper accessible. It’s got more than 400 images. It’s written, I hope, in an enjoy us entertaining way. But underneath it all, the most important thing is this kind of conversation. But the campaign that started the humanized campaign by a whole group of us is really just trying to start 10 million conversations. It’s from those conversations that different ways of just talking will leak into the way society refers to buildings. What we ask ourselves and what we ask of the buildings and things happening around us.

Pearl Lam: Last time I read a the only book that really criticized about modernism, in Tom Wolf book from. From Bauhaus to my house, and that was really the last time. But it’s written by a writer, not a professional. So obviously what you’ve written, I mean, everybody is thinking about it, but no one dares to voice, voice and discuss about it. And I think it’s a great thing. But you really use some very, very provocative description like boredom epidemic. I love this boredom and epidemic. Can you elaborate on this boredom epidemic?

Thomas Heatherwick: Well, it’s true. I mean, it sounds provocative that I’m not holding back from saying something that’s true, that we’ve been engulfed in characterless buildings all over the world. This isn’t just the UK and we all know it, but nobody’s talking about it. And there’s a professional industry that sort of keeps this over to one side. And unless society speaks, nothing will happen. And I learned that when I was very lucky to talk to the former chief medical officer of Great Britain. And I asked her, why are hospitals and care homes and clinics some of the worst places any of us will ever experience? And she said, well, you’ve got to understand, no one’s really in charge of the whole health service. There’s separate health trusts. But the only way change will happen is with patient pull. I remember thinking, patient pull? What does that mean? And she said, look, actually, and this is my interpretation of what she said, was that leaders don’t really lead. Good leaders listen. And until the patients speak up and say, well, look, there’s a cancer care centre there that was in Manchester or Leeds or wherever that is, that’s really good. Like you’re building a new one. Have you seen that one? That’s how leaders follow, is when they feel that there’s a groundswell of public conversation. We had terrible quality of school lunches in the UK, and then somebody drew attention to that. Society started talking about it and change happened. But there’s no national conversation, and there hasn’t been for 40 years, since the now king of the United Kingdom spoke about buildings at that time. The conversation was very binary. It was, do we carry on doing modern buildings like we see them now, or do we go back to the past? And I don’t believe we need to go back to the past. I think we can create contemporary new creative visions that are progressive of the future, that don’t need to have negative effects on our mental health.

Pearl Lam: But would you? You know, I understand that you have created something called boring meter. So will you be creating a building in accordance to the boring meter?

Thomas Heatherwick: The boring omitter is a provocation, but it’s a serious piece of software that we’ve been developing in my studio, which was just deliberately. It’s software, it’s deliberately trying to look at two of the main measurable metrics that have a big impact on whether buildings are characterless or not. And one of them is how flat a building is, and the other one is how monotonous a building is. And so we developed a bit like those pin. You know, the pin toys that you sometimes see children have. They push their face into, or you push your hand into. They probably, I’m sure your viewers have seen them all over the world, those you push them in, and all the little pins leave the shape. So we’ve created a digital version that you push into the design of a building and all the pins adjust to the shape and particularly the bottom two floors, because that’s where your emotion is more. And they pull that out and it measures the diverse positioning of the points and it also can measure how much repetition there is. And it ascribes a score to that between one and ten. And it’s surprisingly so. The reason for saying it like that is it’s not caring whether there are curves, it’s not caring whether something’s straight lines, it’s not caring whether something’s old fashioned. It’s just measuring three dimensionality and repetition. But it’s a very good indicator of things that go towards boring. Obviously, it’s not measuring every aspect, and we found it spookily accurate. We’ve been looking at historic buildings and we’ve tried a few hundred different buildings, and it tends to correlate with what you, or I would think would agree are more boring. I mean, almost every new office building gets one because they’re so flat and so absent of three dimensional detail. So the book is deliberately trying to kick off what I hope will be a lot more research into the impact of buildings, because there are now researchers, neuroscientists, really looking at what buildings that are that flat have on our autoimmune response to place and noticing how we, our bodies start going into stress. It’s not a question of niceness, because it sounds like you notice we’ve not spoken, and I really like we’ve not mentioned the word beauty in this conversation at all, because there has been conversation about buildings, but it tends to say ugly, beautiful. And in a way, I’m not arguing that the world needs to be so incredibly beautiful, great if it is. And I do think many of us do actually agree on what beauty is. But what I’m trying to do is just influence as best I can a conversation that stops mind numbingly boring from happening, because that has impacts on our mental health, that has impacts on healing and our societal health and even crime. But in the big way, all of that adds up to also something very powerful in the climate crisis and these buildings, if nobody loves them, and it’s very soppy, sentimental thing to say, if people don’t care about things enough, they will not mind, they won’t protest if a city or a developer wants.

Pearl Lam: The problem is when I go to different cities, they all look the same.

Thomas Heatherwick: So you have that.

Pearl Lam: Yeah. The homogeneity to create. I mean, when you have everywhere you travel, that homogeneity is really irritating. And I think it’s great that you are making people aware and making people talk about it. And when I read through your book, one thing that you mentioned about door distances, something I don’t understand why door and door distances is one of the, I mean, one of the elements which is important.

Thomas Heatherwick: Explain that. I’m really happy you’ve asked me about that.

Pearl Lam: Yeah.

Thomas Heatherwick: The book tries to show tools to have how to think about buildings, because we tend to have a very basic conversation. And if you talk about architecture in London, people just talk about the shard, the gherkin. What they’re not talking about is the building just behind the shard or the one just to the right of the gherkin. Those buildings have made a real effort. And the biggest impact that buildings have on ourselves is when you’re close up is where you really feel emotion from a distance. You have certain feelings, but where millions of us are walking around on streets or on bicycles or in buses, on scooters, whatever that, or in taxis in your case, or whatever it is, that’s where you really feel the atmosphere of a street. And that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t care about how tall the building is. Hong Kong teaches that it doesn’t care whether the top is rounded or the top is spiky. And in general, we find new buildings. The bit the door handles, the repetition of just big, flat pieces of glass, aluminium paneling and silicon feel the same. And often the things people love about old buildings are tiny details. They’re just the way somebody molded something into the wall. The way for some reason, there’s a bit put into the wall for scraping your shoes, the way there’s just a slight curve, the way the window was divided. And that is a scale that isn’t expensive in the big picture of making buildings, it’s not expensive to change that. So I’m not saying we need to turn every building into Sydney opera house and do crazy shapes that look great from helicopters. The opposite, actually. We need to unleash the creativity of building designers and millions of collaborators, because you know that there are, in the world of artists, the buildings used to be big collaborations and involve hundreds of craftsmen and artists. And we had a cultural revolution where we threw all of that away with the idea. There was sort of one genius who designed each building, which is nonsense. They’re massive collaboration, but we need more creative input and which can be textures and details. And I just think it’s such a shame that almost whatever building, it’s got very similar door handle, very similar piece of glass, that the atmosphere isn’t about big shapes, it’s actually more about the tiny details at street level. And that’s what you feel when you’re walking around every new city.

Pearl Lam: Okay, another question for you is, you call Le Corbusier the God of boredom. Actually, I thought, number one, you are very daring. Number two, I thought, you know, during the time when he’s making these modern, square shape, white building, he’s building, building among an art nouveau building with a lot of elements. So when you go to his building, you actually feel, wow, this is so special, because there’s nothing like his sort of buildings. So at that point in time, you wouldn’t find it boredom. You will find it is very avant garde. I mean, we are talking about 1920s, 1910s, which was during the Art Deco period, and so he went extreme. So taking this and into context, I can’t see that he is the God. He was or he is God of boredom.

Thomas Heatherwick: So the reason that, I mean, I call him the God of boring in the book is that he’s the paradox.

Pearl Lam: Yes.

Thomas Heatherwick: He designed arguably one of the best buildings of the last century. Well, a whole, a few that were not absolutely brilliant. Brilliant to genius level brilliance. But what we need to talk about is what he wrote and what he advocated for. Because. And the book goes into that, we go into the seven beliefs of Le Corbusier, because actually what was more influential than his buildings was what he wrote. And in what he wrote, what he wrote advocated mass boredom. Because he said, don’t have a silhouette on the skyline with spies. Make a straight line. Now imagine now if we looked out and you chopped off everything that wasn’t a straight, a horizontal straight line, this would be mind numbingly boring around us. He called it a ragged, tumultuous gash on the skyline. For example, he said we should get rid of streets and that cafes are the fungus on the streets that should be abolished. I mean, can you imagine streets without cafes? It’s ridiculous. But he’s been taken so seriously and I think that we have to separate the brilliance of his small handful of buildings from his mass influence and cult like following that still carries on so much today without anyone fully clearing the sort of gentle things going. Well, I’ve got a slight problem with his urbanism. He wanted to destroy every old town of every city.

Pearl Lam: But what he’s written was a reaction of that period of time. I don’t know how that period of time and how France was like, whether there’s enormous cafe, I don’t know. But he was looking at all those very ornate buildings. And then he’s just wanted. Because his whole idea is simplifying everything. And also he’s a socialist. To make everything like a socialist building.

Thomas Heatherwick: Well, he’s not really. He was that. That’s the thing, is that his best buildings weren’t simplifying everything. They were actually very complex and very sophisticated. But he advocated this simplifying, which we now know, that human brains go into negative place when exposed to this absence of complexity. You know, we talk about biophilia. Our brains need the complexity. We restore the attention of ourselves when we look out at the leaves on trees. There’s all sorts of studies showing actually that complexity is really important for our health. And one of the things that he really got wrong, and I can imagine the zeal after the second world war of feeling that we had had all these problems of slums and things like that, was the misunderstanding of what a slum even really was. If you take one of the villas in Notting Hill here in London, fill it with eight families or nine families, which is what was happening, you call it a slum, put one family in it, it’s suddenly a luxury. One of the most expensive houses in London. There’s these what a slum is and isn’t. He was chucking out the baby with the bath water by this puritanical mindset that wanted to simplify and didn’t understand how our human emotion to place really is when you do it at scale. And the mimickers, the problem is everyone who mimicked him, I mean, Mies van der Rohe did some incredibly beautifully refined, simple buildings. The problem is, leave them like that. Let them be that. Don’t repeat them endlessly. Don’t make this like some dictat that everywhere on the planet has to be the same, the same of anything. Wouldn’t be good if I did everything on the planet. That won’t be good if Corbusier did everything on the planet. What we need, humans need, is the diversity that is us. And that’s the thing that the humanize campaign is really arguing, is for just more diversity. It’s interesting that just like in the world of architecture, modernism is still very strong. And modernism affected poetry, modernism affected even hair styling. And it was very powerful as it moved into in the world of painting and sculpture and threw away the sort of sensory romantic ideas that had carried on for many centuries and moved to the brain, and it became very cerebral, the idea of challenging what art is. But the interesting thing is that we’ve been. How long can you keep challenging old ideas? But when that moved into the world of architecture, it’s a bit different, because you can be very challenging and provoke the mind in an artwork or in music with sort of dissonances that are not trying to just make you feel warm and glowy inside. They’re intellectually and possibly even painfully, somehow challenging. But you can take the headphones off, you can walk out of that concert hall, or you can walk away from the painting, or you don’t have to buy the painting or whatever, but you can still consume it, value it, and appreciate the intellectual challenge. Buildings are different, the buildings that surround us every day. In that you have no choice. They are the backdrop of your lives. They are societies, walls of the rooms of our lives. And so if something is very dissonant, there can potentially be impacts on our mental health over the long term, as there would be if you were forced to just look at Duchamp’s bottle rack all your life, or whatever it was. It’s interesting because modernism came in, and I was an amazing thing, because we’d been driven. Art had been very aesthetically driven. And then there was the intellect that had that. We just discovered the idea with Sigmund Freud, of the subconscious. We were learning about atomic structure. There was a revolution happening in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and that was driven by the brain in many ways. And so that same approach was taken to music, was taken to sculpture, was taken to painting. All the art forms suddenly thought, let’s not just connect with your heart, let’s challenge your brain. And architecture was very influenced by that. And thought, yeah, let’s challenge your brain. Why do we have to be pretty? Why do we have to look nice?

Pearl Lam: And also, it is about social change. It’s modernism.

Thomas Heatherwick: And this social change must have felt exhilarating to be in a time of such rapid change that was also connecting to science as well. But the thing that’s different with buildings is that a painting on a wall, you can walk away from a challenging piece of music that isn’t trying to romantically please you, but plays with dissonance. You can take the headphones off or you can walk out of the concert hall, but the walls of our lives, that buildings form this society’s backdrop, you can’t walk away from that. You go past it every day. And so there is some obligation as a building designer, almost like a yemenite public servant, somehow you’ve got a public service that you are doing and that you have to really think beyond just thinking that you are challenging society. You need to get the mix right. And I don’t pretend to have the answer, but the focus moved more to people on the insides of buildings, weirdly, which I think the world of building design wouldn’t say that. They would say, no, no, no. Aesthetics is very important. But there’s this word like vanity and stuff like that about outside. The diminishment of the value of outsides of buildings that was just dismissed as vanity and shallow, and that somehow the planning of the insides very purely was part of the function and purpose which it is. And I think insides of new buildings, the 99% of new buildings are very good. Almost every new building’s got good light, your circulation’s really good. But the outsides are the bit that feels like we’ve lost our understanding and ambition. But from a creative point of view, there’s so much potential. Buildings used to tell us about ourselves on the outside, and in many ways, paintings and sculpture and all the different art forms tell us about ourselves. But buildings got stuck and fixed and it was toxically cheaper. So you get fixed and stuck and what can you do once you’re stuck in that rug?

Pearl Lam: Architecture, you are still talking about aesthetic, I think conceptual painting aesthetic is not as important as an artist’s idea. So when paintings are too pretty or too aesthetically pleasing, it becomes decorative and.

Thomas Heatherwick: Scorned and scorned and scorned. Well, that’s the same with buildings. Same with buildings. Yet nobody would say I’m. You would never hear a building designer saying, I’m aspiring to make people all love and find my building decorative. Decoration is a killer word. I mean, I use the word decorative, but decoration, shock, you know, that seems like you are pandering to the masses.

Pearl Lam: Exactly. If you are talking about painting being decorative, that means decoration is scorned and is so low status.

Thomas Heatherwick: I think it’s really important to say, I don’t believe that they are mutually exclusive. I believe you can do things with a conceptual basis, but that’s just aware, of course you can, of the impact it has on people’s feelings. And aesthetics and decoration act a lot on your feelings. And we talk in society about emotional intelligence, Eq.

Pearl Lam: Emotions. Emotions, emotion, emotion. Seems that it runs through the threat of whatever you’re doing.

Thomas Heatherwick: Well, it’s because there’s a gap. There’s just this big gap, and it’s not been celebrated.

Pearl Lam: You’re right, because modernism is supposedly cold.

Thomas Heatherwick: And building design proudly says it’s the combination of art and science. And I actually believe it’s. It’s missing a trick. It’s neither been that artistic for many, many decades, nor that scientific. And actually, I think there’s a potential to cross both things by starting to take a more forensic look at how the biggest experiences of buildings, what their feelings are, so that we get some science. And then the really artistic time will happen when we respond to that in the millions of different ways that we know how to. Because people are automatically creative. We’re imaginative when provoked, and that provocation has been scorned. But we all know there’s a problem, and if we talk about it, we can make that change. One of the arguments that gets put against what I’m saying is like, oh, but we can. There’s lots of wonderful plants and there’s public art put there. And I experienced this when I started my studio. No one trusted me to design buildings. I was never given that opportunity, as any young designer never has that chance. It takes years. And so projects I did got called public art. And you knew what you were doing was a compensation for characterlessness in the buildings. So you were there as the compensator, like the handbag creator or the earring maker, to make an otherwise too plain, too flat, too shiny, setting be human in some way. So I think this idea of public art is a compensation, and it’s a shame. And I was with, I’m not advocating we shouldn’t have artworks in the public space, but they shouldn’t be there because they’re cheaper. It’s a cheaper way to make people care about a place than actually making the giant walls of the rooms of our lives have creativity and artistic expression and culture baked into them, too. And I was with a well known british artist, and a well known curator started saying, how are you doing with your public art and your public sculptures? And the well known british artist was there just saying, I don’t do public art. I am an artist and I do arthem. Public art isn’t a thing, it’s artworks in the public space.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely.

Thomas Heatherwick: And this idea that there’s this different thing called public art, he was responding strongly against that. And I think that I found that very interesting and sort of telling that there’s this sort of industry of decorating streets that’s acceptable, but putting culture into buildings somehow isn’t, because it’s then called decoration and decoration. Booze. Terrible thing you can do.

Pearl Lam: I think, you know, art in public spaces is important to cultivate different audience, different visitors. And I mean, it is very nice if you have a good minister of culture who knows how to allocate good public art or art in a public space in everywhere of the, and, and of the city, because it’s nice that younger generations start looking at these sculptures and want to be inspired. I think one of the art, I mean, one of the art and sculptures and all that is to inspire and cultivate a younger generation, making them, realizing that this may be a career, I want to be so. And I like the fact that there are countries like Singapore, whenever you developed a building, you have to take a certain percentage to buy in art in your buildings. So that gives a whole encouragement of the whole art world.

Thomas Heatherwick: But something inside me still thinks it’s a bit sad because there’s an art market that’s used to buying objects and selling objects, and that we never used to have to have these percentages spent on this separate thing called art. My passion is imagination in the world around us. And when you need a bus stop, why can’t that bus stop be something that triggers feelings and emotions? When you need seating, when you need even the curbs. Some of the most interesting creative moments are carved curbs, which have dates and.

Pearl Lam: Times in them, does not diminish or does not discourage any architect or anybody to make refined sculpture. I mean, refine door handles or architecture. I mean, it doesn’t.

Thomas Heatherwick: But actually that it’s the artists who may be the best person to do that. And if they’re sort of happily occupied making low risk interventions separate.

Pearl Lam: I like to make anything of functional objects, like doing a door handles. It’s not. This is designers, you know, artists, they like to. They like to make works that inspired you to think. Think in different ways, think about social changes, politics. Philosophy is not for practical.

Thomas Heatherwick: I think there’s room for both. I think there’s room for both, I think. But I think it’s a too easy get out. The reason I’m not sort of that interested in it is because it’s been a compensation. Do you know the expression? The expression the turd in the plaza? Yeah, but look, we’ve had that so much for so many decades.

Pearl Lam: I mean, look at your building, a thousand trees. And in Shanghai, you are incorporating all the artworks in your building.

Thomas Heatherwick: And that’s what I think that’s a one off project. But I think that there’s ways to incorporate and have major, meaningful collaborations with imaginative, creative people. When you say just door handles, that can be more significant than that.

Pearl Lam: I mean, of course, when you have a beauty, you are the. You are, you are. What is that called? It’s like an orchestra conduct.

Thomas Heatherwick: Like a conductor.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, you’re the conductor. That you can have all these people helping you all to create your artwork. Your building is your artwork. So obviously, you know, what we call the artwork in a public space or artwork in whatever place, doesn’t matter. It’s only a label.

Thomas Heatherwick: But it’s tricky because the art world has also got quite, I think, stuck on one mode of the very blank, neutral box which has suited, and I understand completely why, having zero expression in the building in order to let artworks stand out and be the main focus. And that’s kind of got so that perfectly works. There’s this sort of luxury modernism that goes on and on and on because that works with the art market, and it just keeps this sort of separation of buildings as sort of neutral backdrop, vanilla luxury in the art world separate from imaginative brilliance that is independent of function. And I believe that we shouldn’t have one thing or another, but there’s a lot more room for imaginative brains conceiving of the spaces that artwork could be in without diminishing the ability for things that want to be freestanding or independent to be there, too.

Pearl Lam: Look at the museum. You’ve done okay. The museum did not limit you because usually a museum should be just a square box. It didn’t limit you. The only reason why you need that square box is it’s easy to install. And you exactly what you said. You don’t take the attention away from the artwork looking at this beautiful design. But of course, if the artwork is strong, if you know how to correlate with the pose, it should work. But it’s because in a museum it’s flexible. You want a flexible fit space for any kind of art.

Thomas Heatherwick: And it’s also important to say that the humanize is about the outsides of buildings. In a sense, I think I’m a minimalist on insides, whereas outsides are the bits, which, because insides you can change with an inside, you can repaint it, you can get plants, you can get objects, and you can transform an inside, any one of us can, but outsides you can’t, you can’t get a crane, you can’t do something. And outsides affect a thousand times more people than the insides. So it’s very different. It’s a very different approach, insides to outsides.

Pearl Lam: Today we talk about diversity, today we talk about mental health, health and during their period, whether it’s caboose or mies, van Rose, the bathouse, we don’t talk about mental health.

Thomas Heatherwick: I mean, it’s interesting that it isn’t mental health professionals who’ve really connected more broadly with the public, it’s celebrities and people like Prince Harry. Believe it or not, talking about mental health has meant that it’s become more acceptable in society. And so it’s not the professionals, it’s actually society. And so mental health issues now in the workplace are taken very seriously. But we didn’t have mental health, we had a very top down approach to making cities.

Pearl Lam: People are embarrassed about mental health.

Thomas Heatherwick: And now mental health is starting to come more broadly into society. And my studio has done polling of 2000 people across the UK with an independent polling agency, and 76% of the public say that they believe buildings affect their mental health. So I’m quite excited that we’re at an early stage still. But it is a thing that even the critics who are sort of not unsurprisingly going to respond to the idea of this humanized movement and a pushback against an orthodoxy that exists there. But the. It’s a thing that they’re not disagreeing with, that there is a problem. We’ve got a problem in the general buildings being built around us, and we’ve got a problem in the profession, in how it’s got stuck. And I think that as we now move forward, we can do, we can go deeper into the research, because for one of the biggest industries ever in history, it’s the most unmeasured. You think of the finance industry, it measures the effectiveness of a dollar or a pound very precisely, but the effectiveness of buildings to the biggest experiences of them, the public all around is virtually unmeasured. Hardly anybody really looks at people’s feelings, and feelings are a big part of the success or failure of buildings. And we’re uncomfortable with it because it seems subjective. But you can see at mass, at mass scale, a story emerges. And what’s interesting is that people are now wearing smart devices that read their pulse and read their, are effectively reading their stress level. And if we start to sort of with people, anonymized data to actually say, how do millions of people feel? It’d be so interesting. We’ll have a renaissance in the world of buildings because designers will be fed interesting information to interpret and be inspired by and respond to.

Pearl Lam: But you just said that. And the architects decided that public opinions and how they feel is not important. So how are you going to address that?

Thomas Heatherwick: I think that when we’ve got real data that shows how people feel, there’s been just speculating and assuming that people will realize something’s brilliant, maybe in 20 years or 30 years, rather than trusting their response. And to be clear, I don’t think that everyone has to love everything that everyone builds. Of course that’s not going to happen. But we can all feel, we’re not stupid. You can feel when something is wholehearted, or when a building is a giver rather than a taker. And for too long we’ve had buildings that are takers. They’re caring about great light inside, whether they’re going to sell the apartment inside. But a thousand times more people are going to see the outside of every building than the privileged few who get to live, work or have a drink in whatever it is inside these new buildings.

Pearl Lam: Tell me more about this early health that you are doing well.

Thomas Heatherwick: Together with the person who headed up Google’s communications for ten years in the UK and outside of America, we have set up a very early stage health startup which is looking at health in your home. And we’ve all got used to testing and treating our homes as laboratories because of the terrible Covid crisis that happened. And so all I can say at the moment is that we are looking at how we can normalize and humanize testing within your home, so that all these conditions that if they were only captured earlier would be easily treated, but are treated too late and diagnosed too late. So we don’t actually have a treatment problem so much in the UK and around the world, we have a diagnosis problem. Nobody wants to go into their doctors or surgeries or hospitals because it’s uncomfortable and it’s embarrassing. And so we all delay and put off things which if your home saw you and saw your health, we could shortcut a lot of that.

Pearl Lam: My favorite things has been saying these days is the western colonization of culture. Unfortunately, in the east, we follow the west. And how many, just look at how many western. I mean, how many collectors in the west is actually collecting chinese inkbrush painting? I mean, especially contemporary and ink brush painting? Very few. And I think, and in general is when your country, every country wants to look up, look up to the strong, to the strength. So China has been under 150 years western. I mean, not western domination, I would say 150 years of economically very, very poor. And then when it opened, it looks at the west and they copy the west. So they always been influenced by the west until the day that China would be strong again. They will be looking at their own culture. As of today, the chinese intellect, the contemporary art, they becomes more nationalist in a good way, not a bad way. There are chinese fashion designers doing ticking from the fashion of the chinese, traditional fashion, and make it into cut, and they are doing that and they experimental chinese ink brush. Intellectually, there are. There are writers writing about chinese philosophy because it has been influenced the world. Taoism, Confucianism. Confucianism is not so much, but Taoism and also the art of war, which has been adopted by every, I mean, many, many financial institutes. So as of today, west is still dominating the international culture.

Thomas Heatherwick: It’s interesting, in the world of buildings, I think the west has dominated so much for so long, but there is a real shift. And originally, as China was opening up, it felt that China was thinking, let’s have a building like that and one like that and one like that. And then I’ve seen that shift as they started to think, hang on, why did we do that? Why did we copy these things? And then much more sophistication and confidence in commissioning original work in a way that nobody demands that originality. In the West, I find people assume you’re going to do something similar to the last thing you did. That’s the prevailing things. The person who does the really square things, the person who does the curved things, give me another one of those. Whereas I’m having extraordinary conversations with people who have the confidence to think. But maybe it’s an inadequacy complex which is misplaced inadequacy of thinking that, oh, well, there’s all that creative, sophisticated stuff happening over there and you’re quietly thinking there isn’t. Actually, it’s quite conservative now because, you know, countries like the UK are old culture, old countries in terms of the museums and all of those things that can build a snobbery that doesn’t embrace real change. And we literally are. Even though we need millions more homes, and even though we need millions of more homes, we’re not really building. We seem paralyzed and stuck. And so I’m finding that we have been given much more creative opportunities in Singapore, in Japan, in China and in Korea, where people are just thinking, right, what should we do? What would connect with people, what matters? And thinking with clearer minds, without cultural snobbery baggage, which is the worst part of it.

Pearl Lam: How would you advise someone who looked at you and said, I want to be the Nick Thomas Hadowick? And how could I wouldn’t try and.

Thomas Heatherwick: Be me, I’d try and be yourself. Try and be yourself. But when I was little, I wanted to. I was fascinated by invention and then realized, you can’t study inventing. But it seemed to me that in the world of painting, the most interesting paintings had an inventive thought, the most interesting architecture had inventive thoughts in it, the most interesting landscape or food. Ideas are the base of everything, but you couldn’t study inventing. And inventing also seemed to be driven by a problem. And I think I was really interested in problem solving and that how something makes you feel is also a problem to solve. So I didn’t see a line between artistic or creative or whatever. Imaginativeness with having ideas, they all are aspects of using your imagination and applying it to the world. So at the time, when I was younger, that you couldn’t. The word inventor had mad stuck at the front of it. So the association was british eccentric rather than logical thing that would be good for something somehow around us. So the word design seemed a word that encapsulated, probably best, that you design buildings, you designed medical things, you design a bus, you design food, you design hair. So I went on a route to find my own way, I suppose. I studied three dimensional design at Manchester Polytechnic. Wood, metal, ceramics, glass and plastics. I was very involved in making things. I built my first building when I was 21, and that was because nobody built buildings. So I’ve always been attracted to gaps where it feels like something isn’t happening. And that’s also because I think I was aware that I don’t think I’m better than other people. I think I’m good at certain things. So instead of competing with other people, why don’t you try and do something that other people aren’t doing? So those gaps have always inspired me and I think that young people who might be watching this or listening to this, I suppose I would encourage them to follow their curiosity and don’t think things aren’t possible and be interested in being an applier. Often you’ll be going through an education process probably and often that education process theorizes and takes things and sort of diminishes the importance of application. And I’m really passionate about applying ideas. I always have been. And so I’m always looking for how do you take something and make it useful for other people? And that’s selfish because it gives me great satisfaction when you do something and somebody feels like that was worth it.

Pearl Lam: Thank you, Thomas

Thomas Heatherwick: Thank you.

Pearl Lam: Thank you.