A century of global catastrophe engulfed towns and cities

(private adaptation)

I want to talk about the importance of exteriors rather than interiors. This is because I don’t believe that internals don’t matter.

They matter a lot, but they matter only to those who go inside the buildings.

Also, it is relatively easy to change the interior of buildings with color and materials and furniture. The exteriors of the buildings are different. They are important to everyone who walks past them, and that’s a lot of people.

But most of us are really powerless to change how these external parts look to us.

For every person who spends time in an office or block of flats, there will be hundreds or thousands of people who pass outside that building every day.

The exterior of this building will impress each of these people. This will help with how they feel.

As they walk down the street and they pass dozens of buildings, they will feel dozens of emotions.

And these feelings increase. Those feelings matter.

They are more important than we think.

Over the past 100 years, the exteriors of ordinary buildings that we pass by every day have taken on a certain ‘look’. It is present in towns and cities around the world.

This form has proven to be surprisingly harmful. The spaces created for us that took this shape make us stressed, sick, lonely, and afraid. They have contributed to partition, war and the climate crisis.

What we saw a century ago has become a global disaster.

There is a word that describes the types of buildings I am talking about.

I don’t like this word. It’s bland, vague and forgettable. It seems frivolous.

The word does not do justice to the damage it describes. It fails to cover the drastic and horrific changes that have been sweeping our towns and cities over the past 100 years, bringing with them destruction, misery, alienation, disease and violence.

I wish there was a better word I could use for it – a word that when you hear it and you realize that there is a century-long global catastrophe that we are still in the grip of.

But when I think about that destruction and I think about those buildings, I always come back to that word. So he is present.

disgust

I warned you.

When you hear the word ‘disgusting’ you almost certainly think: ‘A whole book about disgusting buildings … really? We have many problems in the world: social injustice, climate crisis, political polarization, war, oppression and corruption. And you’re making a fuss about the … disgusting buildings.

And maybe then you might reasonably think: ‘Who are you to call something disgusting?

‘Just because you don’t like this shopping center or that office block, doesn’t mean it’s bad.’

If you’re thinking that – well, I don’t blame you. If I were you, I would probably think the same. All I want to ask of you is to hold on for a few more pages.

There are some serious issues to consider that affect billions of people. By the end of this article, I hope I will have convinced you that boredom is upon us and that it is indeed a global catastrophe.

What does disgust really mean?

Much smoother

The facades of modern buildings are incredibly smooth. Their windows and doors barely stick to the inside or outside. Their roofs are also often flat.

Height and width are important in buildings because they create interest. In countless subtle and complex ways, a building of great depth changes its appearance with the movements of the sun—

A little light here, a little dark there–light streaming in and out through doors and window frames throughout the day with the Earth’s rotation. When buildings are too smooth, they are punishingly boring.

Very simple

Modern buildings lack ornamentation. When you look at buildings built more than a century ago, it’s amazing how carefully their designers created the maze.

These buildings have patterns, details and decorations. They have highs and lows and deep narrow spaces and corneas and corneas and points.

Even everyday buildings that were not considered ‘special’ or ‘important’ were built with the same mindset – that of interest and what was considered beauty at the time.

When buildings are too simple, they are boring.

Very straightforward

Modern building design is based on rectangles. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach (so were classical buildings) and it is logically understandable because it is highly competent.

It’s also very easy to design things with straight lines and right angles – even (easier) with the latest building design software that draws squarish shapes most easily.

But the exclusive use of straight lines and rectangular geometry has gotten out of hand. When used on buildings at scale and in an otherwise formless fashion, they create scenes of repeated horizontality, and (by) passers-by feel utterly alienated.

They are unbearable for humans. Given that there are no straight lines or right angles in nature, they are also surprisingly unnatural.

Very bright

Exteriors of modern buildings are made of smooth materials such as metal and glass. Shiny materials may be beautiful, but when all buildings – and here even entire districts – are made of only hard-feeling reflective materials, our senses are dulled by indifference. This lack of diversity has profound implications.

Newer buildings often have large panes of relatively thin glass instead of solid walls with windows. Even when they have large areas of metal paneling, the surfaces of all these materials are still smooth.

A prime example of this is the construction industry’s invention of the glazed wall—which uses nothing but large sheets of glass on the entire exterior of buildings.

When it is used up, whatever human interest and diversity the exteriors of buildings may have had is virtually eliminated. When buildings are too shiny, they are boring.

Increased use of glass on buildings has also contributed to large-scale bird deaths. It is estimated that in the United States alone, between 100 million and 1 billion birds die each year from crashing into windows.

Too much homogeneity

Modern buildings often take the shape of a rectangle made up of smaller rectangles. These rectangles are arranged in a grid.

If a straight road contains buildings like this grid, the landscape will look like a repetition of smooth, shiny, simple rectangles.

These buildings look the same from afar and up close. Such homogeneity does not affect humans.

Very anonymous

More than 100 years ago, building exteriors tended to have something of a place of their own. They were meaningful in one way or another.

They told a story about where they were, and what they were for. Today, they are often not.

This 100-year disaster has been a cultural revolution. It has ruthlessly stripped new buildings of their personality and sense of place. When buildings are too anonymous, they are boring.

Very serious

What do you feel when you see these types of office buildings?

You feel serious, maybe even a little scared. These are serious buildings for serious people living serious lives. Why should buildings look serious?

Why were their craftsmen afraid to create a place that would make people feel happy? Such buildings are capable of creating only one kind of feeling.

They are extremely lacking in emotions. When buildings are too serious, they are boring.

When does disgust become disgust?

In the right context and with the right intentions, basic elements of disgust can be amazing.

But when many of these elements accumulate in a building or a space, clutter becomes a serious problem.

The way I see it, disgust is like an equation.

It is like putting too much sugar, fat, carbohydrates, alcohol and nicotine into the human body. Often, it’s a lifetime of accumulation (elements) that kills you.

When there is too much disgust in a place, it is … harmful disgust

How can disgust be harmful? Is not absence, an interval, nothingness, abhorrence?

Not having any cleavage can’t hurt you. But the surprising and little-known fact is that disgust is worse than nothing.

Much worse

Disgust is a state of psychological deprivation. Just as the body suffers without food, the brain begins to suffer when deprived of sensory information.

Disgust is the hunger of the mind

Colin Allard, a neuroscientist, has studied how this happens. In 2012, he visited New York City to analyze how people feel when they walk through a boring place and then walk through an interesting place shortly after.

They wanted to know: How would spending just a little time in these different places affect a person’s mood?

It was a boring place. It is outside a large supermarket Whole Foods on New York’s Lower East Side.

It takes up a whole block. It was an interesting place, just a short walk from Whole Foods Market.

As the groups walked through each location, a specially designed smartphone app asked them questions about what they were seeing and how they were feeling.

Outside the supermarket, the most common responses included: bland, uniform and unobtrusive. However, down the block at Whole Foods, the most common responses included: social, busy and nice.

But the reality is that Allard didn’t need an app to identify how his mood was being altered.

It was obvious. In his account of the study, he wrote, ‘In front of an absolutely flat front, people were silent, shoulders hunched and doing nothing. In the interesting place, they were lively and chatty, and we had some difficulty in controlling their enthusiasm.’

One of the study’s rules stated that participants should not talk to each other.

At Whole Foods Market, keeping quiet wasn’t a problem. But at an interesting point, the researchers lost control over the participants.

The rule of silence was ‘soon cast aside. Many expressed their desire to skip the tour and share in the splendor of the place.’

Allard was also collecting data on the participants’ emotional states, with special bracelets that took regular readings from their skin.

The bracelets were detecting a condition scientists call ‘autonomic arousal’.

Autonomic arousal refers to how alert we are, and how ready we are to respond to danger is a measure of stress.

When Allard examined the results, he found that people in the boring place didn’t just feel numb. Their autonomic arousal, their stress levels had increased.

Disgust wasn’t just numbing them. Their minds and bodies were also going into a state of stress.

You may wonder why being chased by a stranger or locked up in a prison is stressful. But why should a boring place stress you out?

Scientists have discovered that when we enter any environment, we unconsciously scan it for information.

During the millions of years in which our brains were being shaped by evolution, we lived in nature. And the natural environment is full of complexity.

Every second, our senses provide our brain with about a million pieces of information about our environment and surroundings.

The human brain is designed for this basic level of information, just as the body has basic levels of oxygen, water and food.

Boring modern landscapes, which prioritize repetition over complexity, give us unnaturally little information.

Allard posits that walking between them is like talking on the phone, but you’re only hearing words like ‘it’ and ‘so’ and ‘that’. There is information out there, but it is repetitive, uncomplicated and of very low quality.

When the brain is not receiving information from its environment, it takes it as a sign that something is wrong. It gets nervous. It alerts the body, increasing its readiness to deal with danger.

More than 100 years ago, it was extremely difficult to find boredom in the outdoor urban environment. Today, disgusting environments are everywhere. A thick blanket of disgust is draped over us.

As you read these words, at the very moment professionals in studios are making drawings of smooth, straight, bright, anonymous, serious rectangles and intersections, calling them beautiful, visionary and wonderful.

Concrete is being poured

Cranes are lifting large smooth panes of glass from place to place.

Disgusting buildings are popping up in towns and cities around the world.

Currently, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By 2050, this number is expected to increase to more than 70 percent.

A world of noxious disgust is being created for us to live in, whether we like it or not.

Adapted from ‘Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World’ by Thomas Hedrock, published by Viking on October 19 at £15.99. © Thomas Heatherwick 2023