Why Boring Buildings Are Bad for Us

[Serial_Apologist]

Excellent first part of a 3-episode series on Radio 4, Tuesday mornings over the next 3 weeks, criticising functionalism in modern architecture as both antithetical to human wellbeing (as evidenced by brain scans) and environmentally wasteful, while not advocating returns to traditional vernacularism. Well worth hearing.

Tues 3 Oct
9am - Building Soul with Thomas Heatherwick
1/3 - Why Boring Buildings Are Bad for Us
Designer Thomas Heatherwick looks at the way cities get built and how it affects our lives. He begins by explaining why he believes boring architecture is bad for human health and the damage done to the planet by identikit modern urban environments.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001r1b2

[kernelbogey]

Not quite on topic but I visited Framlingham in Suffolk last week for the first time: a dellightful higgledy-piggeldy mixture of architectural styles, like a child's book illustration of a 1950s town. I kind of 'fell in love' with it immediately and want to go back.

[smittims]

Thanks, S-A; I'd have missed that otherwise. I'll catch up on it. It sounds fascinating.

Two buildings spring to mind: the old 1930s Ministry of Labour building on Aytoun Street in Manchester (near Piccadilly ) , which remained ghostlike and empty for years, and was said to have 'sick building syndrome' , and Tolworth Tower, a 21-storey rectangle on the A3 where the Epsom Road crosses the Kingston by-pass. I knew people who refused to work there or even enter it, some calling it 'The Bloody Tower'. I worked on the 12th floor there for two years and liked it .

[Frances_iom]

I turned it off within the 1st couple of minutes entirely due to the background music - did you not notices the large 'nudge' factor this was giving as to how you were to view the description - a none-too-sublte indication that arguments could be weak.

[french frank]

I turned it off within the 1st couple of minutes entirely due to the background music - did you not notices the large 'nudge' factor this was giving as to how you were to view the description - a none-too-sublte indication that arguments could be weak.

I wanted to know who this "villain" of architecture was, and why. Have to wait until next week. He had several specialists on who seemed to come to the same conclusion so the arguments were worth thinking about (as I sit now thinking about them without the 'persuasive' power of the music in the background). I also looked at images of some of the buildings designed by the presenter and didn't much like them. They did have complexity and I like the idea of incorporating plants and trees (not his own - think Boris Johnson's garden bridge ). But a stimulating listen.

[gradus]

For me Boring Buildings also describe the 'operating theatre' school of kitchen and living room design so much in vogue and the minimalist, uncluttered by human contact interiors feted in programmes like Grand Designs.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'd have to investigate the buildings ff mentions; the main point of concurrence for me was Heatherwick's view that the mind needs complexity in its surroundings - I think the word I scribbled down illegibly was "hetero-aesthetics" - otherwise it goes off-balance as if seeking something else to lock onto, and then provides the "missing" detail, or character. Imagination never suffices, hence so many graffiti-defaced otherwise bare concrete surfaces on council tower blocks etc. The variety kb discovered in Framlingham is found in most historic town and city centres - walk down as ordinary a main street as Islington High Street and you just need to look up: you will see buildings that went up when Islington was a quaint country town just outside London, cheek-by-jowl alongside others from all intervening historical architectural periods.

The concept had me wondering about there being possible correlates in music: what is it that bores about music consisting largely of outworn musical gestures? Should it bore when for centuries musical language advanced in terms of intricacy and detail at snail's pace? Was it that in earlier ages people were more attuned to the natural order and gained a greater spiritual/aesthetic fulfilment from engagement with that order per se than music was needed to satisfy? Or was life too gruelling to allow for such indulgences, which religion was there to supply? If one surmises that one or the other might well be so, what conditioning has been inflicted on the human mind that takes for granted the clichéd procedures of much pop music, whose musical idiom only "moves on" in peripherals? Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven evidently weren't satisfied with the return to simplified forms of the post-Baroque, and music from their age onwards tended to fluctuate between states of relative simplicity and complexity without today's neurotic critical selfconsciousness governing whether or not musical progress can be measured in terms of advances in complexity, or even measured (ie assessed) at all - the very idea of "progress" in general having been thrown into question.

[alywin]

For me Boring Buildings also describe the 'operating theatre' school of kitchen and living room design so much in vogue and the minimalist, uncluttered by human contact interiors feted in programmes like Grand Designs.

I totally agree.

Thanks for alerting us, OP - it sounds as though it might be interesting.

[smittims]

Surely what is 'boring' is the way people copy what they think is smart or trendy without thinking about whether it is personal to them. Conversely, a building (or a kitchen) of 'character' is one where someone has gone their own way and said something individual. I've never liked wall-mounted , built-in furniture and always preferred individual free-standing pieces, and resisted attempts to impose the mass-produced kitchen-design ethos .

[Serial_Apologist]

Surely what is 'boring' is the way people copy what they think is smart or trendy without thinking about whether it is personal to them. Conversely, a building (or a kitchen) of 'character' is one where someone has gone their own way and said something individual. I've never liked wall-mounted , built-in furniture and always preferred individual free-standing pieces, and resisted attempts to impose the mass-produced kitchen-design ethos .

Furthermore, if you notice on ads plugging built-in such as the one where the young woman trashes her existing cupboards and shelving, it is always presented as fitted where premises have alcoves or recessed sections of wall - in other words the replacements are not actually space-saving in any great way, just creating that impression by presenting a flat exterior, while the actual space widths are narrower than previously.

[french frank]

I wanted to know who this "villain" of architecture was, and why. Have to wait until next week.

I won't spoil the plot . A bit of a put-down for the presenter from Jonathan Meades, not that he seemed to mind. I think I agree with what he's saying, but one needs to see the kind of buildings being envisaged.

[Serial_Apologist]

I won't spoil the plot . A bit of a put-down for the presenter from Jonathan Meades, not that he seemed to mind. I think I agree with what he's saying, but one needs to see the kind of buildings being envisaged.

I think Heatherwick overstated his case - he comes close to acknowledging there is good modern architecture at one point. The main good point in the second programme (available on the above link) is that architects in the 1960s and 70s, especially when redesigning tower blocks for council housing after slum clearance, blindly followed Le Corbusier's writings rather than the examples of his actual buildings, because re-housing had to be done in a hurry and as cheaply as possible. The first programme raised issues about long-term sustainability, along with the environmental damage wrought by over-dependence on concrete; hopefully these two themes will be drawn together in the third and final programme. There was also no mention of the landscaping of the environs of these new buildings; I could take anyone around this particular district where they will see how well fitted some otherwise quite standard mediocre 2 and 3-story town houses are to their surrounds: with spacing and attention to preserving or creating "natural"- wooded surroundings the match can more than satisfactorily mitigate any severity in the buildings - many of which, with their large picture windows front and aft, are delightful places in which to live, as an old school friend who regretted moving into a 30s semi once he acquired a family, has attested to me. Unlike the pokey Poundbury fake early 19the century cottages and town houses with their small windows and dark interiors, which need additional lighting, those living in these buildings proudly leave their interiors exposed to external view in an escape from the claustrophobic ethos of the private nuclear family enclosure.