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more at evernorth.com/wonder. Boring

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architecture is starving your brain. Thomas

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Heatherwick believes architecture has a nutritional

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value to society and that the

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public desperately deserve a better offering.

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Bonjour, Medeiros. Designer

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Thomas Heatherwick thinks the construction industry

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is in a crisis. We've

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just got so used to buildings

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that are boring, says the man

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behind London's revived Routemaster bus, Google's

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Bayview, and New York's Little Island.

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New buildings again and again

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are too flat, too plain,

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too straight, too shiny, too

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monotonous, too anonymous, too serious.

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What happened? While those

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features can often be aesthetically appropriate

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on their own, Heatherwick notes that...

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it's the relentless combination of them in

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the aesthetics of modern buildings and urban

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spaces that makes them overwhelmingly boring. This

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boredom, he adds, isn't just a

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nuisance, it can actually be harmful.

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Boring is worse than nothing, Heatherwick

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writes in his latest book, Humanize.

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Boring is a state of psychological deprivation.

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Just as the body will suffer when

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it's deprived of food, the brain begins

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to suffer when it's deprived of sensory

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information. Boredom is the starvation of the

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mind. This isn't just a

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matter of opinion. Heatherwick cites, for

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instance, the research of Colin Ellard,

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a cognitive neuroscientist at the University

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of Waterloo, who studies the neurological

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and psychological impact of the built

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environment. In his experiments,

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Ellard has shown that people's moods

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were considerably affected when surrounded by

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tall buildings. In one experiment, he

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collected data from wearable sensors that

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tracked skin conductance response, a measure

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of emotional arousal. When

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people pass by a boring building, Heatherwick

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says, their bodies literally go into a

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fight-or-flight mode. They have nothing for their

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restriction supply. The

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brain, Heatherwick argues, craves complexity

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and fascination. There's a

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reason why, when you look out into

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a forest, nature's complexity and rhythms restores

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our attention back, he says. We

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need that in buildings. Less is not more.

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This is backed by the research

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of psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan,

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who in the 1980s developed attention

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restoration theory, which posited that people's

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concentration and improves when spending time

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in natural environments. We

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haven't been paying attention to the nutritional value to

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society of the buildings that are around us, Heather

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Rick says. He believes, for

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example, that architects now prefer to prioritize

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the internal spaces of a building while

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neglecting what the building looks like from

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the outside. This is a mistake. Buildings

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are the backdrop of society's life, he says.

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A thousand times more people will go past

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this building than will ever come inside it.

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The outside of that building will affect them and

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contribute to how they feel. Ultimately,

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to humanize our urban spaces, architects need

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to think about the people that inhabit

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them. Heather Wick recalls a

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debate of elite people in the construction industry

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a few years ago about whether the opinion

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of the public matters. We debated

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all night and then they voted that they

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didn't. It was unbelievable. Such

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short-term thinking is leading to what Heather

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Wick calls the dirty secret of the

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construction industry, its disastrous environmental

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impact. Just consider, for instance, that

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in the US, one billion square

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feet of buildings are demolished every

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year. That's half of

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Washington, DC, destroyed just to get rebuilt

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after with the same sort of boring

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buildings, he says. In the

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UK, 50,000 buildings a year are

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demolished, with the average age of a commercial

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building being around 40 years. If

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I were a commercial building, I would have been

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killed 14 years ago, he says.

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To build a tower in the city of London,

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which by global standards isn't that big, takes

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the equivalent of 92,000 tons of carbon emissions. As

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a result of this, estimates show that

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the construction industry now emits five times

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more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than

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aviation. We can't have buildings

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that are only here for 40 years. We

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need thousand-year thinking, he says. The

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world of construction teaches you that

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form follows function, less is more,

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ornate is a crime. It's

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powerful and when you're studying, that goes in

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your brain and brainwashes you. But

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Heatherwick reminds us that emotion is a function

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and one that... could be celebrated in the

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world of construction. Thanks

6:03

for listening to Wired. My name is Zeke

6:05

Robison, and for more stories like this one, visit us at wired.com.