Architects are often snobby about – and no doubt jealous of – the designer Thomas Heatherwick, who isn’t an actual architect yet still manages to wangle important building commissions. And he knows this. In his documentary for BBC Radio 4, Building Soul, where he examines what he calls the ‘blandemic’ in today’s architecture, he asks to interview fellow Spectator writer Jonathan Meades, who responds: ‘The last person who should be doing a series on urbanism is a designer.’ Heatherwick wears this as a badge of honour.

Indeed, qualifying as an architect is no guarantee of quality – check out the past nominations for the Carbuncle Cup, the now defunct prize for the ugliest building in Britain. Some of the best constructions, moreover, have been built by unqualified architects. Look at the work of Italian maestro Carlo Scarpa, who, in an act of poetic justice, redesigned the Venetian courtroom where he had faced trial for practising architecture without a licence.

But by focusing on this sideshow – reductively blaming everything on a culture of complacent and mis-educated architects – Heatherwick’s documentary misses the point. He almost completely ignores the power of the actual boring stuff: finances, procurement, planning, building regulations and law. This is what the qualified architects he employs have trained years for and have to navigate on a daily basis.

Heatherwick shares research from ‘neuro-aesthetics’, urging us to follow the science proving that curves are more stimulating; that blandly designed façades cause stress. His interview with a Syrian architect even suggests that relocating the people of Homs ‘from the ancient city into bland tower blocks’ was ‘a major leading factor’ of war. While fixating on the actual buildings and not, say, the housing and social policies that give rise to them is somewhat tendentious, Heatherwick rightfully draws attention to the psychological impact of architecture.

His concern with the combined cost to wellbeing, environment and planetary resources of the many boring buildings that are unloved and prematurely demolished is a reasonable point. But this argument is perhaps not best made by the designer of The Vessel in New York, his disastrous, extravagantly pointless 16-storey staircase to nowhere. I wouldn’t labour the point about architecture’s impact on mental health had I too designed a building that had to be closed after it became a suicide hotspot.

Heatherwick also takes aim at the ‘cult of modernism’, especially Le Corbusier, the Franco-Swiss architect, the alleged cult leader. He is blamed for infecting architects and planners with dogmas that demanded they reject architectural history, abolish streets and build in straight lines. Heatherwick is not wrong in highlighting Le Corbusier’s advocacy of those ideas, albeit in his early career writings, which he consistently disregarded (can one not forgive the follies of youth?). Le Corbusier was, however, a furious self-promoter. And it’s telling that Heatherwick, who has perhaps fallen for the fawning press coverage that named him ‘the Da Vinci of our times’, has also fallen for this ‘great man theory’ of architectural history.

All this self-flattery overestimates the power of the architect and planner. When he speaks with Simon Jenkins about how Covent Garden faced being flattened in order to make space for a dual carriageway, and brainwashed planners get the blame, it feels a tad trite. A much earlier plan, devised by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire to plough baroque boulevards through the historic City of London, failed not for the architect’s lack of trying. It didn’t succeed because landowners had already rebuilt along existing medieval boundaries, and the cost of acquiring their land was too high.

The reason why postwar planners and architects could do what Wren couldn’t, and flatten swathes of Britain in the name of obsolescence, was thanks to new planning laws that unbridled their worst instincts. Planners gained not only exclusive discretion to permit what was built but also unprecedented powers to forcibly buy up property at existing land values. If Le Corbusier is to be blamed, so must Clement Attlee’s Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

On cost, Heatherwick pleads for limited budgets to be spent better with the blissful naivety of someone who’s only ever been commissioned to design flagship buildings and not social housing. It smacks of hypocrisy when his firm and groups associated with his firm earned £2.8 million for the non-existent Garden Bridge folly. He showcases the work of Amin Taha (whom I interviewed earlier this month for The Spectator) as an example of an architect who adeptly sidesteps constraints to create fascinating buildings. Yet this is what makes Taha’s work exceptional: it takes outstanding willpower, imagination and labour to cut costs, while spinning the multiple plates of aesthetic concerns, profitability, placating planners’ whimsical tastes and complying with the ever-growing tangle of red tape.

In other words, while building less boringly isn’t impossible, the system is rigged against it. If Heatherwick really wants to stop the ‘blandemic’, perhaps he should apply his much-vaunted original thinking to reforming the actual boring stuff – starting with the planning system. Maybe then, architects wouldn’t need to flatten the curves.