It needs a big personality to answer a big question: why is so much new building so very bad; why are our cities so ugly? Thomas Heatherwick is that big personality. He is the Jamie Oliver of architecture and design: personable, blokeish, smart, tele-genic, extremely successful, nearly demented with ambition, and, one suspects, inclined to petulance if crossed. He is a visionary with several blind spots. To extend the Oliver comparison, there are times when Heatherwick serves up a delicious dish with his thumbs stuck in the bowl. His flair comes with flaws.

As a designer, his Boris Bus for London was charming, but functional problems led to its withdrawal from service. His ‘B of the Bang’ sculpture in Manchester has been dismantled. The ‘Rolling Bridge’ in Paddington is a fabulous conceit. But hang on a moment.  Who wants a bridge that rolls? In Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, his vertiginous open-work ‘Vessel’, a honeycomb structure, has been closed indefinitely because too many people jumped off it and killed themselves. So much for visitor attractions. His Olympic cauldron was widely admired. For Longchamp, he designed a Manhattan shop with a sloping floor.

Humanise is a stonking brick of a paperback whose intention is to agitate us into an angry revolution against boring, ugly buildings. Heatherwick brings his huge, undisciplined intelligence to the architecture debate, speaking for human values, complexity and surprises. It is a predominantly illustrated book, whose scrappy presentation is, I think, to make a point about the arbitrariness of the creative process. There are scribbled annotations and underlinings, trompe l’oeil notes on pinboards and a generous range of fonts. Some will think this visually exciting, others may find it too cute.

There is no designed grid for the book but, as the reader soon realises, Heatherwick does not much care for straight lines. Although an epigrammist of talent, he is no belle-lettrist, and I suspect that most of Humanise was written by Will Storr, a professional ghostwriter who is a long-standing collaborator. Storr is not an architectural specialist and the book is not directed at the specialist reader. (It is explained that Vitruvius was a Roman architect, and the reference to him cites the Britannica website as the source.) 

The thesis is that modern architecture was a wicked cult led by a boring, mad man called Le Corbusier, who wanted to destroy civil society with concrete, geometry and his hatred of decoration. Indeed, a large section is dedicated to a denunciation of ‘The Seven Beliefs of Le Corbusier’. But then we get a magnificent reverse-ferret when Heatherwick discovers Corb’s Ronchamp chapel near Besançon, an astonishing design of lavish curves and spatial complexities which is revelatory. 

The attack on Le Corbusier, central to the book, is not entirely fair or accurate. His notorious (unbuilt) Plan Voisin for Paris was no more bombastic than Haussmann’s routinely praised but frankly totalitarian ‘renovation’ (which is to say demolition) of the city in the mid-19th century. And isn’t Haussmann’s uniformity boring? Far from hating decoration, Le Corbusier was a painter of the first rank. As for his lack of humanity, his Modulor system of proportion, described in his 1954 book, was based on human form and bears comparison with Alberti.

Not that it matters, but Heatherwick is not a qualified architect. Instead, his education at a Rudolf Steiner school established a distaste for the ‘ghettoes of thought’ associated with any discipline. Clearly, he distrusts the architectural establishment and it returns the compliment by being snarky about his success.  But his argument about the narrow-mindedness of the profession becomes messy when he reveals that neither the satanic Le Corbusier nor the Teutonic Mies van der Rohe had formal architectural training. Nor had Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carlo Scarpa, Tadao Ando, and, in our day, John Pawson and Alex Lifschutz.

There are some excellent points made in the book. Item: most modern buildings do not work at street level because architects present clients with three-dimensional models or CGI presentations emphasising the view from above. Item: every designer and contractor involved with any building should be explicitly and permanently identified on the structure. Item: architecture critics are an ultramontane priesthood in thrall to celebrity and rarely acknowledge human need. 

But there is a lot of tosh as well. How does Heatherwick know that ‘the great majority of everyday buildings were once interesting’?  He is a victim of survival bias: only the best buildings of the past remain. It is very good to have Salisbury Cathedral; but it is also very good that the mud-floored, unheated, unventilated foetid slums surrounding it have gone the way of all wattle and daub.

While Heatherwick’s energy is fresh and authentic, the arguments here are recycled.  This is appropriate, since recycling buildings is a preoccupation of architecture today. Heatherwick acknowledges his debt to Jane Jacobs and her 1961 classic about neighbourhoods, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But Humanise is also in the same territory as Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities book of 1902; Architecture without Architects, published by Bernard Rudofsky in 1964; ideas about complexity in building design fashionably touted by Robert Venturi in 1966; Design for the Real World argued by Victor Papanek in 1971; and Oscar Newman’s theory of Defensible Space which appeared in 1972. All good stuff, but we really have heard it before.

Of course we want better buildings and more beautiful cities, but victimising dead architects and alienating the profession is not going to achieve much. And I am sceptical about Heatherwick’s enthusiasm for AI.  Instead, design education should be compulsory, so that every consumer of buildings can express desire and criticise errors, forcing up standards the while. With its aim to be ‘super accessible’, Humanise might even be on the national curriculum. But it is more an anthology of polemical slogans than a coherent narrative. The struggle not to be boring eventually becomes self-defeating, just as wanting to be cool denies the possibility of ever achieving such a thing.