Boring Architecture Is Starving Your Brain

Designer Thomas Heatherwick thinks the construction industry is in a crisis. “We’ve just got so used to buildings that are boring,” says the man behind London’s revived Routemaster bus, Google’s Bay View, and New York’s Little Island. “New buildings, again and again, are too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous, too serious. What happened?” While those features can often be aesthetically appropriate on their own, Heatherwick notes that it’s the relentless combination of them in the aesthetics of modern buildings and urban spaces that makes them overwhelmingly boring.

This boredom, he adds, isn’t just a nuisance—it can actually be harmful. “Boring is worse than nothing,” Heatherwick writes in his latest book, Humanize. “Boring is a state of psychological deprivation. Just as the body will suffer when it’s deprived of food, the brain begins to suffer when it’s deprived of sensory information. Boredom is the starvation of the mind.”

This isn’t just a matter of opinion. Heatherwick cites, for instance, the research of Colin Ellard, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo who studies the neurological and psychological impact of the built environment. In his experiments, Ellard has shown that people’s moods were considerably affected when surrounded by tall buildings. In one experiment, he collected data from wearable sensors that tracked skin conductance response, a measure of emotional arousal. When people pass by a boring building, Heatherwick says, “their bodies literally go into a fight-or-flight mode. They have nothing for their mind to connect to.”

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