The Architect of Our Neoliberal Hell

Years later, it still seems unbelievable. A designer is tapped to build a grand public structure, with a budget of $75 million, as the centerpiece of a Manhattan real estate project. As he works, the cost rises above $150 million—more than the annual expenses of the Whitney Museum, more than the price of an F-35 fighter jet, more than any artist before could ever possibly hope to have at their command. Eventually, it is said to climb further, to $200 million, with some landscaping added.

The design is closely guarded until 2016. Then, renderings are released. The grand reveal: this designer is planning to make … a tower of stairs—154 flights, to be exact, all arrayed in a kind of upside-down cone, like shawarma on a spit, stretching 16 stories (some 150 feet) into the sky. In 2018 the designer offers a wan explanation: “What I like about stairs—as soon as you start using your body, it breaks down potential artistic bullshit, because there’s just an immediacy to straining your leg,” he tells the New Yorker’s Ian Parker.

Then, early 2019, Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel opens to the public in Hudson Yards, the crowning jewel of a complex of towering corporate offices, luxury apartments, luxury stores, and a luxury hotel developed by a luxury gym chain. Its pristine copper-colored cladding gleams in the sun. It looks alien and a little menacing, like a digital creation clicked and dragged from a computer screen into real life. It is vacuous in its celebration of vertigo-inducing capital and private ambition, and even though it closes to visitors not long thereafter, in May 2021, it has to rank as one of the defining architectural projects—one of the defining artworks—of the era.

Miraculously, this managed not to derail the 53-year-old Englishman’s career. Gargantuan, eye-catching Heatherwick schemes continue to crop up around the world. Boris Johnson has compared him to Michelangelo. Diane von Furstenberg has termed him a “genius.” For engineer Tony Fadell, the “father of the iPod,” he is “a creative genius.” Billionaire Stephen Ross, the man behind Hudson Yards, is said to view him as “the ultimate genius.”

It is no crime for artists and designers to be adored by the wealthy and powerful, of course. It’s essential. (Michelangelo certainly knew this.) But Heatherwick has become the go-to artist of the ultra-rich. Why?

ONE ANSWER IS THAT Heatherwick really can make punchy spectacles—edifices that become landmarks that patrons tout with easy pride. An early success was the Rolling Bridge, conceived for a London office and retail development where it was installed in 2004. More a kinetic sculpture than a bridge, it unfolds grandly from an octagon into a now-nonfunctional 36-foot-long footbridge over a canal in Paddington Basin. (Comprising thousands of complex moving parts that stopped working in 2021, it may never be repaired.) A few years later, his UK Pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, covered with 60,000 thin acrylic rods, was a shimmering Op art tour de force. And his similar starburst of a sculpture for Manchester, England, the nearly 200-foot-tall B of the Bang (2005), emanated the thrill of a vision brought improbably to life. Sadly, it was removed because parts of its 180 spikes kept falling off. Even the lobbying of Antony Gormley, another lover of bombast, could not save it.

But these are essentially razzle-dazzle, one-note pleasures, perfect examples of Ed Ruscha’s old line about the reaction that bad art elicits: “Wow! Huh?” Whereas good art draws those same words in reverse. Heatherwick’s 2007 Spun Chair, rendered in polished copper and stainless steel, could be a mascot for his methods: a sleek chair (picture a thread spool pinched at the center) that sitters can tilt at an angle and spin in a complete circle. It’s fun for a few spins.

Heatherwick’s competitor (and collaborator on a 2022 Google building in California), Bjarke Ingels, nailed it when he told the New Yorker: “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work. An element of steampunk, almost.” He comes bearing showy designs that aim to be icons for a development, a neighborhood, a city. A prime example is his 2017 plot with Mayor Johnson to build a $260 million Garden Bridge—a tree-filled pedestrian walkway—across the River Thames in London, scrapped after having sucked up $48 million in public funds.

The Heatherwick phenomenon is not a tale of gentrification. That work has usually been done by the time he gets the call. Long ago, white-cube galleries in West Chelsea and the rent-spiking High Line paved the way for Hudson Yards, which was helped along by almost $6 billion in tax breaks enacted by dubious rezoning that made Harlem, Central Park, and Hudson Yards all one low-employment district (never mind that only one of these had people living in it: the latter is a former train yard). He is, instead, an exemplary architect for a time when cities have become unbearably expensive and the wealthiest do not believe they should have to pay taxes.

HEATHERWICK, HOWEVER, positions himself as a man of the people. In his new manifesto of a book, running nearly 500 pages, he goes on the attack against the past century of design. “Some architects see themselves as artists,” he writes in Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities. “The problem is, the rest of us are forced to live with this ‘art.’” He inveighs against buildings that are “boring”—too flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, serious. Some 50 pages are devoted to a diatribe against Le Corbusier, “the god of boring,” whose theories “gave permission for repetitive order to utterly overpower complexity,” which Heatherwick prizes.

“Modernist architects think boring buildings are beautiful,” Heatherwick grouses. Their minimal, theoretically loaded work has lent cover for the cheap, knockoff stuff that sits alongside it. Against these elites and their “emotional austerity,” their buildings that “make us stressed, sick, lonely, and scared,” he adopts the language of the populist politician. “I am going to make a promise to you,” he writes in a lightly condescending letter to the “passerby” that closes Humanize. “I will dedicate the rest of my life to this war. But I need you … to join us. Our aim is modest: we just want buildings that are not boring!” And if boringness sounds difficult to measure, do not worry: Heatherwick Studio has made a “Boringometer” to determine how interesting a structure’s shapes and textures are, on a scale of 1 to 10.

The obvious irony is that many Heatherwick structures read like desperate, failing attempts not to be boring, via some whiz-bang trick. They illustrate Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick—a device induced by late capitalism that falls flat for appearing to work both too little and too hard. Bulbous, grenade-shaped windows monotonously line his 2021 Lantern House apartment building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, while his newly opened 1,000 Trees mall in Shanghai features, yes, 1,000 trees, each sitting on its own mushroomlike column high in the air around the stepped building. It suggests a videogame environment, as do renderings for his overwrought multifarious proposal for an island in Seoul’s Han River.

While purporting to speak on behalf of everyday people, Heatherwick is careful to do nothing that could actually offend the ultra-rich. In a revealing passage in Humanize, he praises Antoni Gaudí’s curvaceous Casa Milà in Barcelona for “wanting to fill us up with awe and break us out in smiles.” Says Heatherwick: “Even though this building was made to provide high-end apartments for wealthy people, I believe it is a gift.” We should be grateful.

Heatherwick’s pitch sounds precisely attuned to the ears of politicians who are disinclined to pursue projects that might actually benefit the public at a time of government austerity (forget about the emotional strain). Self-styled technocrat Michael Bloomberg blurbed Humanize, praising it as “a powerful prescription for buildings that put the public first.”

“Our most vulnerable people live in the most boring buildings,” Heatherwick writes on a page that is illustrated, bizarrely, by the burned-out Grenfell Tower, where 74 people died in 2017. “Why should absence of boredom be a luxury good?” Heatherwick, it should be noted, has not pursued any large-scale, or affordable, housing projects that I am aware of.

Making buildings and cities that are more hospitable, livable, and generous is a noble pursuit, but the designer of a cold and imposing nine-figure stairway to nowhere does not feel like the right man for the job—not least because he and his developer-patron declined to install safety features after a series of suicides there. (Following the fourth, they finally closed it; nets are reportedly being tested.) Standing below it, I do not feel that I am receiving a gift.

STILL, IT IS EASY to share a common enemy with Heatherwick: boring buildings that exhibit little regard for those who use them. We all spend time in places made with little imagination and even less care. We deserve more. As he writes, “we’re richer than we’ve ever been at any point in history.” Heatherwick, making that pitch to deep-pocketed developers, has not often been able to deliver satisfying structures, but his brio should inspire everyone, whether commissioned architects or apartment renters or voters, to ask for more.

In any case, some ideas that Heatherwick floats in his tome for creating better buildings are sensible mainstream ones that practitioners and activists do advocate, like reducing regulations and simplifying planning processes. (Such moves could also assist wealthy developers, to be sure.) But my favorite Heatherwick prescription is an eccentric one, and absolutely peak Heatherwick: “Sign buildings.” Instead of “staying in the shadows,” he says, a building’s creators should “be proudly named at eye level on the outsides of their projects.”

“Why would anyone involved in the process of building buildings be against this?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t you be proud? Why wouldn’t you want to sign your canvas?”