Cities As Gardens For Growing People

This is the keynote lecture following the MArch Jury for the Architecture and Urbanism (DRL) Taught Postgraduate Programme.

Why do so many places look the same? Dull, soulless and depressing. What happened to make our cities so inhuman? In this lecture, Thomas Heatherwick will offer his analysis of why we’re surrounded by buildings that make people sick and unhappy and damage the planet, and how we can reimagine cities, in the words of James Rouse, as ‘gardens for growing people’. Drawing on 30 years of making bold, interesting buildings, and recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, he will argue that a new generation of liberated designers could challenge the legacy of pastiche modernism and grapple with the idea of emotion as a function, to make places that better serve society.

Introduced and moderated by DRL Programme Head Theodore Spyropoulos

Thomas Heatherwick is one of the UK’s most prolific designers, whose varied work over three decades is characterised by its originality, inventiveness and humanity.

Founded in 1994, Heatherwick Studio was set up to create emotionally compelling places led by public experience, working across multiple scales, locations and typologies. With studios in London and Shanghai, the team of over 200 people is currently working on projects in multiple continents and has recently completed Azabudai Hills, a six-hectare mixed-use development in the centre of Tokyo, and Google’s first ground-up campuses at Bay View and Charleston East in California. These projects follow the creation of Little Island, a park and performance space on the Hudson River in New York, as well as the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town and Coal Drops Yard, a new retail district in King’s Cross, London.