Have architects built boredom into our streetscapes, and can it harm our health?

“Beauty is only skin deep.” That proverb has championed inner qualities so successfully that outward appearance is often dismissed as superficial. In architecture, that assumption is harder to sustain. Around the world, increasingly loud calls are being made for an end to buildings deemed boring, if not outright ugly, on the outside. But what does that mean? Who decides? And why should we care? For months, these questions led me down a rabbit hole that seemed to circle back on itself. That was until a casual conversation with an aunt, who for decades lived a short walk from the South China Morning Post’s former editorial office in Quarry Bay. “Remind me,” I asked her, “what did your apartment complex look like?” I was trying to picture the orderly, middle-class private residential development I’d walked past countless times on my way to meet her or shop at Cityplaza. It bothered me that I remembered most of the mall’s outlets, some public outdoor areas, even the quickest route to a popular Thai restaurant – but little else. Same for my aunt. She praised the convenience of her former neighbourhood and its relative safety. But when it came to where she actually lived? “White blocks, straight lines, lots of windows,” she said, swatting away the question. “They were just buildings. Not memorable.” In other words: boring. While my aunt’s priorities clearly lay elsewhere, others are pointing to what they say is one of modern architecture’s most pervasive failings. And they are not debating aesthetics alone. Some are marshalling research warning that the monotony of streetscapes in cities around the world is a silent, chronic stressor affecting our well-being. For them, architectural boredom is not a neutral condition but a public health issue in need of a cure. Few figures have pushed that argument more forcefully than British designer Thomas Heatherwick, lauded in Hong Kong for his reimagining of upmarket shopping mall Pacific Place, Admiralty. One of the most prominent voices crusading against what he calls a building “blandemic”, he seems an unlikely activist – until you read his manifesto, Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World (2023). Three years into Heatherwick’s 10-year campaign, the deliberately provocative book still polarises. Online reactions range from accusations that his arguments are “shallow and superficial” to endorsements intoning “I’m with you.” “Opens my eyes to how modern buildings are not serving the mass public and passer-by,” writes one reader. Another adds: “What he proclaims makes perfect sense as I walk down streets seeing flat, lifeless office block after office block.” Me? As I raced through the book – not difficult, given the plethora of pictures – I found myself juggling multiple, often conflicting, ideas, including this: “One reason Modernism endures today is because it is perfectly compatible with cheapness.” And this: “When buildings are too plain, they are boring.” But most enduring was Heatherwick’s assessment of architectural failings plaguing our landscape. Having built a portfolio of attention-grabbing projects around the world – many in Asia, including a recently completed commercial district in Xian, Shaanxi province – he is careful to stress that his critique is not aimed at landmark architecture. “I’m not arguing for iconic buildings,” he told me last September on the sidelines of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, which he curated. So he’s not referring to opera houses, art museums or fancy company headquarters and the like. “This is about the 99 per cent of buildings that surround us.” These “everyday buildings” include everything from Korean hagwon cram schools and care homes to libraries, hospitals and apartment blocks. None of the last, it would be safe to assume, approaches his Eden apartment building, in Singapore, where every unit has a lush, pitcher plant-shaped balcony that extends greenery from the ground to the skies. For Heatherwick, structures reduced to “soulless, characterless, sterile” boxes signal a global failure. His studio’s tongue-in-cheek “Boringometer” tips into red when buildings are not only too plain but also too straight, too shiny, too anonymous, too flat, too monotonous, too serious. Surveys back up the sentiment, he says: in 2025, 97 per cent of 1,000 Seoul residents described apartment complexes negatively (some saying they felt “suffocated” by their monotony), while a poll conducted a few years ago in Britain found that 76 per cent of 2,000 participants linked buildings directly to mental health. He traces part of the problem to the elevation of minimalism, where clean lines and simplicity have become virtues in themselves. While that approach can work at small scales, he argues, its translation into large buildings often strips away visual richness, producing environments that feel alienating and repetitive. “We talk about how good a building is for daylight, how good it is for circulation and flow, but we don’t talk enough about what our buildings give back to society,” he tells me. “What I’m talking about is the outsides of buildings. The interiors of most new buildings are very good. But these interiors are often paired with a presence on the street devoid of any interest, which is weird because, in reality, every day, a thousand times more people pass by the outsides of most buildings than go inside.” Hong Kong offers an instructive case. Heatherwick points to the decades in which developers of residential towers were incentivised to add bay windows, which introduced shadows and visual texture at scale on building exteriors. When the “free” gross floor area allowance was tightened in the 2010s, many of those projections disappeared, and facades became flatter and less engaging. As he writes in his book, “What we like is just the right combination of repetition and complexity. Not one, nor the other – but both, complementing one another. This is surely related to our evolution in natural environments.” If Heatherwick’s campaign is fuelled by frustration, the science behind it is driven by lived experience. A few years ago, Cleo Valentine – now a senior design researcher in neuroarchitecture at the global architecture and interior design firm HKS, an affiliate lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a research associate at Harvard University – was “very, very unwell”, she says, after multiple concussions and brain injuries. It later emerged she had a brain infection that had sent her nervous system into a state of relentless overdrive. As she recovered, one question refused to let go: why does the body sometimes remain trapped in stress even after the original threat has passed? An understanding of neuroimmunology, neurophysiology and stress physiology helped her diagnose her own condition. “For me, it was really about trying to identify the ways in which our environment and our world might actually be contributing to that kind of neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory condition.” That insight has shaped her work – and her involvement in Project WHY, an international research initiative launched by HKS on World Brain Day in July 2025, examining how everyday buildings shape emotional experience, cognitive performance and well-being. We have the same form repeated over and over again Cleo Valentine “Humans have been on Earth around 200,000 years,” Valentine says. “We’ve been in cities for only 6,000 years. We’ve not evolved to visually process the world we inhabit very well.” Her research examines how architectural form influences stress. “The further we get away from organic, biomorphic, biophilic geometries, the harder our brain, our visual cortex specifically, has to work to process that visual scene.” Such stressors are now commonplace. High-glare glass facades, acoustic panels, ventilation units and other elements repeated at the same scale can all contribute. “We have the same form repeated over and over again, and at the wrong spatial frequency or at the wrong size and scale. That can be incredibly problematic,” she says. “When we’re talking about things like too shiny, too regular, too repetitive – those are about as strong a deviation from organic geometries as you can get,” she adds. “You don’t really find them in nature.” Early research into the built environment largely concentrated on how architectural conditions might inadvertently provoke harmful physiological and emotional responses. More recently, this inquiry has broadened to a complementary question: if certain spatial features reliably elicit negative reactions, which ones support well-being and positive emotional states? Project WHY exemplifies this shift. Its first study gathered crowdsourced images and opinions from 227 participants worldwide, each nominating places that evoked awe, belonging or creativity. Using AI-assisted visual and language analysis, the findings suggest that emotional responses to buildings are not arbitrary – and that architecture can be tuned accordingly. Awe, the emotion that most fascinated participants, clustered around immensity, verticality and dramatic light, while belonging emphasised material comfort, human scale and social infrastructure. Creativity emerged in visually rich, flexible, light-filled spaces described as playful and stimulating. But why value awe (and does too much of a good thing make something “awful”)? Because the feeling interrupts self-focus, explains Upali Nanda, an HKS global sector director of innovation and executive vice-president. Your attention is shifted outwards, possibly quieting anxious mental loops. “There’s a myth that awe has to be grand,” she adds. “It doesn’t.” What matters is perceptual vastness combined with surprise – a break in expectation. That might come from light falling unexpectedly across a wall, or from a facade that reveals complexity as you move past it. In other words: a building that doesn’t blank you. For Swedish urban sociologist Michael Diamant, legibility is key. Buildings that are hard to read, he argues, tax the mind. Like Heatherwick, he has little patience for modernism, though his critique is less about what’s architecturally boring, more about what should replace it. The founder of non-profit association Architectural Uprising – a group that began on Facebook in 2014 and now boasts chapters worldwide – argues that many modernist buildings are not merely dull but unsettling. “It’s not rocket science; you instantly, intuitively see what is ugly and beautiful,” he says, pointing out that classical architecture originated more than two millennia ago and continues as a living tradition. Echoing Valentine, he adds that when buildings are hard to read, the mind struggles to make sense of them, triggering stress and disengagement. What Diamant champions is the use of classical principles in contemporary buildings – hence his second group, New Traditional Architecture (“two legs of the same stool”, he says). In his view, the problem is not that styles have moved on, but that a coherent framework has been lost. Classical architecture, understood as the formal arm of traditional vernacular building, is, he argues, less a historical look than a system of shared rules governing proportion, symmetry, geometry and human scale. Every day, ugly, horrendous modernist buildings are built Michael Diamant It will come as no surprise, then, that he insists beauty is not in the eye of the beholder – a position he argued in an online lecture on new traditional architecture, hosted by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, on February 28. “Every day, ugly, horrendous modernist buildings are built,” he says. “They’re ugly, shallow, not functional and devoid of culture. They don’t express anything. They could be built anywhere in the world. A skyscraper in Shanghai could be built in Sweden or Latin America or the US. There’s nothing that shows that it’s built in China. There are no values reflected.” Not everyone is comfortable framing the debate in such terms. In their book Cities of Repetition (2024), Jason Carlow and Christian Lange take a more analytical approach, examining how large parts of Hong Kong’s built environment – particularly private housing estates – came to look the way they do. Their focus is not whether buildings are boring, but how and why repetition emerged and became normalised. Carlow, who teaches at the American University of Sharjah, near Dubai, notes that repetition takes different forms across cities. In Dubai, he says, “There are also a lot of high-rise towers, but they are all trying to be iconic in different ways.” Hong Kong followed another path. “The estates that we were looking at may look very boring aesthetically, or similar and repetitive,” Carlow says, “but the way they work in terms of providing housing, providing transit-oriented density and providing public space in their courtyards and podia is unique.” That repetition, he suggests, became entrenched once certain building types proved efficient and viable. “One of the ends of standardisation is profit making,” Carlow adds. Lange, an assistant professor in the University of Hong Kong’s architecture faculty, met Carlow when they were both teaching there and places repetition within a longer historical arc. “That’s where buildings are not any more necessarily a product of craftsmanship,” he says, pointing to industrialisation and the spread of modernism as a universal architectural language. In Hong Kong, that legacy includes the influence of Le Corbusier, whose ideas shaped post-war housing worldwide – and whom Heatherwick calls “the God of boring”. For Carlow and Lange, repetition is best understood as a product of density, necessity and performance, shaped by economic, historical and planning conditions rather than surface appearance alone. What may register as monotonous at first glance, they argue, often reflects how housing systems have been optimised to function at scale. Similar questions about how architecture is shaped by context, and how it is encountered, also arise in the work of Beijing-based architect Ma Yansong. The question of place is central to his practice, and he has long critiqued certain Western modernist assumptions – particularly the prioritisation of isolated, object-like buildings over integrated, human-centred design. Speaking at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism last year, the founder of MAD Architects recalled a professor who once told him that architecture had nothing to do with being interesting. “It was a different time,” says Ma, explaining that his teacher was emphasising function and social responsibility. “For me as a young designer, I was interested in architecture because it could be artistic and personal. I wanted to express myself. “But function can also be interesting. It seems to me that we’re saying, ‘If you have one, you can’t have the other.’” What Ma resists, then, is the tendency to divide architecture into binaries: inside and outside, use and appearance. In his view, architecture should be understood as a continuous spatial experience shaped by movement, atmosphere and context. That philosophy is evident in such MAD projects as Beijing’s Baiziwan Social Housing, completed in 2021, and the new Shenzhen Bay Culture Park, conceived as a continuous public landscape, with buildings rising from greenery and roofs becoming terrain. While the project operates in a different register from the everyday buildings that dominate most cities, it reflects a broader position in Ma’s thinking. Drawing on East Asian traditions, he places less emphasis on static form than on how space unfolds through use – how a building is experienced over time, and how it coexists with its surroundings. This perspective also explains Ma’s caution around debates that focus too narrowly on whether buildings are boring. Visual interest alone, he argues, cannot resolve deeper urban conditions. In cities such as Beijing, oversized streets and car-dominated planning are structural problems that no amount of surface treatment can fix, he says. The issue is not simply how a building looks, but whether the urban setting allows people to walk, gather and feel at ease. Architecture, in this sense, is inseparable from urbanism. Pedestrian-friendly streets, appropriate scale and coherent planning matter as much as individual buildings, and meaningful change depends on architects and planners working in alignment. Seen in this light, Ma’s argument runs parallel to contemporary critiques of monotony in the built environment. Where attention drifts too easily, or passage is rushed, something essential is being missed. As Heatherwick writes in his book, a building should be “interesting enough to hold your attention as you pass it by”. In other words: not boring. If we barely notice the places where we spend our lives, it may be worth asking what that absence is costing us.

Have architects built boredom into our streetscapes, and can it harm our health?

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Cookie-cutter buildings are efficient, but our brains evolved for variety, not endless repetition, and that mismatch can stress us out