Thomas Heatherwick has come in for criticism over his Humanise campaign, but here Aidan Walker mounts an impassioned defence of the British designer.

There's a lot of commentary on Thomas Heatherwick flying about at the moment, much of it negative. Most recently it came in response to the news that Heatherwick's Humanise campaign is working with Loughborough University on a master's degree, due to start in autumn 2025 with a promise to "inspire joyful architecture". The publication of the studio's proposals to turn Seoul's Nodeul Island into a public park (pictured) has also met with brickbats.
I won't enumerate the largely sneering and condescending comments under the corresponding Dezeen stories; it's too dispiriting. Most appear to be from architects invested in their seven-year training and threatened by a non-architect who challenges the prevailing modernist orthodoxy. Here we have a most unusual ? not to say unique ? imagination
Heatherwick set the cat among the architectural pigeons for sure with the publication of his Humanise book last autumn. Reviewing it in The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright really weighed in, attacking "Heatherwick's simplistic aesthetic philosophising".
Wainwright makes the same mistake of which he accuses Heatherwick: he misses the point. The Humanise movement, he says, focuses on the outward appearance of buildings at the expense of "much more crucial issues" that concern the inhabitants of buildings; ceiling heig...