Humanise

A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World

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Humanise

By: Thomas Heatherwick

Narrated by: Thomas Heatherwick

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

In this manifesto for change, one of the world's pre-eminent designers explores how buildings and cities around the world lost their soul - and what we can do about it.

Thomas Heatherwick shows how design has a profound effect on our mental and physical health, the climate, as well as the peace and cohesion of societies. He shows how a flawed idea of utility and 'efficiency' has engulfed our towns and cities and hardened into a form of bland minimalism. But it doesn't have to be this way: there are other ways to build - with the power to lift our spirits, engage and connect us.

Heatherwick draws on his own work, the ideas of other experts in the field, and recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology to offer both a case against the inhumanity of modernist design and a rallying cry to everyone to imagine the world anew. Looking through his eyes, we take in places around the world, old and new, famous and obscure, that can sap the life out of us - or nourish our senses and our psyche.

Humanise is a tautly argued provocation and an urgent call-to-arms to make the world around us a far better place for everyone to live.

Architecture

Human Geography

Social Sciences

Sociology

Urban

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Critic reviews

"This book is a super accessible guide as to why we shouldn't put up with soulless buildings and how we might change that." (Grayson Perry)

"Humanise is a masterwork. It's quietly furious, impassioned, rigorous and forensic in all the right doses. It leaves me very hopeful indeed about how things could go from here." (Alain de Botton)

Most relevant

I enjoyed the unfolding of the well-reasoned argument read by Heatherwick himself in his characterful voice. I felt the passion against our obsession with sanctifying ‘The Market’ which has resulted in (a lot of cases) bare minimum functional architecture.

Hopefully this book will ignite a movement of people celebrating the humanity in making beautiful and functional things.