Name: 退屈な建築からの脱却。麻布台ヒルズを手掛けたデザイナー、トーマス・ヘザウィックが都市の未来をアップデート | The Big Interview | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2026-01-30T18:14:06.000Z
Duration: 18 min 52 s
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The second conditional

If I was a residential building, I would have been killed 22 years ago.

In Japan, the average age of a residential building before it's demolished is 32.8.

His urban ideas for city planning were terrible.

Just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

So you wrote an article for Wired at the end of 2024 and the title is it's official.

I've been working now for three decades, and

when I began work, my urge was not to express myself.

I have had a chance to reflect, particularly over the last five, six years.

We've had a digital revolution in the time since I started my studio, and the seriousness has grown.

We used to have to go into a street to buy your food, to get to go to work, you had to leave your home.

But now it became clear there's a blind spot, that we have an epidemic of loneliness.

And it's amazing an industry as big as oil and gas has not been measuring the impact our buildings have on society, on the billions of people who spend their lives going past and around.

Buildings are no longer 8 meters wide or 10 meters wide.

You end up with buildings that are 100 meters.

It's not worth a developer, property developer doing a project unless it's 100 meters, 200 meters.

The interesting thing is that the researchers, the neuroscientists looking at neuro aesthetics and how our environment affects our brain, are showing that it's like ultra processed food.

We now understand that ultra processed food is not good for our stomachs.

And when I was little, my mother was on a macrobiotic Japanese diet.

And my friends would come to my house and look at seaweed and umeboshi plums and be like, what, you're a hippie?

Now look, the whole world understands that ultra processed food is low nutritional value.

But we are still in the equivalent of half a century ago and not understanding that buildings.

That's not the issue, it's public health.

There's things like skin conductance sensors.

You can just see physiologically how the body in front of the planer, shinier, flatter, more monotonous, anonymous and serious buildings.

And then you can compare with a Less monotonous, less flat, less plain, less serious, less shiny building.

And what's so interesting is this stress hormone cortisol spikes in front of the buildings that are more plain, anonymous, serious, shiny.

And the dirty secret in the construction industry is that when society doesn't care about buildings, we demolish them quicker.

In Japan, the average age of a residential building before it's demolished is 32.8 years.

So if I was a residential building in Japan, I would have been killed 22 years ago.

When society doesn't care, those buildings get demolished.

And the carbon impact, the dirty secret is that it's five times the greenhouse gas emissions of the aviation industry.

And society talks about the aviation industry and doesn't talk about construction.

We care about the people inside the buildings and we talk about the client of the building and making the clients.

New buildings tend to be full, well off companies, well off residential thing.

But a 14 year old who will never work in that building, who will never live in that building, what does the building give?

But that's why now you even publish this one in Japan and saying this important message to everyone living in Japan and Tokyo cities all over the world.

The buildings are fatter and wider and bigger.

But us humans, we're still the same size as we were half a million years ago.

In the past, buildings were maybe 8 or 9 meters wide, which meant it almost didn't matter what design someone does on a public street, because if you walk for 300 meters, it means and a building is 10 meters wide, you're going to get 60 different impressions, different doors, so you're getting a visual complexity.

I'm designing buildings now which are 300 meters wide, so suddenly imagine one facade for 300 meters, four and a half minutes of your life walking.

It's a bit like if I suddenly go, never change.

Actually our streets are rooms, they're the public rooms and the buildings are the walls of public life.

And they need to love us and have a duty to serve us, who will never make any money from those people going past.

You'll never work inside me, you're never going to buy anything inside me, but

Last year your partner, Neil Hubbard gave us A video lecture keynote for the Wired regionality of City Summit and talk about how to regenerate the city itself.

We who live in Tokyo kind of start thinking oh, that's too many big boring plain buildings, especially in the center or especially by the Tokyo Bay.

So then our regenerative city is not only about regenerate nature, but

regenerate culture, regenerate human relationship or communities.

But it's always stopped by the economical judge by the developers how to make Then the right answer is just boring buildings.

That's why they make their new buildings sustainable.

If you don't mind me swearing, they will look like an asshole if they don't.

But there is no public conversation about are you an asshole if you make your buildings with no generosity to passersby.

And the other thing for me, particularly in Japan is that to me Japanese people are joyful and humorous.

I know there's many sides to Japanese personality and that humour can be there in new buildings.

So often the image around architecture must be serious, always serious.

And it must be honest and clean lines and pure and subtle.

Whenever someone says this new building is subtle, I always think oh no, subtle is very good when it's a mobile phone or a tablet.

At this scale, that's really right and calm and true.

It makes places that are stressful and we need streets to feel human scale.

I'd like to ask the one quite wiredish question.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

退屈な建築からの脱却。麻布台ヒルズを手掛けたデザイナー、トーマス・ヘザウィックが都市の未来をアップデート | The Big Interview | WIRED Japan

process

subtle

physical

realize