Thomas Heatherwick's 2025 Seoul architecture biennale calls for ‘radically more human’ buildings

At the launch of the 2025 Seoul architecture biennale, a giant twisted wall made of 1,428 steel tiles captures the attention of passersby walking through Songhyeon Green Plaza. This 90 metre-long, 16 metre-high wall twists in the middle, forming an opening that draws people into the plaza. Dubbed the ‘Humanise Wall,’ the structure features images of 400 buildings from 38 countries and by 110 architects, as well as nine community projects that convey ideas of how buildings in this city can change.

Welcome to the 2025 Seoul architecture biennale

The ‘Humanise Wall’ is the gateway to the 5th edition of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, which aims to spark a public conversation about how to ‘humanise’ buildings for the well-being of citizens. This year’s event, titled ‘Radically More Human,’ is helmed by British designer Thomas Heatherwick as general director and builds on his ‘Humanise’ campaign, a global initiative launched with his 2023 book ‘Humanise.’ The campaign argues against the creation of 'boring' structures, claiming how dull, soulless buildings are bad for our brains, our economy, and the planet, and calls for more joyful, engaging and human buildings and cities.

'We've had an epidemic of boringness. Blandemic (bland + epidemic), I called it. The argument is we've had things where everything's just too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous, too serious. When you get all of them again and again, it's harmful boring,' said Heatherwick in Seoul ahead of the biennale's opening. 'Just like we need nutritional complexity for our gut biome, we need visual complexity. There’s a necessity for fascination.' It’s not his own argument, he flags, but one 'made by researchers who are looking at how our brains respond to buildings.'

According to studies by the Humanise Campaign, being surrounded by boring buildings which lack visual complexity can have a profound impact on public health as well as culture and society. Buildings without texture, warmth, or variety can leave people feeling low and disconnected, architecture that is too uniform or repetitive can lead to mental fatigue, disorientation, and stress, and curved façades and organic shapes may reduce cognitive stress and help make everyday surroundings more comfortable and intuitive.

'We’ve done polling across thousands of citizens of Seoul for the biennale by the Humanise campaign and 97% of them, which is an incredibly high number, say they don't like the residential buildings that are built here. And 90% of people in Korea say that buildings affect how they feel,' said Heatherwick, citing research data conducted by his studio for the biennale, which will be announced during the ‘Emotional City Conference’ on September 27 and 28.

But because there is 'no public conversation about the global epidemic of characterless places,' this biennale has a huge role to play, he says. 'The whole biennale is about health and the need for places to be more engaging. It's actually a nutritional public health conversation.'

In order to engage people in this public conversation, he had to attract people’s attention and draw their curiosity – hence the giant wall. The ‘Humanise Wall’ was inspired by jogakbo, a Korean patchwork textile made by sewing together small, leftover pieces of fabric (usually from silk or ramie) to create a wrapping cloth, called a bojagi.

'At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, there is a collection of jogakbos. I've been to Korea many times, and I love the fabrics and the textiles. The ‘Humanise Wall’ is like a big, gigantic magazine. The patchwork of the jogakbos could be a mechanism to have many different stories being told and the work of the local communities all coexisting in a miscellaneous way,' Heatherwick said. 'It’s like a giant bibimbap [a Korean mixed rice dish with of vegetables].'

When entering the gateway, visitors encounter 24 smaller partitions facing the ‘Humanise Wall.’ These ‘Walls of Public Life’ are giant fragments of buildings, 2.4m wide by 4.8m high, inspired by Stonehenge in England, and highlighting how the façade of a building plays a big role in shaping people’s emotional responses. The walls are created by 24 design teams from across the globe, coming from a variety of creative and cultural backgrounds, some with no experience of designing a building. Korean American chef Edward Lee, British fashion designer Stella McCartney, a jeweller, a car manufacturing team at Hyundai, and two traditional building makers from Burkina Faso, among others, have participated.

'It is emotion that makes you cherish something. So it's really a mindset shift for our industry to be more interested in looking closely at how people experience,' says Heatherwick. 'Just as Korea is a world leader at skincare, I thought we would focus on skin, skins of buildings, for the biennale. It's like a cutout of a future building. Every single one of them has visual complexity and fascination, and is an example where you could take any one of those and say, ‘turn it into a building, please.’ The campaign is about changing the buildings that get built.'

Until now, there has been huge importance given to the interior, but for the public, the exterior is more important, he continues to explain. 'There is a smaller group of people who are inside most buildings and a much bigger group who are going past the outside. I'm not saying the inside doesn't matter. It does matter. But we're actually quite good at the insides. The balance of love has been on insides.' When asked whether people might feel stressed if a city becomes too visually complex and stimulating, Heatherwick says he’s not arguing for buildings to look 'crazy.'

'You go to a forest, it's full of visual complexity. But there are no big show-offs in a forest. So we mustn’t mix up my work with the argument,' he said. 'In effect, I've overreacted with my own work to this drought of storytelling in buildings. I'm not proposing every building to be a crazy shape, and it's not going to happen because it's not affordable. But just be generous, be kind.'

The biennale’s main site is the Songhyeon Green Plaza, but the event extends to the Seoul Hall of Urbanism and Architecture which offers a further three exhibitions – the 'Cities Exhibition,' featuring 25 building exteriors from 21 cities, the 'Seoul Exhibition,' revealing 18 projects on the future of Seoul, and 'Global Studios,' an interactive media exhibition exploring the emotions and memories evoked by the outsides of buildings.

'The goal is the city-wide conversation. I think Seoul could potentially be one of the first humanised cities and show other cities around the world how to engage the citizens because it has receptiveness and open-mindedness,' he said.

'Korea is a global powerhouse in beauty and understanding of skin. Korea is a powerhouse in pop music, in drama and in food, but it isn't in architecture. The economic miracle of Korea, which has facilitated and superpowered the growth, is amazing, but now the pali-pali ['quick quick,' in Korean] mindset needs to be used and adjusted to bring in the human dimension properly. And underneath it all, emotion is the thing that drives us.'

The 5th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism is on show until 18 November 2025