Saarinen chairs and Noguchi coffee tables remain popular long after they’ve become period décor. More than 100 years after Le Corbusier’s revolution, modernist design still retains a revanchist hold, especially in the upper strata of prestige. The movement delivered so thoroughly that, in Heatherwick’s view, it scattered the globe with banality, and it’s not done yet. Factories would churn out housing for all. Developed in the years before World War I and dominating a cratered world after World War II, the clean-lined, flat-surfaced, fuss-free modern aesthetic promised sanitary spaces and abundant light. (Although Heatherwick designs buildings himself, he isn’t a licensed architect, so his own feet remain blameless.) The members of that profession - cult is the term he prefers - remain in thrall to an obsolete orthodoxy of modernism. He lays boringness at the feet of architects, which is to say his employees, colleagues, and collaborators. Not until the early-20th-century embrace of concrete, mass production, and modernism did humans fully explore the realm of boringness. Ever since the first megaloceros hunters painted the walls of their caves, people have lived and worked in ornamented structures, complex even in their simplicity. Blah-ness is not a default setting, he says. Heatherwick has channeled that indignation into Humanize, a fat, lavishly illustrated screed against tedious architecture. In his view, nearly all contemporary architecture is worse than bad or clumsy or oversize or energy-sucking.

What do you expect to see when the wrapping comes off a construction site, revealing a new apartment building, hospital, strip mall, or subdivision? Thomas Heatherwick, the designer of flamboyant showpieces like Little Island and Google’s tented Bay View campus in California, watches these unveilings like a boy opening a present he already knows will be socks. Photo-Illustration: Curbed Curbed Photos: Steve Lovegrove/Shutterstock, Getty Images, Courtesy of Heatherwick Studios We think that fog or mist from the outside and accumulated in the building, and it looked like a kind of hazy atmosphere.A Heatherwick hall-of-fame of international boringness, clockwise from top left: Fukuoka, Nairobi, Moscow, Canberra. “The building was still being constructed as the first plane was being built, and one wall was not yet enclosed. There is a longstanding urban myth that the building is so large and high that clouds form at the top of it. “I only have to wear a sweater or a light jacket and that’s sufficient.” In winter, the effect of the more than one million lights, the huge amount of electric equipment and some 10,000 human bodies also helps moderate the temperatures. In summer, if it gets too hot, Reese says, they just open the massive doors to let in the breeze. While there is ventilation, there is no air conditioning. The factory boasts some surprising features.

That can be an issue with some of our visitors, they say things like ‘Oh, I wear reading glasses, that will be enough.’ It’s not.” “We do require proper footwear, so no open-toed shoes and no high heels for the ladies – anything that could possibly cause a fall or damage your feet – and you have to wear safety glasses at all times in the factory. There are a few rules for working in, or even just visiting, the factory. They chose an area of woodland some 22 miles (35km) north of Seattle, near an airport that had served as a fighter base during World War Two. Bill Allen, Boeing’s charismatic chief, had realised the company would need a huge amount of space if they were going to build an airliner big enough to carry 400 passengers.

Norway’s plan for a fleet of electric planesīoeing started work on the Everett factory in 1967, just as the Boeing 747 project was starting to gather pace.

How big? Try the biggest enclosed building in the world. So it’s no surprise the factory which ended up building has to be very big indeed. If you’ve ever seen a 747 from close quarters you’ll know just how giant Boeing’s jumbo is. When Boeing decided to build the 747 – a plane so big it would become known around the world as the jumbo jet – they had to build a factory large enough to build several of them at the same time. When you’re building some of the world’s biggest airliners, you need an equally outsized building.

Office building inside boring