Prime Highlights
- Heatherwick’s Humanise campaign organises a beach protest of symbolic sandcastles in Morecambe.
- The radical action condemns dull, soulless architecture and encourages creative, humanised design.
Key Fact
- Giant sand sculptures up to 3 meters tall stood for “bland” modern architecture.
- The public responded by creating their own expressive ones, showing natural creativity.
Key Background
Morecambe’s South Beach was the location for an innovative protest by Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise campaign. The protest took the form of giant sandcastles—”Bland Castles” was the term used by the protesters to describe them—to make a point about the lack of character in so much of the contemporary city’s architecture. These unimaginative, off-the-peg buildings were built specifically to call out the emotional lack in so many contemporary buildings, as described by Heatherwick.
The protest was not individualistic—it was inclusive. Sunbathers were free to create the sand sculpture themselves, a three-dimensional alternative to the uninteresting “blank” shapes. It became a color-blocking display of human creativity, detail, and uniqueness. This public accessibility was the campaign’s operating hypothesis: that everyone, given the chance, instinctively creates worlds that are full of life and sentiment.
Heatherwick, who is a master of expressive and innovative design practice, is dedicated to architecture for human experience. According to him, building construction these days has far too much cost cutting and regulation, which creates space that makes humans feel emotionally alienated. The campaign’s purpose is to return the design community to the way of building that is for affirming life, diversity, and sensuous experience.
While originally scheduled for the day prior, the protest was rescheduled due to the strong winds from Storm Floris. Regardless, the turnout and creative response to the new date served to reinforce the strength of the message of the campaign. The Humanise movement is not just critiquing construction trends, but is also offering everyday men and women a voice to redefine the structures that they inhabit—to call for a future in which architecture is not so much built but lived.
