Is Thomas Heatherwick the best person to preach about modern architecture?

It needs a big personality to answer a big question: why is so much new building so very bad; why are our cities so ugly? Thomas Heatherwick is that big personality. He is the Jamie Oliver of architecture and design: personable, blokeish, smart, tele-genic, extremely successful, nearly demented with ambition, and, one suspects, inclined to petulance if crossed. He is a visionary with several blind spots. To extend the Oliver comparison, there are times when Heatherwick serves up a delicious dish with his thumbs stuck in the bowl. His flair comes with flaws.

As a designer, his Boris Bus for London was charming, but functional problems led to its withdrawal from service. His ‘B of the Bang’ sculpture in Manchester has been dismantled. The ‘Rolling Bridge’ in Paddington is a fabulous conceit. But hang on a moment. Who wants a bridge that rolls? In Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, his vertiginous open-work ‘Vessel’, a honeycomb structure, has been closed indefinitely because too many people jumped off it and killed themselves. So much for visitor attractions. His Olympic cauldron was widely admired. For Longchamp, he designed a Manhattan shop with a sloping floor.

Humanise is a stonking brick of a paperback whose intention is to agitate us into an angry revolution against boring, ugly buildings. Heatherwick brings his huge, undisciplined intelligence to the architecture debate, speaking for human values, complexity and surprises. It is a predominantly illustrated book, whose scrappy presentation is, I think, to make a point about the arbitrariness of the creative process. There are scribbled annotations and underlinings, trompe l’oeil notes on pinboards and a generous range of fonts. Some will think this visually exciting, others may find it too cute.