The Soul in the Structure: Why we need human steets again.

There is a Japanese concept called Wabi Sabi which conceptualizes to beauty in something that is temporary or imperfect. The Japanese ceramics they are wonky, or glaze is not even and they’re yet beautiful. Why? Because they’re hand made. Things made on the machine are same, standardized, and less beautiful. Things made by hand are beautiful because they’re imperfect. What makes people beautiful is not that we get things right, it’s that we get many things wrong. And what makes us fall in love is not the person who is perfect, but the person who accepts our imperfections and we know when we are in love when we learn to accept theirs. Not learn to but want to. 

We now know that artists, architects, to sign affidavits that say I made this, I created this and not AI. Not because it was better or worse but if this was touched by human hands. What’ll will eventually happen in this world is that everything will be standardized, everything will be so perfect, that it’ll be as if we’re all driving or using things that everything came of a conveyer belt. And we’ll eventually start to desire things that are made of hand.

In a world obsessed with perfection, we’re slowing remembering what truly moves us, the uneven glaze of a handmade bowl, the grain of natural wood, the imperfect yet irreplaceable details of human touch. It’s not flawlessness that makes us beautiful, it’s our cracks, our quirks, our humanity.

Humans seemed to be drawn to repetition. We naturally appreciate order, symmetry and patterns in artworks and objects. But we do not like repetition too much. Just enough allows us to feel oriented and reassured, too much feels oppressively boring and tyrannical.

Humans also like complexity. As animals we are naturally curious, intelligent and easily bored. We gravitate to interesting things that invite us to look more to understand them. But complexity without any order or repetition can feel alarming and chaotic.

What we like is just the right combination of repetition and complexity. Not one. Nor the other-but both, complementing one another. This is surely related to our evolution in natural environments. If you think of trees or ripples on a lake or the marking on a butterfly’s wings, you’ll be picturing a play of repetition and complexity. These are images that probably inspire feelings of quite elation in almost everyone.

Let’s take an example of an art form like music and storytelling also play with repetition and complexity. The rhythm of a drum, a verse and a chorus are all patterns that can repeat in a song, but complexity is frequently then layered on top of these elements, using string instruments, lyrics and shifts in tempo and emotional intensity.

The difference between a song Like Hanuman Chalisa and that of Aur ho from Rockstar is that one leans more towards repetition and the other towards complexity. They’re at the opposite ends of the spectrum, but they use the same essential tools. Likewise, when we read a captivating novel, or watch the latest thriller, we can sense an archetypal pattern in the story: the drama goes predictably up and down until the inevitable finale. We know it’s going to happen, but if we’re not bored, it’s because the writer has added enough complexity to the ancient pattern to keep us interested. 

How can boring be harmful though? Isn’t it boring an absence, a pause, a piece of nothing? Nothing can’t harm you. Nothing is nothing, after all. But the astonishing and little-known truth is that boring is worse than nothing.

Boring is a state of psychological deprivation. Just as the body will suffer when it’s deprived of food, the brain begins to suffer when it’s deprived of sensory information. Boredom is the starvation of mind.

A neuroscientist called Colin Ellard has studied how this happens. In 2012, he travelled to New York city to analyze how people felt when they walked through a boring place and then, shortly afterward through an interesting place. He wanted to know: how would spending just a brief amount of time in these different places affect a person’s mood?

As the groups walked through each location, a specially designed smartphone app asked them questions about what they were seeing and how they were feeling. Outside the supermarket the most common responses included bland, monotonous and passionless. However, in East Houston Street, the most common responses included socializing, busy and lively.

But the truth is Ellard didn’t need an app to identify how their moods were being altered. Autonomic arousal refers to how alert we are, and how primed wea re to respond to threat. It’s a measure of stress. When Ellard checked the results, he discovered that people in the boring location weren’t simply feeling nothing. Their autonomic arousal, their stress levels had gone up.

The boredom wasn’t just making them feel nothing, their brains and bodies were going into a state of stress.

But why would a boring place make you stressed?

When we enter any environment, we unconsciously scan it for information. During the millions of years in which our brains were being moulded by evolution, we lived in nature. And natural environments are crammed with complexity. The human brain has evolved to expect this base level of information, a bit like the body expects base levels of oxygen, water and food.

Boring modern landscapes, which privilege repetition over complexity supply us with an unnaturally low level of information. When the brain is deprived of information from its environment it takes it as a signal that something is wrong. It panics. It switches the body to a state of alert, raising its readiness to deal with danger.

In the right contexts, and with the right intentions, the base elements of boring can be wonderful. But when too many of these elements come together in one building or one place, boringness becomes a serious problem.

The way I see it, boring is like an equation. It’s like putting too much sugar, fat, carbohydrates, alcohol and nicotine into a human body. More often than not, it’s the combination and accumulation over a lifetime that kills you.

Humans are not well suited to a life of boredom. Boring buildings and places make us malfunction.

Backyards, front yards, broad steps and streets are all places that encourage humans to look, linger and chat, there is more likely to be a sense of community.

When we live in low-rise housing, or along well-designed terraced streets, we’re primed to gradually make acquaintances. These acquaintances might begin as the briefest nods of acknowledgement as we encounter each other in backyards and front yards, and on front steps, pavements and streets.

Those nods can turn into smiles.

Which can turn into small talk.

Which can turn into bigger talk.

Which can even turn into friendships and life enhancing relationships that make our lives more meaningful.

This is how the design of the outsides of the buildings can have a profound impact on our lives and the shape of our societies. At the best they tip us toward each other, increasing our chances of positively connecting with one another. Humans are social animals. We tend to suffer when we don’t feel securely connected within a supportive network of people, and we thrive when we do.

People tend to be kinder and more connected when they slow down and have the chance to make eye contact. Old, winding streets nurture this sense of sociability. A perfect example of this can be seen on JM Road and FC Road in Pune—where shoppers wander leisurely, friends gather on seating structures to share conversations about life, artists showcase their talents along the sidewalks, and restaurants infuse the entire area with joy and warmth for everyone who visits.

Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain experiences any environment we enter as an action setting. It processes place as a set of instructions, seeking answers to the question: how do I interact with this location? Where do I walk? Where do I sit? Where do I get shelter? In which direction should I travel? The format of the traditional street is crammed with answers to these questions. It is a successful action setting. A modernist plaza or wide, empty boulevard is not.

Humans are thigmotactic which means we are wall hugging species. We’re naturally drawn to and naturally build relatively narrow streets lined with wall buildings. We prefer not to walk across wide-open empty plazas unless we’re in a hurry and will walk instead closer to the sides. Similarly, if there are benches available in the middle of a public space and along the sides, we tend to instinctively choose the seat on the sides.

The geometry of traditional style streets makes us more social. It makes us feel safe. It gives the brain what it needs to act.

Public Opinion about art:

There was a debate held in an exclusive London club, between two figures from the world of architecture. The topic was whether the public’s opinion about buildings should matter. The general mood of the room was supportive of the idea that they wouldn’t know enough to be worth listening to. Most people thought, “Why would you ask them? What do we know? This culture has protected the egos of elite building designers from the rejection of their work by the vast majority of the population. It says: The masses don’t like what we do because they’re ignorant. We know better.

It’s a convenient fiction that allows them to dismiss the overwhelming evidence that most people just don’t want what most building designers are making. It allows them to keep on building boring buildings, generation after generation, repeatedly.

How did these people end up so separated from everyone else?

What do they see that the rest of us are so blind to?

Here’s the surprising answer: Modernist architecture think boring buildings are beautiful.

When architects and non-architects look at buildings, they tend to see different realities. Modernist architects experience an alternative reality, in which their buildings are truly beautiful. And non-architect clients, scared of seeming ignorant or old-fashioned and perhaps concerned that an alternative vision will be more expensive, give the benefit of the doubt to the building designer who they perceive as the expert.

Whilst many modernist musicians, painters and writers of the twentieth century rejected the idea of representing beauty entirely, perhaps mindful of the fact that they had clients to please and commissions to win, they declared their spare, blank, boring artforms to be beautiful.

Modernist artists form a cult. A cult’s beliefs and practices must be radically different to those followed by ordinary people-it’s exactly this difference that allows its members to believe they’re separate and enlightened.

Only by strictly adhering to its arcane beliefs can cult members achieve acceptance and status within the cult. This is why cults are recognizable both by the strangeness of their beliefs and by the conformity of their members.

There is a concept of level horizontal. The level horizontal is a place of tranquility. There will be no conflict. It is like a tide, which after it has come in and reaches its highest point, forms a level horizontal where there is no motion, no conflict. After the moment of high tide has passed, the water begins to recede and resumes its motion.

Modernist artists study special texts to achieve enlightenment, and they also speak in their own special language. It creates a sense of community, allowing members to identify with each other and exclude unenlightened outsiders. It also helps to form the strange alternative reality that cultists live inside.

As the world began to industrialize in the nineteenth century, it also began to look more industrial. As the world became wealthier in the twentieth century, it began to look more like profit.

The Industrial Revolution triggered a tsunami-like shift from artisan building to mass production. The development of new materials and building methods inevitably affected the size, shape and style of buildings. New ways of working iron, forging steel and reinforcing concrete meant structures could now be far taller.

The ability to construct buildings from steel frames instead of load bearing brick walls meant that they could cover entire outer walls in glass. The creation of the elevator meany those higher floors could be easily accessed, the invention of electric lighting and air conditioning meant people no longer had to be so close to windows, so buildings could be deeper.

Property agents:

Another incredibly powerful force in shaping the world around us, property agents tell the developers what they’ll be able to sell or rent. So, the true customers of the developers and their buildings designers tend not to be the specific families who will be buying and living in the flats and houses (and certainly not the millions of us who will be forced to experience the outsides of these buildings), but the property agents who are lumping all the potential customers together. And because there is generally such a shortage of property agents who are lumping all the potential customers together.

And because there is generally such a shortage of property globally, it’s a seller’s market, scarcity makes values go up even if the quality is low. This is why the commercially driven people who pay for new buildings tend to focus on the insides of space. They don’t have to care much about the outside because most properties will sell anyway, regardless of how dull the outsides appear.

If we speak to a property agent that they should care more about what homes look like on the outside, they’d probably say: Why? I sell every single home I’m given. It’s scary to realize that there’s so little financial incentive to spend time and money making the outsides better.

The efficiency obsession:

The building professionals talks constantly about efficiency. This is the difference between how many square feet of a building you can build, with its associated costs, versus how many square feet you can actually sell or let to somebody. In a housing project, for example, the marketing team will say that they can’t sell the shared corridors, so the pressure is on to have the shortest corridors possible.

Efficiency also means maximizing the perceived internal room size, which inevitably encourages external boxiness. Land is valuable, and sites usually have straight boundaries that you aren’t allowed to overhang or build over. As a height limit is always imposed by the city’s authorities, the developer and the building designer are incentivized to build out to the maximum width possible, so they understandably try to use up every millimeter of space. This creates a tendency for everything to be pushed out, flat and square.

From the inside, a space you’re selling looks biggest when the windows and their frames are pushed out as far as possible within the openings of walls. The outcome of this is that the glass becomes almost flat and aligned with the external surface of the wall.

Sadly, windows almost always look best for all of us in the streets of a city when they’re not just flat and aligned with the outside surfaces of a building. They look best when they’re pushed inwards, creating three dimensionality to break down the monolithic boxy feel of a building.

Who should win?

The small handful of people who see this new building from the inside, or the millions who’ll see it from outside. It’s like a tug of war between the insides and outsides of the building, with selfish forces of money the likely winner on the inside, and the public the loser on the outside.

Efficient is exactly how new buildings all over the world appear today. Their highest value is not focused on the people who’ll see and use them every day, but on those who’ll make money from them.

Why do so many of the world’s new buildings look like greed? Because the ultimate customer is the capitalist world and not the public.

Another interesting point to look at is the rise of a new profession that emerged in the last century as compensation for buildings that were otherwise losing their ability to engage the emotions of their users. Once, architects would pride themselves on designing beautiful integrated interiors.

Although today’s building designers have to care a lot about the sellable size of the interiors, they have largely lost the art of thinking about how the details of the rooms they create will make people feel. When they try, the results are often half-hearted. Building Designers have unwittingly surrendered their understanding of the insides of buildings, to the point where they no longer know how to infuse them with mood and feel.

So, the task of mastering mood and feel has increasingly been taken over by interior designers and artists. Sadly, if you want to see human centric design in most modern buildings, you have to go inside them.

Some of the interesting, emotionally satisfying places you can find today are the insides of restaurants and hotels. This is because the ultimate customers of these places aren’t developers or agents, but members of the public who simply wouldn’t turn up if they weren’t made to feel good.

One interesting case study I recently came across is this:

BKC just made Starbucks coffee more affordable than rent per sqft. ₹811 per sq ft. That’s what BNP Paribas agreed to pay last quarter for Bandra-Kurla Complex space. Meanwhile, Apple slid into the same tower earlier at ₹738 per sq ft. The bigger punch-line? Since 2022, MMR’s office rents have surged 28%, outsprinting every other metro like Usain Bolt on espresso.

Here’s what nobody’s talking about:

Scarcity + infrastructure = irrational exuberance. When Grade-A space in BKC gets rarer than parking spots, companies pay iPhone prices for office real estate. The result? A 1000 sq ft office now costs more than most people’s annual salary.

While everyone obsesses over BKC postcodes, Navi Mumbai and Thane are witnessing sub-10% vacancy rates. Capital values still trail BKC by 40-60%.

Every 5% annual escalation bakes an extra 63% of the cost by year 10. That “affordable” ₹500 per sq ft today becomes ₹815 by 2034. Most CFOs are signing contracts they can’t math.

And this isn’t just about Mumbai.

Bengaluru’s seeing 22% rent spikes. Pune’s Hinjewadi is trading at premiums. NCR’s DLF Cyber City is pricing out unicorns.

We’re witnessing the financialization of office space where location becomes a luxury good, not a business necessity.

The hard truth is that the buck of boring doesn’t stop with artists. Whether or not they’re sensitive to the emotions of users, they’re often the victims of a vastly more powerful system of money, bureaucracy and government. And even when they want to, they’re often prevented from building more interesting buildings because society keeps on choosing to see value principally in cost and efficiency.

Until boring buildings become a vote loser for politicians and councillors, and we begin insisting to planners and developers that we must have better buildings in which to live, work, learn and heal, the catastrophe of boring will continue its conquest of the world.

But in this boring world there are some people like Rahul Bhushan who are thinking differently towards this concept. He and his team Imagines a Himachal with low impact structures that are context driven and made with heart. Giving a piece of nature the respect it deserves is what they aim to do by creating a regional centre for the development of Himachal, in Naggar.

Amongst the deodars, on a mountain, they’ve set up a small village for themselves. Here, they have a research cell where they innovate local materials & sustainable architecture and flourish the crafts of this region through training programs and workshops with the karigars (craftspeople).

An architecture and design studio sits beside it where they design and build sustainable structures for the region. In the midst of it all sits their community kitchen surrounded by our permaculture farm where we practice conscious nourishment of our bodies.

At the edge of the land resides a place where all the elements of the earth meet to energize and rejuvenate the subtle energies that a land inherently has. Littered throughout the land are naturally built cabins made by the top architects of India for visitors to experience our campus from.

Besides the library which houses archival material and books of and from Himachal, is the artist residency wing where creators from everywhere get together and intervene in the streets through art and host workshops for the locals to teach them something new.

They’ve built a space where people could be less preoccupied by their professions and more reliant on each other as we practice new skills together. It's a home, where we meet splendid nature, make architecture, art, music and food; practice community building; learn new skills; and enjoy each other's company. This was the first line I wrote about North, and it still holds true.

Sustainable living is a process which takes time and patience to mould into being. It is an active process of becoming aware and making choices towards a healthy and fulfilling life. It is more than being free from illness, a dynamic process of change and growth. Patience is required to live a life in the forest. It's a path made of principles, which builds our character.

A thing, structure, building, art form should be able to hold your attention for the time it takes to pass by it. I’m no one and no interest in telling artists precisely how things should look, sound like and even if I did nobody would listen.

A simple argument that leads to interestingness to engage a passerby for the short time it takes them to experience it. What we need isn’t more conformity, but more creativity.

Nestled among the stately, straight-lined facades of British-era architecture on Pune’s Camp Road, this gravity-defying structure instantly arrests the eye: its dramatic lean seems to defy physics, as though time itself paused to tilt the building skyward. In a streetscape otherwise governed by symmetry and historical restraint, its bold cantilevered volumes and skewed windows inject a playful tension, prompting passersby to linger, to question— “Is it truly as precarious as it appears?”—and to marvel at our capacity to bend rules without toppling over. This single gesture of deliberate imbalance transforms the mundane task of urban transit into a moment of discovery, proving that architecture need not be monumental in scale or budget to humanize our experience and awaken our curiosity.

Humans are driven by powerful emotions that are felt instantly and automatically. Every building we pass inspires feelings. On the most basic level, a building makes us feel good or it makes us feel bad. It attracts or repels.

When you walk into century old Murudeshwara temple, or any other century old temple in India, you are struck immediately by darkness and coolness echoes and the echoes around the stonework. The air around the temple of Murudeshwar is all humid. Yet when you enter the temple, the humidity disappears in an instant. And you are struck with cold breeze on your face. You only imagine how this comes up.

You hush your voice and look heavenwards towards the spectacular pillars and the foundations and ceilings over which the temple was built. Your breathing slows down and you feel calmer and more meditative. The place deeply affects how you feel. The decisions of its designers who died centuries ago still manage to reach in and change you. They knew that emotion was a critically important function of their structures.

We’re not the same people as we were even half a generation ago. On a massive range of issues, everything from race to gender to our ideas about sustainability and the environment, we have evolved.

In 2005, the UK government banned the industrialized food product Turkey Twizzlers from school meals following a campaign by the television cook Jamie Oliver. India too in 2025 has asked the USA to certify the Genetically modified crops for them to enter the Indian market due diligently.

India's 2021 regulation on GM crops mandates that imports of 24 specified items including grains, oilseeds, fruits and vegetables must be accompanied by GM free/non-GMO certificate, comprising a health certificate and additional validation from the country of export. Cheapness wasn’t the most important value associated with that industrialized product. Food for the people, children shouldn’t taste efficiency.

Its time that we insist that our buildings are nutritious too and nourish us as we encounter them. We should confidently reject the tired old argument that property developers cant be expected to make human places because they’re hard nosed capitalists with a bottom line to worry about.

Society has chosen to spend less on each individual building we now build. Its surprising they aren’t emotionally nutritious enough.

We could afford to make good, simple, human artforms in the year 1723, 723, 23, and 3.

Every other generation managed to do it. There is no doubt that we can do it today.

There is a catastrophe unfolding that’s affecting you and everyone you love. It has been happening for 100 years and counting. But it is a slow and stealthy process.

It all just happens in the background. The hoarding screens are put up. The demolition ball comes down. Then come the cranes. Then the mind-numbing boredom. This activity tries to hide itself. But its being done to you, just as broken nose is done to you.

We need to fearlessly demand interestingness in our artforms, music, paintings and buildings. We need to stop telling yourselves, this is a problem for later. By 2050, two out of every three will live in a town or a city. And if this continues, we are going to be exposed to all of the boring artforms we still try to neglect.

Human beings deserve human places.

Today we’re beneficiaries of the generous gifts past generations have given us. Some of us are lucky enough to live and experience the artforms that the past generations have left for us. The great majority of everyday artforms were interesting. How many are today? Two percent?

Boring artforms aren’t just a curse for the visual and listening landscape. They’re a curse on mental health. They make us unhappy. The less privileged people are, the more their lives are blighted by boredom.

To the one reading this, to the one who is listening, visualizing and feeling at least one or the other artform. I’ve been talking so much about what industry professionals could do to end the catastrophe of boring that by now you’d be forgiven for feeling a little ignored. Even a little powerless.

What about me? You might be thinking. What can I do about all of this? I’m just a person experiencing visualizing, listening to this.

As powerless as you might feel, you’re actually the most powerful part of this movement. Revolutions don’t come from council offices or corporate boardrooms, production houses, or studios. They start when enough ordinary people come together with enough passion and excitement for change.

And it takes only five simple steps: Looking, listening, feeling, thinking and talking.

When you are out in the streets, listening to music, watching a movie, watching a play, looking at various paintings, artforms, architecture, ask yourself how they make you feel. Have the confidence to know that your emotional responses truly matter. They are as valid as anyone else’s.

Is the artform you are listening to, looking at interesting enough to hold your attention as you pass it by? If so, why? How have its designers been successful? And if it fails, why?

Encourage your newfound thoughts and feelings to catch fire. When you see brilliance, feel brilliant. When you see boring, feel angry. But don’t let the anger get you down. Let it help you passionately appreciate all the brilliance there is in the buildings, old and new, that do manage to be generous and interesting. Relish these buildings. Celebrate them. Allow them to lift you up and show you the way to a better future in which our streets are lined not to be harmful boring but with fascination and joy.

Once you’ve seen and felt and thought about the thing, that surrounds you, there is a vital final step. Its important that you share your thoughts and feelings with anyone and everyone who might care. Encourage the people you hand this feeling, information to then pass it on themselves. Allow its message to spread, slowly but surely, from person to person. All you know you need to do is go out look, feel, think and talk.

The time has come to open our eyes and make a noise. The time has come to close the book to boring. The time has come to be interesting.