AI Strips Britain’s Favourite Buildings of Their Soul

Boring buildings starve our soul. Beautiful buildings feed it.

We are living through a quiet, global catastrophe of boring buildings that make people sick, stressed and depressed — while simultaneously destroying our planet. A whopping 76% of Brits say the way buildings look affects their mental health.

Interesting buildings lie at the heart of British culture. Our cities are full of iconic streets and priceless landmarks. But a lot of what we’re building for the future is drab, dreary and depressing.

That is why UnLandmarks has been created. It’s a new project from the Humanise movement and founding partners Uncommon Creative Studio. Using artificial intelligence, fed with 75 years of soulless development data, UnLandmarks reimagines Britain’s most beloved buildings through the eyes of its most boring architectural trends.

A dystopian warning to the future and a wake-up call to create cities that are radically more joyful and human. The UnLandmarks project spotlights a century-old global issue: how most new buildings have become increasingly soulless, worsening our health and contributing to the climate crisis.

The series of images shows six of the most loved and quintessentially British landmarks stripped of their personality to reveal their boring alter-egos.

These include the Tower of London, Houses of Parliament, ‘Hovis’ Hill, Edinburgh Castle, The Liver Building, and Buckingham Palace. All were chosen because of their cherished status in British culture - based on a 2015 survey of Britain’s top 10 most loved buildings.

The resulting images replace the unique character of these global icons with monotonous designs emblematic of so many new buildings around the world.

UnLandmarks sends a stark message: if boring buildings continue to proliferate, our towns and cities will lose their soul and everything that makes them special and important to us. But the message of hope is also clear - that by creating more interesting buildings, the places we design today can become our landmarks of the future.

As part of this initiative, Humanise and Uncommon took over a souvenir shop in London, replacing classic tourist souvenirs like mugs, tea towels, fridge magnets and postcards with the boring and cheeky UnLandmarks.

This deliberately soulless souvenir stall highlights another facet of the problem - that boring buildings have an outsized impact not only on the people who live in a city, but also on people wanting to visit. London alone gets 30 million tourists each year. Why would they come if the buildings get more and more identikit and uninteresting?

Sign up to the Humanise movement to learn more about the impact of boring buildings - their consequences for our mental and physical health, as well as the environment - and what you can do here.