The image above is an AI example of Buckingham Palace if it were built today. Building blocks might be fun toys for children but they’re not much fun to live in. And throughout the world, that is what is being built – boring buildings that make people sick, stressed and depressed, while simultaneously destroying our planet. 76% of Brits say the way buildings look affects their mental health*.

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

So the Humanise Movement and foundsing partner, Uncommon Creative Studio, have recreated six of Britain’s greatest landmarks, including Buckingham Palace & the Houses of Parliament, as boring, soulless buildings to draw attention to the problem.

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.

It’s 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 six buildingds, the Tower of London, Houses of Parliament, ‘Hovis’ Hill, Edinburgh Castle, The Liver Building, and Buckingham Palace 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.

The UnLandmarks campaign 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?

*2023 survey by Thinks Insight polling a nationally representative group of 2,029 members of the UK public.