THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS
-Alain De Botton
Contents
o The significance of architecture
o In what style shall we build?
o Talking buildings
o Ideals of home
o The virtues of buildings
o The promise of the field
Review
A jumbled start of the content that takes the tour through the history of architecture, beginning with
Epictetus and Bernard of Clairvaux explaining what architecture meant to them, passing to the
original theme of the book.
First chapter leaves us wondering if all along the meaning of architecture that we understood was
nothing but a deceptive appearance of the real form, the actual influence of the same on the minds.
De Botton talks about how walls, chairs, floor, and their colour, makes us feel but only for a while;
how it makes us conscious where we can not afford to be. The illustrations that are used to explain
the conflict of what beauty of architecture is, leaves the impression of how we tend to want the
change of thought by changing the colour of room or a piece of furniture. The lesson is to exclude
the feeling of contentment of anything that might be covered by lava or may absorb a wine stain.
Throughout the chapter, de botton puts forward different perceptions of how people tend to
misjudge what architecture truly does to us. “architecture is also perplexing. How inconsistent is its
capacity to generate the ascending happiness and how it is sometimes unable to even disrupt the
sadness that nails within”. How finely the author targets that architecture may possess a moral
message but it simply has no power to enforce it.
Botton’s second chapter is about the meaning of style and is likewise brisk, moving rapidly from the
whole history of classicism to Horace Walpole, who, de Botton implies, was the first to use gothic for
domestic architecture. An oversimplification of what he writes - what about all those Oxbridge
colleges or Vanbrugh's admiration for Woodstock Manor or William Kent? We pass through the 19th
century to the time that really engages his emotional interest and sympathies, namely the period of
early modernism and, in particular, Corbusier's Villa Savoye, which he writes about with poetic
eloquence.
I particularly like de Botton's third chapter, which is a meditation on the meaning of abstract shape,
beginning with Adrian Stokes's (Freudian) views of the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth, then looking
at the language of typefaces and at Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy. He goes on to a contradiction
between the work of Albert Speer and the architecture of Postwar German democracy, although this
distinction is slightly complicated by a drawing by Mies van der Rohe in the V&A's current exhibition
on Modernism, which shows a building uncannily like the Barcelona pavilion flying swastikas.
De Botton was clearly outraged to be invited to drinks at the official residence of the German
ambassador in Washington and to find that the garden designed in 1995, clearly echoes the work of
Speer. This is, once again, not really an issue of architecture or design, but what Geoffrey Scott in his
book, The Architecture of Humanism, published in 1914, called the associational fallacy, which is
boldly addressed here.
The purpose of this book is not about the specifically architectural characteristics of space, plan,
volume and design, but much more about the emotions that architecture inspires in the user of
buildings. Many people, devote huge amounts of time trying to ensure that the interior of their
houses is a bulwark against the disorder of the outside world: places of contrived harmony. There is
an obvious difference, as de Botton describes, between the harsh strip lighting and painfully sad
atmosphere of a McDonald's on London's Victoria Street, which he describes with eloquent disgust,
and the wonderfully empty, dark, numinous spaces of Westminster cathedral on the other side of
the road. Yet architects do not normally talk nowadays very much about idealisation, about emotion
and beauty. They talk about design and function and technology and shape. They have lost an ability
to think about more traditional ideas of order, simplicity, balance and harmony.
Just as de Botton has taken philosophy out of the academy and back into the realm of common
sense and reflection, where it originally belonged, so he has taken discussion about the
characteristics of architecture out of the professional journals, where issues of aesthetics are treated
in a language that is wilfully abstruse, away from the offices of the developers and town planners,
and back into the drawing room. There it behoves us all to think carefully, as de Botton has done
with perceptive clarity, as to what exactly are the qualities that make a good building.
One of my favourite lines from the book “It is sad how houses can invite them in a mood which we
find overselves in capable of summoning.”
