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The
Architecture of Happiness, by Alain De
Botton.
Eclectic author and philosopher Alain
De Botton - who's previously tackled such subjects as
status anxiety, the art of travel, and love - here takes
on architecture and its relationship to happiness. When
De Botton speaks of happiness, what he's really talking
about is beauty, a descriptor that has kept a stigma in
architectural circles for the last one hundred or so years
as technology, engineering, and Modernism supplanted prescriptive,
Classical principles of architecture. This stigma is at
the root of the author's albeit enigmatic argument in this
book: that beauty - and therefore happiness - in architecture
should be discussed.
The impact of architecture on our lives is an undeniable
part of De Botton's argument that he takes pains to explain
in the early portion of his book. This makes The Architecture
of Happiness as relevant to the general public as those
within the architectural profession, perhaps explaining
why the book is much more widely discussed than most books
on the subject. Much of the criticism levied at the book
takes aim at its conservative tone, as De Botton calls for
architects to have the "confidence and kindness [and
humility] to be a little boring," and takes aim at
Le Corbusier for being out of touch with the common man.
But throughout the book the illustrations speak to not only
conservative tastes but also those more progressive. These
seemingly polar opposites are presented (in many cases)
side by side to illustrate that beauty is not purely a matter
of taste, it is how the architecture embodies humanity.
Buildings done mainly for profit (that therefore express
such), for example, are the type that De Botton would like
to change.
For this reader, the author's argument is ultimately conservative,
not in terms of architecture but in terms of urban design.
While the latter is much harder to pin down than the former,
urban design does clearly extend beyond the single building
or development to encompass streets, squares, and so forth.
Much of what De Botton criticizes are these sorts of things:
the abolishment of the street in Le Corbusier's theories
versus the composed boulevards of Paris, for example. Perhaps
what the author is calling for, though doesn't explicitly
state, is for something that mediates between the building
and the city in today's age of democracy. The urban gestures
of past monarchies clearly cannot be duplicated today, but
some democratic equivalent could occur, perhaps stemming
from more and more people understanding how the built environment
shapes their lives and therefore taking a greater role in
its outcome. This book may be a step towards that, whatever
those future shapes may become.
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