The Architecture of Happiness (2006) Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton takes the readers on an aesthetical and psychological quest through the history of architecture, underlining how the built environment influences mood and behaviour, about what emotions architecture can instil in the user of buildings.
Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time – consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch.” (de Botton p.26)
He also argues that lately architects have lost the capacity or interest to talk about ideals, emotions, or beauty in relation to the built environment. They rather use terms as design, function, and technology instead of ideas such as order, balance, elegance, coherence, and self-knowledge (which he identifies as ‘virtues’ of beautiful buildings). De Botton remarks that our intuition about attractive architecture should have already generated ways on how to reproduce beautiful buildings or beautiful cities as we can manufacture consistent quantities of other things we find beautiful.
The masterpieces of art continue to seem like chance occurrences and artists to resemble cavemen who succeed in periodically igniting a flame, without being able to fathom how they did so, let alone communicate the basis of their achievements to others.” (de Botton p.165)
People, on the other hand, should have an obligation to require more from the built world and from architects, urban planners and designers who impose their projects upon them.
In what concerns aesthetics of care, he does point out that even in buildings that triumph over architectural challenges the care for the details translates into “signs of goodness in a material register, a form of frozen benevolence”. He talks of Henry Labrouste’s wrought iron arches in Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, where:
… the observant visitor will notice a series of small flowers fashioned out of wrought iron. To think these elegant is to acknowledge how unusual was the care that lay behind their creation. In a busy, often heedless world, they stand as markers of patience and generosity, of a kind of sweetness and even love: a kindness without ulterior motive. They are there for no other reason than that the architect believed they might entertain our eyes and charm our reason. They are markers of politeness, too, the impulse to go beyond what is required to discharge brute tasks – and of sacrifice as well, for it would have been easier to support the iron arches with straight-sided struts. Below, the mood may be workmanlike, and outside, in the streets, there will always be hurry and cruelty, but up on the ceiling, in a limited realm, flowers swirl and perhaps even laugh as they wend their way around a sequence of arches.” (de Botton, p.209)
Ioana Ramona Cecălășan
Universitatea Tehnică din Cluj-Napoca (UTCN)
De Botton, Alain, The Architecture of Happiness. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.