ann's Reviews > The Architecture of Happiness
My rating:
The Architecture of Happiness
by Alain de Botton (Goodreads Author)
by Alain de Botton (Goodreads Author)
Reading this book was good for me because it's been 4 years since I've been out of architecture school and it was invigorating to get a fresh perspective on a subject I considered myself more informed about. The thing I liked most initially about this book was de Botton's ability to apply poetic and wonderful character descriptions to architecture.
His ability to speak for building, while inspiring eventually made the book tedious. In the first half, I was so happy that someone actually paid attention to architecture the way he did, but by the end, I found his opinions and object lessons a little overbearing and I just wanted to stop reading his poetry and go design again. That said, this is one of his better and impassioned books, and I wondered if he ever at some some point fantasized about being an architect in the same way I've fantasized about being a writer.
Sections of the book I really liked: He suggest that modern social aesthetics and democratic politics are inherently linked. There is a moral judgment and inherent aesthetic in whatever law or social plan you enact or in this case whatever building you build.
Yet at the same time, to acknowledge morality or beauty directly as a reason for an object's superiority is seen as undemocratic...It's never enough to say that something "is most beautiful" just as it is unconvincing to say that "i believe something to be true and right". If you give an uncritical opinion based on what is "beautiful" "natural" or "right", you might be confused with a bigot...but, it's always okay and it is encouraged to have taste and define what you like.
The positioning of the engineering as a scientific authority of building allows for a freedom of taste...just as the primacy of a "democratic system" allow for a variety of opinions and political parties. In the center of both the architecture and political realms there is room for a multitude of beliefs and tastes...you can say you like or dislike about a artwork or building as much you can claim that you believe such and such a thing, but it would considered uncivil, undemocratic, to believe your opinion or your taste superior to another on the basis of your taste or belief alone...to give a party real social power, to assert a style on a large scale, to denounce a party, or to condemn a style people rely on on a scientific or an economic defenses. Mere taste and belief is for the individual and private realm.
Reading this book helped me understand a lot of my frustration with modern architectural education (at least at my school). You are trained to develop personal taste, you practice self criticism and your interrogate your work from an artistic perspective...but rarely from a social, political, or economic perspective. To defend your building on the promise it could encourage behavior or on the basis of cost could earn you eye rolling. You are graded and examined as an individual "artist" about hypothetical buildings while in reality the true nature of building is absolutely collaborative and economic.
The ideas he explores from Schiller and Worringer were new and exciting to me. Some might find these ideas too generalized and rigid, but I have sympathy for them. De Botton builds the arguement that architecture and art is a manifestation of our ideal potentials...and so (Worringer reasons) a chaotic society would find relief in the ordered, the geometric, and a very ordered, stable, and traditional society would find relief in the embellished, fanciful and ornate. I can think of a few counter examples to these truisms, but it did make me aware that many buildings and styles are incarnate ideals that aren't guaranteed in our day to day life. The cottages in suburbs speak to the wish for a pastoral life in the same way a monolithic, glass block office building disguises the fact that it may be occupied by unrelated specialists and trades on different levels, all of whom are strangers to each other.
Very interesting book and I would recommend it to all architects who haven't designed in a while and are looking for a breather or an aesthetic reset.
His ability to speak for building, while inspiring eventually made the book tedious. In the first half, I was so happy that someone actually paid attention to architecture the way he did, but by the end, I found his opinions and object lessons a little overbearing and I just wanted to stop reading his poetry and go design again. That said, this is one of his better and impassioned books, and I wondered if he ever at some some point fantasized about being an architect in the same way I've fantasized about being a writer.
Sections of the book I really liked: He suggest that modern social aesthetics and democratic politics are inherently linked. There is a moral judgment and inherent aesthetic in whatever law or social plan you enact or in this case whatever building you build.
Yet at the same time, to acknowledge morality or beauty directly as a reason for an object's superiority is seen as undemocratic...It's never enough to say that something "is most beautiful" just as it is unconvincing to say that "i believe something to be true and right". If you give an uncritical opinion based on what is "beautiful" "natural" or "right", you might be confused with a bigot...but, it's always okay and it is encouraged to have taste and define what you like.
The positioning of the engineering as a scientific authority of building allows for a freedom of taste...just as the primacy of a "democratic system" allow for a variety of opinions and political parties. In the center of both the architecture and political realms there is room for a multitude of beliefs and tastes...you can say you like or dislike about a artwork or building as much you can claim that you believe such and such a thing, but it would considered uncivil, undemocratic, to believe your opinion or your taste superior to another on the basis of your taste or belief alone...to give a party real social power, to assert a style on a large scale, to denounce a party, or to condemn a style people rely on on a scientific or an economic defenses. Mere taste and belief is for the individual and private realm.
Reading this book helped me understand a lot of my frustration with modern architectural education (at least at my school). You are trained to develop personal taste, you practice self criticism and your interrogate your work from an artistic perspective...but rarely from a social, political, or economic perspective. To defend your building on the promise it could encourage behavior or on the basis of cost could earn you eye rolling. You are graded and examined as an individual "artist" about hypothetical buildings while in reality the true nature of building is absolutely collaborative and economic.
The ideas he explores from Schiller and Worringer were new and exciting to me. Some might find these ideas too generalized and rigid, but I have sympathy for them. De Botton builds the arguement that architecture and art is a manifestation of our ideal potentials...and so (Worringer reasons) a chaotic society would find relief in the ordered, the geometric, and a very ordered, stable, and traditional society would find relief in the embellished, fanciful and ornate. I can think of a few counter examples to these truisms, but it did make me aware that many buildings and styles are incarnate ideals that aren't guaranteed in our day to day life. The cottages in suburbs speak to the wish for a pastoral life in the same way a monolithic, glass block office building disguises the fact that it may be occupied by unrelated specialists and trades on different levels, all of whom are strangers to each other.
Very interesting book and I would recommend it to all architects who haven't designed in a while and are looking for a breather or an aesthetic reset.
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