The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain de Botton

Architecture may well possess moral messages; it simply has no power to enforce them. It offers suggestions instead of making laws. It invites, rather than orders, us to emulate its spirit and cannot prevent its own abuse.

The expense of transporting materials over any significant distance likewise limited stylistic choice,

The difficulties of travel also hindered the spread of knowledge about alternative building methods.

with an absence of aesthetic self-consciousness, with their owners’ modest pride at being able to afford shelter in the first place.

Le Corbusier

ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal.

‘1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.’

We want them to shelter us. And we want them to speak to us – to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.

they looked to architecture to support a way of life that appealed to them. Their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence.

Science, then, would apparently determine the pitch of the roof.

architectural and decorative styles become, for us, emotional souvenirs of the moments and settings in which we came across them.

‘Beauty is the promise of happiness.’

‘There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.’

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them.

In turn, those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honour with the term ‘home’.

Our love of home is in turn an acknowledgement of the degree to which our identity is not self-determined.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.

where we are critically determines what we are able to believe in.

we require places where the values outside of us encourage and enforce the aspirations within us.

Architecture can arrest transient and timid inclinations, amplify and solidify them, and thereby grant us more permanent access to a range of emotional textures which we might otherwise have experienced only accidentally and occasionally.

The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure,

From Palladio’s time forward, and

the creation of houses which could reflect the ideals of their owners became a central ambition of architects throughout the West.

The purpose of their art and their buildings was not to remind us of what life was typically like, but rather to keep before our eyes how it might optimally be, so as to move us fractionally closer to fulfilment and virtue.

German philosophy of the late eighteenth century

Rather than confronting us with evocations of our darkest moments, works of art were to stand, in Schiller’s words, as an ‘absolute manifestation of potential’; they were to function like ‘an escort descended from the world of the ideal’.

A great work of architecture will speak to us of a degree of serenity, strength, poise and grace to which we, both as creators and audiences, typically cannot do justice – and it will for this very reason beguile and move us. Architecture excites our respect to the extent that it surpasses us.

why a society might transfer its loyalty from the one aesthetic mode to the other.

The determinant lay,

in those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in...

We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient.

A diversity of styles is a natural consequence of the manifold nature of our inner needs.