The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain de Botton

determined efforts to scorn visual experience have always been matched by equally persistent attempts to mould the material world to graceful ends.

Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places – and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.

all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty that men have created or may create’.

it can be those most in thrall to beauty who will be especially aware of, and saddened by, its ephemeral character.