The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain de Botton

The house gives signs of enjoying the emptiness. It is rearranging itself after the night, clearing its pipes and cracking its joints. This dignified and seasoned creature, with its coppery veins and wooden feet nestled in a bed of clay, has endured much: balls bounced against its garden flanks, doors slammed in rage, headstands attempted along its corridors, the weight and sighs of electrical equipment and the probings of inexperienced plumbers into its innards.

They have given up weekends to hide unsightly cables behind ledges. They have thought carefully about appropriate kitchen work-surfaces. They have imagined living in unattainably expensive houses pictured in magazines and then felt sad, as one does on passing an attractive stranger in a crowded street.

We seem divided between an urge to override our senses and numb ourselves to our settings and a contradictory impulse to acknowledge the extent to which our identities are indelibly connected to, and will shift along with, our locations.

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.

The noblest architecture can sometimes do less for us than a siesta or an aspirin.

Those who have made architectural beauty their life’s work know only too well how futile their efforts can prove.

architecture will always compete poorly with utilitarian demands for humanity’s resources.

Not only do beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness, they can also be accused of failing to improve the characters of those who live in them.

It seems reasonable to suppose that people will possess some of the qualities of the buildings they are drawn to: to expect that if they are alive to the charm of an ancient farmhouse with walls made of irregular chiselled stones set in light mortar, if they can appreciate the play of candlelight against hand-decorated tiles, can be seduced by libraries with shelves filled from floor to ceiling with books that emit a sweet dusty smell and are content to lie on the floor tracing the knotted border of an intricate Turkoman rug, then they will know something about patience and stability, tenderness and sweetness, intelligence and worldliness, scepticism and trust. We expect that such enthusiasts will be committed to infusing their whole lives with the values embodied in the objects of their appreciation.

How can anyone claim to know what is attractive? How can anyone adjudicate between the competing claims of different styles or defend a particular choice in the face of the contradictory tastes of others? The creation of beauty, once viewed as the central task of the architect, has quietly evaporated from serious professional discussion and retreated to a confused private imperative.

Suena ms a ingeniero civil. Sacrifica la belleza por funcionalidad o por lo menos opta por el balance

A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominance in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution. Mastering the technologies of iron and steel, of plate glass and concrete, they drew interest and inspired awe with their bridges, railway hangars, aqueducts and docks. More novel even than their abilities, perhaps, was the fact that they seemed to complete these projects without ever directly asking themselves what style it was best to adopt. Charged with erecting a bridge, they tried to design the lightest possible frame that could stretch over the widest span at the lowest cost.

The philosophy of the engineers flew in the face of everything the architectural profession had ever stood for. ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.

The principles of engineering may have brutally contradicted those of architecture, but a vocal minority of nineteenth-century architects nevertheless perceived that the engineers were capable of providing them with a critical key to their salvation – for what these men had, and they so sorely lacked, was certainty.

The engineers had landed on an apparently impregnable method of evaluating the wisdom of a design: they felt confidently able to declare that a structure was correct and honest in so far as it performed its mechanical functions efficiently; and false and immoral in so far as it was burdened with non-supporting pillars, decorative statues, frescos or carvings.

Governed by an ethos conceived by engineers, Modernism claimed to have supplied a definitive answer to the question of beauty in architecture: the point of a house was not to be beautiful but to function well.

In a more encompassing suggestion, John Ruskin proposed that we seek two things of our buildings. 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.

Despite their claims to a purely scientific and reasoned approach, the relationship of Modernist architects to their work remained at base a romantic one: 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.

To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.

We may decide that we hate nineteenth-century Gothic, for instance, because it characterised a house in which we were unhappy at university, or revile Neoclassicism (as exemplified by the German Ambassador’s Residence or by the work of the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel) because it had the misfortune to be favoured by the Nazis.

‘Beauty is the promise of happiness.’ His aphorism has the virtue of differentiating our love of beauty from an academic preoccupation with aesthetics, and integrating it instead with the qualities we need to prosper as whole human beings. If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes.

To call a work of architecture or design beautiful is to recognise it as a rendition of values critical to our flourishing, a transubstantiation of our individual ideals in a material medium.

It is in German philosophy of the late eighteenth century that we find the most lucid articulations of the theory of artistic idealisation.

1907 a young German art historian named Wilhelm Worringer published an essay entitled ‘Abstraction and Empathy’, in which he attempted to explain our shifts from a psychological perspective. He began by suggesting that during the span of human history there had been only two basic types of art, ‘abstract’ and ‘realistic’, either one of which might, at any given time in a particular society, be favoured over the other. Through the millennia, the abstract had enjoyed popularity in Byzantium, Persia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Congo, Mali and Zaire, and it was just then, at the opening of the twentieth century, returning to prominence in the West. This was an art governed by a spirit of symmetry, order, regularity and geometry. Whether in the form of sculpture or carpets, mosaics or pottery, whether in the work of a basket weaver from Wewak or that of a painter from New York, abstract art aspired to create a tranquil atmosphere marked by flat, repetitive visual planes, the whole being free of any allusion to the living world.

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.

1776 the Swiss artist Caspar Wolf painted a picture of a group of climbers resting in front of the giant Lauteraar glacier high in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps. Perched on top of a rock, two of the climbers gaze up at an immense crevasse-pitted floe of ice before them. Their stockings, the shapes of their hats and their expensive-looking and dainty umbrella suggest that they are aristocrats. Below them, at the bottom left of the canvas, oblivious to the view, is a mountain guide, holding a long walking pole and wearing a coarse cloak and a peasant’s hat. The painting is a case study in how differing psychological imbalances may result in contrasting notions of beauty.

We can imagine that a whitewashed rational loft, which seems to us punishingly ordered, might be home to someone unusually oppressed by intimations of anarchy. We can likewise guess that the inhabitants of a roughly rendered building, where the walls are made of black bricks and the doors of rusted steel, are liable to be fleeing from feelings of their own or their society’s excessive privilege, just as we can presume that blatantly playful blocks, where the roofs are curved, the windows buckled and the walls painted in childlike colours, will touch an especially powerful chord in the bureaucratic and unimaginative, who will see in them an exuberance that promises an escape from overpowering feelings of inner seriousness.

The street is the product of a distinctively human intelligence.

‘You like to complain that these dry numbers are the opposite of poetry!’ scolded Le Corbusier, frustrated that we might overlook the beauty inherent in such plans and in the forms of symmetrical bridges, blocks and squares. ‘These things are beautiful because in the middle of the apparent incoherence of nature or the cities of men, they are places of geometry, a realm where practical mathematics reigns … And is not geometry pure joy?’ Joy because geometry represents a victory over nature and because, despite what a sentimental reading might suggest, nature is in truth opposed to the order we rely on to survive.

the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is a likely outcome whenever architects skilfully mediate between any number of oppositions, including the old and the new, the natural and the man-made, the luxurious and the modest, and the masculine and the feminine.

In the lobby of Louis Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, another reconciliation of opposites is effected through the interplay of concrete walls and inset panels made of English oak. It would be hard to name two materials with less in common than this pair.

To explain the appeal of balance between contrasting elements in buildings, it seems natural to move the discussion beyond architecture, for it is not only visual beauty which draws us to these balanced works, but also, and perhaps even principally, the evidence they emit of possessing a distinctively human kind of goodness, or maturity.

The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance – holding, spanning, sheltering – with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted.

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas.

‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,’ writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of a Maillart bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express.

We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appear...

We could say that nothing in architecture is ever ugly in itself; it is merely in the wrong place or of the wrong size, while beauty is the child of the coherent relationship between parts.

In his In Praise of Shadows (1933) Junichiro Tanizaki attempted to explain why he and his countrymen found flaws so beautiful: ‘We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or sake cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary we begin to enjoy it only when the lustre has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky, patina.’ Buddhist writings associated an intolerance for the imperfections of wood and stone with the failure to accept the inherently frustrating nature of existence. Unlike our own disappointments and decline, however, those represented in architectural materials were of an eminently graceful kind, for wood and stone, and now concrete and wood, age slowly and with dignity. They do not shatter hysterically like glass, or tear like paper, but discolour with a melancholy, noble air. The rusted and stained walls of the weekend house made for a most artful receptacle in which to entertain thoughts of decline and mortality.

His manifesto, contained in two books, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (1925) and The Radiant City (1933), called for a dramatic break from the past: ‘The existing centres must come down.

Le Corbusier planned to abolish the city street: ‘Our streets no longer work. Streets are an obsolete notion. There ought not to be such things as streets; we have to create something that will replace them.’

Wtf??

To take an overland train to the most violent and degraded of these places is to realise all that Le Corbusier forgot about architecture and, in a wider sense, about human nature.

We appreciate buildings which form continuous lines around us and make us feel as safe in the open air as we do in a room.

Le Corbusier also lost sight of the curious codependence of these two apparently antithetical forces. He forgot that without pedestrians to slow them down, cars are apt to go too fast and kill their drivers, and that without the eyes of cars on them, pedestrians can feel vulnerable and isolated. We admire New York precisely because the traffic and crowds have been coerced into a difficult but fruitful alliance.

To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap.

We should recover a sense of the malleability behind what is built. There is no predetermined script guiding the direction of bulldozers or cranes. While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better.

There was certainly no predetermined reason for parts of London to turn out as ugly as they have.

London might have had some of the grandeur of Paris and Rome; it might have been a great European city, rather than a sprawl which foreshadowed Los Angeles and Mexico City.

The Pleasures of Japanese Literature (1988) by the American scholar of Japan, Donald Keene.

Keene observed that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry,