Product Description

Bestselling author Alain de Botton has written about love, travel, status and how philosophy can console us. Now he turns his attention to one of our most intense but often hidden love affairs: with our houses and their furnishings. He asks: What makes a house truly beautiful?Why are many new houses so ugly?Why do we argue so bitterly about sofas and pictures – and can differences of taste ever be satisfactorily resolved?Will minimalism make us happier than ornaments? To answer these questions and many more, de Botton looks at buildings across the world, from medieval wooden huts to modern skyscrapers; he examines sofas and cathedrals, tea sets and office complexes, and teases out a host of often surprising philosophical insights. The Architecture of Happiness will take you on a beguiling tour through the history and psychology of architecture and interior design, and will forever alter your relationship with buildings. It will change the way you look at your current home – and help you make the right decisions about your next one.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5320 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

About the Author
Alain de Botton was born in 1969. He is the author of Essays in Love, The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, Status Anxiety and On Seeing and Noticing. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

The author reflects on architecture
Considering the significance of architecture, the author remarks that beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness and can also be accused of failing to improve the characters of those who live in them and proceeds by explaining why this is so. Karl Friedrich Schinkel for example stated that to turn something useful, practical, and functional into something beautiful is the architect's duty. Architecture should thus be the decoration of construction as distinguished from mere building. The architects of the Modernist movement, like all their predecessors, wanted their houses to speak and express emotions. Indeed buildings speak. They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.
Interestingly enough what we search for in a work of architecture is not so far from what we search for in a friend because the objects we describe as beautiful art versions of the people we love. The buildings we admire are those which extol values we think are worthwhile: through their materials, shapes and colours they express qualities such as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. As Stendhal wrote, "Beauty is the promise of happiness."
We are vulnerable to what the spaces we inhabit are saying. In a drab hotel room our optimism and sense of purpose are liable to drain away. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need a home in the physical sense: to compensate for vulnerability, we need a refuge.
We may feel joy at the architectural perfection we see before us and at the same time melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. And sadness is conducive to receptivity: our downhearted moments provide architecture and art with their best openings because it is at such times that our hunger for their ideal qualities is at its height.
Such thoughts and many other are contained in this study of architecture and make for a valuable and interesting read.

The Consolations of Architecture!
The title obviously alludes to a previous book by the charismatic author entitled 'The Consolations of Philosophy'.

But I aspire that this review is a little more than word play, resonance and allusion.

One is impressed with the literacy, sophistication, refinement and discriminating taste of the author. He moves with ease in time, Geography and discipline to collate the arguments in support of his points and pronounces virtually in every paragraph profound truths and thoughts with disarming simplicity.

The book is lavishly graced with elegant black and white photographs exquisitely illustrating the points made by the author in the text; in fact these photographs along with their accompanying footnotes comprise an excellent summary of the book.

But the book itself is difficult to summarize because there are simply so many original, beautiful, elegant, subtle and refined thoughts and ideas about buildings and Architecture. One can only aspire to give a flavour of the content of the book by providing fragments of information.

The author introduces the book in a philosophical mood.

In a walk on a brilliant summer day in a pastoral landscape the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke reflect on the trancience of beauty. In another point the author suggests that we are more appreciative of beauty when in sad mood while he reminds us of the cruel truth of the powerless of beautiful buildings to change the evil side of human nature.

The author discusses the evolution of the concept of beauty in Architecture. There was certainty in what comprises beauty in Architecture which with intermission lasted for a thousand years. It developed in classical Greece exemplified by the columnated temples with their friezes and pediments and harmonic proportions, evolved in Rome and revived in Rainessance.

Then tastes changed and the gothic and mixtures of styles were introduced in houses.

In the modern era beauty was ostensibly abandoned altogether and the new credo was function. Buildings and constructions should be functional not beautiful. But this was more of an illusion rather than fact. Modern Architecture was beautiful and gave a promise for the future.

We often describe a building as beautiful when it evokes aspects of happiness. As Stendahl aptly wrote 'Beauty is the promise of happiness'. But he wisely refrained from specifying any particular type of beauty but instead commented that there are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

Buildings we call beautiful often contain in a concentrated form those qualities in which we are deficient. In this regard we feel sacred architecture exemplified in Gothic cathedrals is beautiful because it is uplifting our souls.

We like order in buildings but only when it is combined with complexity.

We like an adequately contextual building which we might define as one which embodies some of the most desirable values and the highest ambitions of its era and place-a building which serves as a repository for a workable ideal.

Finally our views on beauty and aesthetics are often moulded by culture. An extreme example is exemplified by the perceptions of beauty respectively in Western Europe and Japan in Architecture, artefacts and man made landscape.

Incredibly thought provoking
I have only put this book down to write this review. Love it and love Alain de Botten. Everything he talks about provokes more philosophical questions which he is sure to discuss as you read on.