The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain De Botton

  Endowed with a power that is as unreliable as it often is inexpressible, architecture will always compete poorly with utilitarian demands for humanity’s resources. How hard it is to make a case for the cost of tearing down and rebuilding a mean but serviceable street. How awkward to have to defend, in the face of more tangible needs, the benefits of realigning a crooked lamppost or replacing an ill-matched window frame. Beautiful architecture has none of the unambiguous advantages of a vaccine or a bowl of rice. Its construction will hence never be raised to a dominant political priority, for even if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modelled to rival St Mark’s Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotonda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood.

  7.

  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.

  But, whatever the theoretical affinities between beauty and goodness, it is undeniable that, in practice, farmhouses and lodges, mansions and riverside apartments have played host to innumerous tyrants and murderers, sadists and snobs, to characters with a chilling indifference to the disjunctures between the qualities manifested in their surroundings and in their lives.

  We would still often be in a bad mood:

  Philip Johnson, The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1949

  Medieval devotional paintings may try to remind us of sadness and sin, they may seek to train us away from arrogance and worldly pursuits and render us properly humble before the mysteries and hardships of life, but they will hang in a living room without active protest while butlers circulate the finger food and butchers plot their next move.

  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.

  We should be kind enough not to blame buildings for our own failure to honour the advice they can only ever subtly proffer.

  8.

  Suspicion of architecture may in the end be said to centre around the modesty of the claims that can realistically be made on its behalf. Reverence for beautiful buildings does not seem a high ambition on which to pin our hopes for happiness, at least when compared with the results we might associate with untying a scientific knot or falling in love, amassing a fortune or initiating revolution. To care deeply about a field that achieves so little, and yet consumes so many of our resources, forces us to admit to a disturbing, even degrading lack of aspiration.

  In its ineffectiveness, architecture shares in the bathos of gardening: an interest in door handles or ceiling mouldings can seem no less worthy of mockery than a concern for the progress of rose or lavender bushes. It is forgivable to conclude that there must be grander causes to which human beings might devote themselves.

  However, after coming up against some of the sterner setbacks which bedevil emotional and political life, we may well arrive at a more charitable assessment of the significance of beauty – of islands of perfection, in which we can find an echo of an ideal which we once hoped to lay a permanent claim to. Life may have to show itself to us in some of its authentically tragic colours before we can begin to grow properly visually responsive to its subtler offerings, whether in the form of a tapestry or a Corinthian column, a slate tile or a lamp. It tends not to be young couples in love who stop to admire a weathered brick wall or the descent of a banister towards a hallway, a disregard for such circumscribed beauty being a corollary of an optimistic belief in the possibility of attaining a more visceral, definitive variety of happiness.

  The moral ineffectiveness of a beautiful house:

  Hermann Göring (in white) at home with the French Ambassador and, to the right, Generals Vuillemin and Milch. In the background, Saints Margarethe and Dorothea, German (fifteenth century), and Lucretia (1532) by Lucas Cranach

  We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being ‘moved’ by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.

  In his memoirs, the German theologian Paul Tillich explained that art had always left him cold as a pampered and trouble-free young man, despite the best pedagogical efforts of his parents and teachers. Then the First World War broke out, he was called up and, in a period of leave from his battalion (three quarters of whose members would be killed in the course of the conflict), he found himself in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin during a rain storm. There, in a small upper gallery, he came across Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels and, on meeting the wise, fragile, compassionate gaze of the Virgin, surprised himself by beginning to sob uncontrollably. He experienced what he described as a moment of ‘revelatory ecstasy’, tears welling up in his eyes at the disjunction between the exceptionally tender atmosphere of the picture and the barbarous lessons he had learnt in the trenches.

  Life is not usually like this:

  Ken Shuttleworth, Crescent House, Wiltshire, 1997

  Sandro Botticelli, Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels, 1477

  It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

  9.

  Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch. Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things. More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall – in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.

  10.

  But if we accept the legitimacy of the subject nevertheless, then a new and contentious series of questions at once opens up. We have to confront the vexed point on which so much of the history of architecture pivots. We have to ask what exactly a beautiful building might look like.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, having abandoned academia for three years in ord
er to construct a house for his sister Gretl in Vienna, understood the magnitude of the challenge. ‘You think philosophy is difficult,’ observed the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘but I tell you, it is nothing compared to the difficulty of being a good architect.’

  II. In What Style Shall We Build?

  1.

  What is a beautiful building? To be modern is to experience this as an awkward and possibly unanswerable question, the very notion of beauty having come to seem like a concept doomed to ignite unfruitful and childish argument. 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.

  2.

  It wasn’t always thought so hard to know how to build beautifully. For over a thousand discontinuous years in the history of the West, a beautiful building was synonymous with a Classical building, a structure with a temple front, decorated columns, repeated ratios and a symmetrical façade.

  The Greeks gave birth to the Classical style, the Romans copied and developed it, and, after a gap of a thousand years, the educated classes of Renaissance Italy rediscovered it. From the peninsula, Classicism spread north and west, it took on local accents and was articulated in new materials. Classical buildings appeared as far apart as Helsinki and Budapest, Savannah and St Petersburg. The sensibility was applied to interiors, to Classical chairs and ceilings, beds and baths.

  Alhough it is the differences between varieties of Classicism that have tended to interest historians most, it is the similarities that are ultimately more striking. For hundreds of years there was near unanimity about how to construct a window or a door, how to fashion columns and pedimented fronts, how to relate rooms to hallways and how to model ironwork and mouldings – assumptions codified by Renaissance scholar-architects and popularised in pattern books for ordinary builders.

  Rules for Classical columns:

  Architectural plate from Denis Diderot, editor, Encyclopédie, 1780

  A city-wide consensus about beauty:

  John Wood the Elder, north side, Queen Square, Bath, 1736

  The Arch of Constantine, Rome, c. AD 315

  Robert Adam, rear elevation, Kedleston Hall, 1765

  So strong was this consensus that whole cities achieved a stylistic unity that stretched across successions of squares and avenues. An aesthetic language dating back to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi ended up gracing the family homes of Edinburgh accountants and Philadelphia lawyers.

  Few Classical architects or their clients felt any impulse towards originality Fidelity to the canon was what mattered; repetition was the norm. When Robert Adam designed Kedleston Hall (1765), it was a point of pride for him to embed an exact reproduction of the Arch of Constantine (c. 315) in the middle of the rear elevation. Thomas Hamilton’s High School in Edinburgh (1825), though it was made of sombre grey Craigleith sandstone, sat under sepulchral Scottish skies and had steel beams supporting its roof, was lauded for the skill with which it imitated the form of the Doric Temple of the Parthenon in Athens (c. 438 BC). Thomas Jefferson’s campus for the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville (1826), quoted without shame from the Roman Temple of Fortuna Virilis (c. 100 BC) and the Baths of Diocletian (AD 302), while Joseph Hansom’s new town hall in Birmingham (1832) was a faithful adaptation, set down in the middle of an industrial city, of the Roman Maison Carrée at Nîmes (c. AD 130).

  Maison Carrée, Nîmes, c. AD 130

  Joseph Hansom, Town Hall, Birmingham, 1832

  Thus large parts of the man-made world in the early-modern period would not, in their outward appearance at least, have shaken many of the architectural assumptions of a magically resurrected contemporary of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

  3.

  When it came to simpler, cheaper houses, there was again a consensus about the most fitting way to build, though here the canon was the result not of any common cultural vision but of a host of limitations.

  Foremost among these was climate, which, in the absence of affordable technology to resist it, usually dictated an austere menu of options for how most sensibly to put up a wall, pitch a roof or render a façade. The expense of transporting materials over any significant distance likewise limited stylistic choice, forcing the majority of householders to settle uncomplainingly for available stone, wood or mud. The difficulties of travel also hindered the spread of knowledge about alternative building methods. Printing costs meant that few ever saw so much as a picture of how houses looked in other parts of the world (which explains why, in so much of early northern religious art, Jesus is born in what appears to be a chalet).

  Limitations bred strong local architectural identities. Within a certain radius, houses would uniformly be constructed of a particular native material, which would cede its ubiquity to another on the opposite side of a river or a mountain range. An ordinary Kentish house could thus be distinguished at a glance from a Cornish one, or a farm in the Jura from one in the Engadine. In most areas, houses continued to be built as they had always been built, using whatever was around, with an absence of aesthetic self-consciousness, with their owners’ modest pride at being able to afford shelter in the first place.

  4.

  Then, in the spring of 1747, an effeminate young man with a taste for luxury, lace collars and gossip bought a former coachman’s cottage on forty acres of land in Twickenham on the River Thames – and set about building himself a villa which gravely complicated the prevailing sense of what a beautiful house might look like.

  Any number of architects could have furnished Horace Walpole, the youngest son of the British prime minister, Sir Robert, with something conventional for his new estate, a Palladian mansion, perhaps a little like his father’s home, Houghton Hall, on the north Norfolk coast. But in architecture, as in dress, conversation and choice of career, Walpole prided himself on being different. In spite of his Classical education, his real interest lay in the medieval period, which thrilled him with its iconography of ruined abbeys, moonlit nights, graveyards and (especially) crusaders in armour. Walpole therefore decided to build himself the world’s first Gothic house.

  Because no one before him had ever attempted to apply the ecclesiastical idiom of the Middle Ages to a domestic setting, Walpole had to be resourceful. He modelled his fireplace on the tomb of Archbishop Bouchier in Canterbury Cathedral, copied the design of his library shelves from the tomb of Aymer de Valence in Westminster Abbey, and derived the ceiling of his main hall from the quatrefoil compartments and rosettes of the Abbey’s Chapel of Henry VII.

  Few ever saw so much as a picture of how houses looked in other parts of the world:

  Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent, early sixteenth century

  A new understanding of domestic beauty:

  Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 1750–92

  When he was done, being temperamentally disinclined to keep any of his achievements quiet, Walpole invited for a tour everyone he knew, which included most of the opinion-formers and gentry of the land. For good measure, he issued tickets to the general public as well.

  The Long Gallery, Strawberry Hill

  After a viewing, many of Walpole’s astonished guests began to wonder if they, too, might not dare to abandon the Classical mode in favour of the Gothic. The fashion started modestly enough, with the construction of the occasional seaside or suburban villa, but, within a few decades, a revolution in taste was under way which would shake to the core the assumptions on which the Classical consensus had formerly rested. Gothic buildings began to appear in Britain, then across Europe and North America. Transcending its origins as the fancy of a dilettante, the style acquired architectural seriousness and prestige, to the extent that, just fifty or so years after Walpole broke ground at
Strawberry Hill, defenders of Gothic could claim – much in the way that the Classicists had done before them – that theirs was the most noble and appropriate architecture of all, the natural choice for both domestic buildings and the parliaments and universities of the great nations.

  The most noble and appropriate architecture of all:

  Imre Steindl, Houses of Parliament, Budapest, 1904

  5.

  The factors which fostered the Gothic revival – greater historical awareness, improved transport links, a new clientele impatient for variety – soon enough generated curiosity about the architectural styles of other eras and lands. By the early nineteenth century, in most Western countries, anyone contemplating putting up a house was faced with an unprecedented array of choices regarding its appearance.

  Architects boasted of their ability to turn out houses in Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Islamic, Tyrolean or Jacobean styles, or in any combination of these. Among the most versatile of the new polymaths was an Englishman named Humphry Repton, who earned a reputation for presenting hesitant clients with detailed drawings of the many stylistic options available to them.