The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain De Botton

  9.

  Imagine being able to return at the close of each day to a house like that in Rö, north of Stockholm. Our working routines may be frantic and compromised, dense with meetings, insincere handshakes, small-talk and bureaucracy. We may say things we don’t believe in to win over our colleagues and feel ourselves becoming envious and excited in relation to goals we don’t essentially care for.

  But, finally, on our own, looking out of the hall window onto the garden and the gathering darkness, we can slowly resume contact with a more authentic self, who was there waiting in the wings for us to end our performance. Our submerged playful sides will derive encouragement from the painted flowers on either side of the door. The value of gentleness will be confirmed by the delicate folds of the curtains. Our interest in a modest, tender-hearted kind of happiness will be fostered by the unpretentious raw wooden floorboards. The materials around us will speak to us of the highest hopes we have for ourselves. In this setting, we can come close to a state of mind marked by integrity and vitality. We can feel inwardly liberated. We can, in a profound sense, return home.

  Without honouring any gods, a piece of domestic architecture, no less than a mosque or a chapel, can assist us in the commemoration of our genuine selves.

  Näs House, Rö, north of Stockholm, c. 1820

  10.

  Just like an entire room, a single picture can assist us in recovering the lost, significant parts of ourselves.

  Take William Nicholson’s closely observed painting of a bowl, a white tablecloth and some unshelled peas. On first seeing it, we might experience a measure of sadness, as we recognise how far we have drifted from its meditative, observant spirit, from its modesty and appreciation of the beauty and nobility of ordinary life.

  Behind wanting to own the painting and hang it where we could regularly study it might be the hope that through continued exposure to it, its qualities would come to assume a greater hold on us. Passing it on the stairs last thing at night or in the morning on our way to work would have the effect of a magnet which could pull to the surface submerged filaments of our characters. The painting would act as the guardian of a mood.

  We value certain buildings for their ability to rebalance our misshapen natures and encourage emotions which our predominant commitments force us to sacrifice. Feelings of competitiveness, envy and aggression hardly need elaboration, but feelings of humility amid an immense and sublime universe, of a desire for calm at the onset of evening or of an aspiration for gravity and kindness – these form no correspondingly reliable part of our inner landscape, a rueful absence which may explain our wish to bind such emotions to the fabric of our homes.

  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.

  There need be nothing preternaturally sweet or homespun about the moods embodied in domestic spaces. These spaces can speak to us of the sombre as readily as they can of the gentle. There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to. As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

  William Nicholson, The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas, 1911

  11.

  Given the memorial capacities of architecture, it cannot be coincidental that in many of the world’s cultures, the earliest and most significant works have been funerary.

  Some 4,000 years ago, on a hillside in western Pembrokeshire, a group of our Neolithic ancestors lifted up a series of gigantic stones with their bare hands and covered them with earth to mark the spot where one of their kinsmen lay buried. The chamber has been lost to time, as have the body and even the identity of the man whose name must once have been spoken with awe in the communities along this damp edge of the British Isles. But what remains to these stones is their eloquent ability to deliver the message common to all funerary architecture, from marble tomb to rough wooden roadside shrine – namely, ‘Remember’. The poignancy of the roughly chiselled family of mossy orthostats, keeping their lonely watch over a landscape around which none save sheep and the occasional rain-proofed hiker now roam, is heightened only by the awareness that we recall nothing whatsoever about the one they memorialise – aside, that is, from this leader’s evident desire, strong enough to inspire his clan to raise a forty-tonne capstone in his honour, that he not be forgotten.

  The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on a hill on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend.

  Top: Neolithic burial chamber, Pentre Ifan, western Pembrokeshire, c. 2000 BC

  Below: Memorial to Cupid, Plymouth, c. 1790

  The desire to remember unites our reasons for building for the living and for the dead. As we put up tombs, markers and mausoleums to memorialise lost loved ones, so do we construct and decorate buildings to help us recall the important but fugitive parts of ourselves. The pictures and chairs in our homes are the equivalents – scaled for our own day, attuned to the demands of the living – of the giant burial mounds of Palaeolithic times. Our domestic fittings, too, are memorials to identity.

  12.

  We may occasionally and guiltily experience the desire to create a home as a wish to vaunt ourselves in front of others. But only if the truest parts of ourselves were egomaniacal would the urge to build be dominated by the need to boast. Instead, at its most genuine, the architectural impulse seems connected to a longing for communication and commemoration, a longing to declare ourselves to the world through a register other than words, through the language of objects, colours and bricks: an ambition to let others know who we are – and, in the process, to remind ourselves.

  Ideals

  1.

  In 1575 the city of Venice commissioned the artist Paolo Veronese to paint a new ceiling for the great hall in the Doge’s Palace, the Sala del Collegio, where the magistracy held its deliberations, and where dignitaries and ambassadors were received.

  The resulting work was a sumptuous celebration, in allegorical form, of Venetian government. In a central panel Veronese depicted the city as a sober, beautiful queen of the seas, attended by two ladies-in-waiting, one of whom symbolised justice (she was carrying a pair of scales) and the other peace (she had a sleepy but not unferocious-seeming lion on a leash – just in case). Smaller panels around the edges portrayed supplementary Venetian virtues. Meekness showed a young blonde with an obedient sheep resting its front feet on her lap. Next to her, in Fidelity, a melancholic brunette stroked the neck of a St Bernard. Across from these was Prosperity, represented by a ruddy-cheeked, slightly chubby woman in a low-cut dress, holding a cornucopia overflowing with apples, grapes and oranges. And opposite her was Moderation, in which a sturdy maiden with braided hair and one exposed breast smiled impassively as she plucked out the feathers of a vicious-looking eagle (most likely standing in for the Turks or the Spanish). To judge from Veronese’s ceiling, there was little that was not just and peaceful, meek and faithful, about the Venetian Republic.

  Paolo Veronese, Meekness, Sala del Collegio, Doge’s Palace, Venice, c. 1575

  Paolo Veronese, The Triumph of Venice, Sala del Collegio

  Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotonda, Veneto, 1580

  On a plot of land not many miles away, in 1566, a scholar, courtier and merchant named Canon Paolo Almerico asked Veronese’s contemporary Andrea Palladio to build him a country house, to which he and his family might retreat to escape the intrigue and
disease endemic to life on the republic’s lagoons. Palladio was impressed by how well Ancient Roman buildings had managed to embody the ideals of their society – orderliness, courage, self-sacrifice and dignity – and he wanted his own designs to promote a comparable Renaissance conception of nobility. The title page of his 1570 work The Four Books of Architecture would make this didactic ambition explicit, through an allegorical engraving which featured two maidens of architecture saluting the queen of virtue. The balanced façades of the Villa Rotonda, the grand house which Palladio conceived for Almerico, seemed to imply that in this one place on earth, amid the sunlit flatlands of the Veneto, the struggles and compromises of ordinary life had been overcome and supplanted by equilibrium and lucidity. Along the villa’s pediments and stairways, a sequence of life-sized statues by the sculptors Lorenzo Rubini and Giambattista Albanese gave human form to figures from classical mythology. Stepping out onto the terrace for a breath of air after reading a few chapters of Seneca or reviewing a contract from the Levant, the villa’s owner could raise his eyes to take in Mercury, the protector of commerce, Jupiter, the god of wisdom, or Vesta, the goddess of the hearth – and feel that, in his country dwelling, at least, the values closest to his heart had found lasting expression and glorification in stone.

  From Palladio’s time forward, and due in large part to his example, the creation of houses which could reflect the ideals of their owners became a central ambition of architects throughout the West. In 1764 Lord Mansfield, England’s Lord Chief Justice, tasked Robert Adam with coordinating the refurbishment of the library at Kenwood, his house on Hampstead Heath, overlooking London. Under Adam’s direction, the library became an opulent consecration of the character of the most senior legal authority in the land. Its shelves were filled with volumes of Greek and Roman philosophy and history, and its ornate ceiling was inset with an allegorical oval. Entitled Hercules between Glory and the Passions, the vignette showed a young Hellenic hero, clearly a version of Mansfield himself, trying to decide whether to devote his life to pleasure (in the shape of three comely girls, one of whom was baring a plump thigh) or to follow the path of sacrifice to a worthy civic cause (personified by a soldier who pointed towards a Classical temple). The viewer was given to understand that civic virtue would win the tussle – though the painting, with its masterly Italianate command of flesh tones, seemed covertly to be making a more compelling case for the alternative. Another section of the ceiling displayed Justice Embracing Peace, Commerce and Navigation (it looked like a much-longed-for reunion), while over the fireplace hung a portrait of Lord Mansfield by David Martin, who had chosen – or been directed – to portray him leaning against the Temple of Solomon (the wisest of all the kings of Israel), under the approving gaze of a bust of Homer (the greatest of all storytellers), with his right hand holding open a volume of Cicero (the noblest orator). Here was a man of biblical, Greek and Roman sagacity.

  Some sixty years later, just a few miles to the south, the members of London’s Athenaeum Club, an institution catering (as its rulebook stated) to ‘persons of distinguished eminence in science, literature, the arts or public life’, commissioned a new building for themselves on Pall Mall. Classical figures, modelled after those in the Elgin Marbles and executed by the sculptor John Henning, were arranged on an extended frieze some 260 feet long, which wrapped around three exterior sides of the clubhouse. The figures were engaged in the Athenian equivalents of the activities which interested the English gentlemen inside: singing, reading, writing and orating. Above the front door stood a towering gilded statue of Athena. The goddess of craft and wisdom looked defiantly down Pall Mall, intent on offering all who passed a foretaste of the personalities and interests of the membership within. By all appearances, only a few metres removed from the shallow commercialism of Piccadilly, an institution had been founded which harboured within its walls a group of men fully the equals of those who had lent glory to Athens in her golden age.

  Robert Adam, library, Kenwood House, 1769

  Decimus Burton, Athenaeum Club, 1824; E. H. Bailey, Athena, 1829

  2.

  Faced with painted ceilings and statues, in front of allegories of nymphs and gods, our eyes are liable to glaze over and drift away. The idealising style that in many countries dominated architecture between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries has a habit of striking us as both tedious and hypocritical.

  We find it hard to overlook, let alone forgive, the frequent discrepancies between idealised architecture and the reality of those who commissioned and lived with it. We know that Venice, whatever Veronese implied, repeatedly absconded from the virtues trumpeted by the maidens on the Sala del Collegio’s ceiling. We know that she trafficked in slaves, ignored her poor, dissipated her resources and exacted immoderate revenge on her enemies. We know that La Serenissima painted one thing, and did another. We know, too, that the Almerico family fell into disgrace before Palladio’s villa had even been completed and that their successors, the Capras, enjoyed no greater favour from the gods of commerce and wisdom, who seemed to mock the family’s aspirations from the villa’s rooftops. For his part, Lord Mansfield, far from uniting the talents of Cicero, Homer and Solomon, was an archetypal mid-eighteenth-century lawyer, ruthless, frugal with his humanity and adept at hiding his baser instincts behind Classical quotations. As for the Athenaeum, the majority of its members had joined the club for social advancement and wasted their days slumped in leather armchairs, watching the rain fall, slurping nursery food and neglecting their families, bearing as much resemblance to the contemporaries of Pericles as Piccadilly Circus did to the Acropolis.

  By contrast with our idealising predecessors, we tend to pride ourselves on our interest in reality. We reward works of art precisely insofar as they leave roseate ideals behind and faithfully attune themselves to the facts of our condition. We honour these works for revealing to us who we are, rather than who we would like to be.

  Nevertheless, the sheer eccentricity and remoteness of the concept of artistic idealisation invites closer examination. We might ask why, for some three centuries in the early-modern period, artists were applauded chiefly insofar as they could produce landscapes, people and buildings that were free of ordinary blemishes. We might wonder why artists competed among themselves to paint gardens and glades that would be more bucolic than any actual park, why they sculpted marble lips and ankles more seductive than those through which real blood might flow, and made portraits of aristocrats and royalty which showed them to be wiser and more magnanimous than they ever were.

  It was rarely naivety that lay behind these efforts, or indeed the desire to deceive. The creators of idealised works were worldly creatures and credited their audiences with being so too. It was clear that the councillors gathering under Veronese’s ceiling would frequently have been swayed by impulses darker than those depicted above them. Likewise, it was known that Mansfield’s inclination to do honour to his office had to compete with the siren calls of wealth and fame, and that the hope of achieving something worthwhile over the course of an afternoon at the Athenaeum Club would seldom have withstood the lure of gossip and ginger biscuits in the tea room.

  To proponents of the idealising tradition, the notion that artists were being naive in suggesting anything other than this would itself have appeared naive. 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. Sculptures and buildings were to assist us in bringing the best of ourselves to the fore. They were to embalm our highest aspirations.

  3.

  It is in German philosophy of the late eighteenth century that we find the most lucid articulations of the theory of artistic idealisation. In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Friedrich Schiller proposed that the perfections presented in idealised art could be sources of inspiration, to which we would be able to turn when we had lost confi
dence in ourselves and were in contact only with our flaws, a melancholic and self-destructive stance to which he felt his own age especially prone. ‘Humanity has lost its dignity,’ he observed, ‘but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone. Truth lives on in the illusion of Art, and it is from this copy, or after-image, that the original image will once again be restored.’

  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’.

  If buildings can act as a repository of our ideals, it is because they can be purged of all the infelicities that corrode ordinary lives. 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.

  The potential inscribed in an idealised building need never fully be realised to justify its worth. In the eyes of Schiller’s contemporary Wilhelm von Humboldt, it was the idealised buildings of the Ancient Greeks that presented modern Westerners with the most nourishing sources of inspiration, though he added in his essay ‘Concerning the Study of Antiquity’ (1793) that Greek architecture deserved our interest even if only a semblance of the perfections it alluded to could ever be re-created in the practically minded, bourgeois world: ‘We imitate the models of the Greeks in full consciousness that they are unattainable; we fill our imagination with the images of their free, richly gained life, knowing that such life is denied us.’