The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain De Botton

  The most compelling aspect of Worringer’s theory – a point as readily applicable to architecture as it is to painting – was his explanation of why a society might transfer its loyalty from the one aesthetic mode to the other. The determinant lay, he believed, in those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply within itself. Abstract art, infused as it was with harmony, stillness and rhythm, would appeal chiefly to societies yearning for calm – societies in which law and order were fraying, ideologies were shifting, and a sense of physical danger was compounded by moral and spiritual confusion. Against such a turbulent background (the sort of atmosphere to be found in many of the metropolises of twentieth-century America or in New Guinean villages enervated by generations of internecine strife), inhabitants would experience what Worringer termed ‘an immense need for tranquillity’, and so would turn to the abstract, to patterned baskets or the minimalist galleries of Lower Manhattan.

  But in societies which had achieved high standards of internal and external order, so that life therein had come to seem predictable and overly secure, an opposing hunger would emerge: citizens would long to escape from the suffocating grasp of routine and predictability – and would turn to realistic art to quench their psychic thirst and reacquaint themselves with an elusive intensity of feeling.

  We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave:

  Top left: raffia skirt, Kuba, twentieth century

  Top right: Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1962

  Bottom: Byzantine mosaic, Basilica of Kampanopetra, Cyprus, sixth century AD

  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. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues. That we need art in the first place is a sign that we stand in almost permanent danger of imbalance, of failing to regulate our extremes, of losing our grip on the golden mean between life’s great opposites: boredom and excitement, reason and imagination, simplicity and complexity, safety and danger, austerity and luxury.

  If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion – and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

  Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. Society ends up containing a range of unbalanced groups, each hungering to sate its particular psychological deficiency, forming the backdrop against which our frequently heated conflicts about what is beautiful play themselves out.

  A wall to defend us against the threat of poverty and degradation:

  Top: bedroom of Mme Adélaïde, Palace of Versailles, 1765

  A defence against the dangers of privilege:

  Bottom: Tomas Nollet and Hilde Huyghe, Nollet and Huyghe House, Bruges, 2002

  3.

  Viewed in this light, a given stylistic choice will tell us as much about what its advocates lack as about what they like. We can understand a seventeenth-century elite’s taste for gilded walls by simultaneously remembering the context in which this form of decoration developed its appeal: one where violence and disease were constant threats, even for the wealthy – fertile soil from which to begin appreciating the corrective promises offered by angels holding aloft garlands of flowers and ribbons.

  We shouldn’t believe that the modern age, which often prides itself on rejecting signs of gentility and leaves walls unplastered and bare, is any less deficient. It is merely lacking different things. An absence of politesse is no longer the prevailing dread. In most Western cities, at least, the worst of the slums have been replaced by clean, well-charted streets. Life in much of the developed world has become rule-bound and materially abundant, punctilious and routine, to the extent that longings now run in another direction: towards the natural and unfussy, the rough and authentic – longings that bourgeois households may rely on unrendered walls and breeze blocks to help them to assuage.

  4.

  Historians have often noted that the Western world in the late eighteenth century acquired a taste for the natural in all its major art forms. There was new enthusiasm for informal clothing, pastoral poetry, novels about ordinary people and unadorned architecture and interior decoration. But we shouldn’t be led by this aesthetic shift to conclude that the inhabitants of the West were at this time becoming any more natural in themselves. They were falling in love with the natural in their art precisely because they were losing touch with the natural in their own lives.

  Thanks to advances in technology and trade, existence for the European upper classes had become, by this period, overly safe and procedural, an excess which the educated looked to relieve through holidays in cottages and readings of couplets on flowers. In his essay ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ (1796), Friedrich Schiller observed that the Ancient Greeks, who had spent most of their time outdoors, whose cities were small and ringed by forests and seas, had only rarely felt the need to celebrate the natural world in their art. ‘Since the Greeks had not lost nature in themselves,’ he explained, ‘they had no great desire to create objects external to them in which they could recover it.’ And then, turning to his own day, Schiller drove home his message: ‘However, as nature begins gradually to vanish from human life as a direct experience, so we see it emerge in the world of the poet as an idea. We can expect that the nation which has gone the farthest towards unnaturalness would have to be touched most strongly by the phenomenon of the naive. This nation is France’ – a country whose late queen had only a few years before perfectly corroborated Schiller’s thesis by passing her weekends watching cows being milked in the rustic village she had had built at the end of her garden.

  5.

  In 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.

  Though he must know these mountains better than all his charges, the guide has none of the aristocrats’ interest in the scene. He seems to be hiding by the side of a boulder. One imagines him longing for the excursion to be over and inwardly mocking the gentlemen who knocked at his door the previous day, asking to be led into the clouds for lunch, in exchange for a sum he could not turn down. For the guide, beauty is likely to lie in the lowlands, in meadows and chalets, while high mountains are fearsome places which one would sanely ascend only out of necessity, to rescue an animal or to build a snow barrier to break the fury of avalanches.

  Cottages to correct the excesses of a palace:

  Marie Antoinette, Prince de Ligne, Hubert Robert,

  Queen’s Hamlet, Petit Trianon, Versailles, 1785

  Caspar Wolf, The Lauteraar Glacier, 1776

  The date of the picture is significant, for it was at this point in the calendar of the Western imaginati
on that mountains, having been dismissed for centuries as monstrous aberrations, began to exert a widespread attraction for aristocratic tourists, who found in their raw appearance and perilousness a welcome relief from the fastidiousness and gentility of their increasingly over-civilised lives at home. A century before and the gentlemen would have stayed on their estates, trimming their hedges in geometric patterns, feeling no call to be reminded of disorder or wilderness. A century later and even the native guide and his ilk would have started to look more benevolently upon the untamed aspects of nature, their newfound interest having been incubated by the spread of central heating, weather forecasts, newspapers, post offices and railway lines running along even the highest of the Alpine valleys.

  But at this moment, at the top of a mountain, two assessments of beauty lie side by side, their divergence explained by two different, and differently deficient, ways of life.

  6.

  In 1923 a French industrialist named Henry Frugès commissioned the famous but still relatively untried architect Le Corbusier, then thirty-six years old, to build houses for a group of his manual workers and their families. Sited next to Frugès’s factories in Lège and Pessac, near Bordeaux, the resulting complexes were exemplars of Modernism, each a series of undecorated boxes with long rectangular windows, flat roofs and bare walls. Le Corbusier was especially proud of their lack of local and rural allusions. He mocked the aspirations of what he called the ‘folkloric brigade’ – made up of the sentimentalising traditionalists – and denounced French society’s intransigent resistance to modernity. In the houses he designed for the labourers, his admiration for industry and technology expressed itself in expanses of concrete, undecorated surfaces and naked light bulbs.

  But the new tenants had a very different idea of beauty. It was not they who had had their fill of tradition and luxury, of gentleness and refinement, nor they who were bored by the regional idiom or the detailed carvings of older buildings. In concrete hangars, dressed in regulation blue overalls, they spent their days assembling pine packing cases for the sugar business. The hours were long and the holidays few. Many had been dragooned from outlying villages to work in Monsieur Frugès’s factories, and they were nostalgic for their former homes and parcels of land. At the end of a shift in the plant, to be further reminded of the dynamism of modern industry was not a pressing psychological priority. Within a few years the workers therefore transformed their all-but-identical Corbusian cubes into uniquely differentiated, private spaces capable of reminding them of the things which their working lives had stripped away. Unconcerned with spoiling the great architect’s designs, they added to their houses pitched roofs, shutters, small casement windows, flowered wallpaper and picket fences in the vernacular style, and, once that was done, set about installing a variety of ornamental fountains and gnomes in their front gardens.

  The tenants’ tastes might have run in different directions from those of their architect, but the logic behind the exercise of these tastes was identical. Just like the renowned Modernist, the factory workers had fallen for a style evoking the qualities with which their own lives had been insufficiently endowed.

  Le Corbusier, houses, Pessac, 1925 and 1995

  7.

  A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste may not change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disbelief. We should know to ask at once what people would have to lack in order to see an object as beautiful and can come to understand the tenor of their deprivation even if we cannot muster enthusiasm for their choice.

  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.

  Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics: the view that there is only one acceptable visual style or (even more implausibly) that all styles are equally valid. A diversity of styles is a natural consequence of the manifold nature of our inner needs. It is only logical that we should be drawn to styles that speak of excitement as well as calm, of grandeur as well as cosiness, given that these are key polarities around which our own lives revolve. As Stendhal knew, ‘There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.’

  The buildings we call beautiful contain in a concentrated form those qualities in which we are deficient:

  Left: David Adjaye, Dirty House, London, 2002

  Right: Michele Saee and Bruno Pingeot, Publicis Drugstore, Paris, 2004

  Nevertheless, this breadth of choice leaves us free to determine that particular works of architecture are more or less adequate responses to our genuine psychological needs. We can accept the legitimacy of the rustic style, even if we question the way M. Frugès’s tenants attempted to inject it into their homes at Lège and Pessac. We can condemn the gnomes while respecting the longings which inspired them.

  8.

  The clashes and evolutions in our sense of what is beautiful may be painful and costly, but there seems little chance of insulating ourselves from them entirely: of producing chairs or sideboards, for instance, which could be guaranteed to provoke a unanimous or permanent aura of charm. Clashes of taste are an inevitable by-product of a world where forces continually fragment and deplete us in new ways. As long as societies and individuals have a history, that is, a record of changing struggles and ambitions, then art, too, will have a history – within which there will always be casualties in the form of unloved sofas, houses and monuments. As the ways in which we are unbalanced alters, so our attention will continue to be drawn to new parts of the spectrum of taste, to new styles which we will declare beautiful on the basis that they embody in a concentrated form what now lies in shadow within us.

  V. The Virtues of Buildings

  1.

  When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt.

  Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty.

  Yet architecture has repeatedly defied attempts for it to be set on a more scientific, rule-laden path. Just as the secrets of good literat
ure have not been for ever unlocked by the existence of Hamlet or Mansfield Park, so the works of Otto Wagner or Sigurd Lewerentz have done nothing to reduce the proliferation of inferior buildings. The masterpieces of art continue to seem like chance occurrences and artists to resemble cavemen who succeed in periodically igniting a flame, without being able to fathom how they did so, let alone communicate the basis of their achievements to others. Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.

  Even those who privately harbour a notion of the operative principles behind architectural beauty are unlikely to make their suppositions public, for fear of committing an illogicality or of being attacked by the guardians of relativism, who stand ready to censure all those who would dress up individual tastes as objective laws.

  2.

  Fear has not always been so prevalent. In previous periods, architectural theorists held fervently to the claim that great buildings could be made to yield up their secrets. Architecture was thought as susceptible to rational analysis as any other human or natural phenomenon. The careful study of the finest buildings promised to lead to laws of beauty, whose crisp expression would inspire apprentices, rightfully intimidate clients and spread sympathetic architecture more widely across the earth.