The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain De Botton

  The limits of order:

  Office building, Trenton, New Jersey, 1995

  By comparison, there are no puzzles to detain or astonish us in the Classical front of the Procuratie Vecchie. The eye at once deduces the scheme behind its design, where the ground floor sets a pattern which is unimaginatively imitated on a smaller scale on both the first and second floors. The difference between this building and the Doge’s Palace is like the difference between a monotone drum beat and a Bach fugue.

  6.

  The most obvious means of creating complexity in a façade is through variations in the handling of doors and windows. But a pleasingly complex effect can also be attained through the use of brick, limestone, marble, patinated copper, wood and concrete, materials somewhat rough and uncivilised in appearance, in each of which something organic and untamed seems to stir. Beauty is a likely offspring when order is imposed on such vital materials: when spirit is aligned with logic. As Novalis advised: ‘In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.’

  The tedium of order: Mauro Coducci, Procuratie Vecchie, Venice, 1532

  There are masonry walls that perfectly honour the German poet’s insight, where every brick seems alive, unruly and individual, freighted with a distinctive personality and story. One brick may be gnarled and dark, another pink and innocent, a third stubbornly small, a fourth coloured and textured like walnut bread. Yet all these disparate characters will settle side by side, end to end, in creamy mortar, conforming to the selfsame master scheme, perfectly balanced between singularity and concord.

  The pleasure of order combined with complexity: Doge’s Palace, Venice, 1340–1420

  Flagstone floors can present us with a similar picture of harmony between contrary forces. There are floors in which large, obtuse stones have been persuaded by a mason to take their place within a methodical grid. One senses how the excesses in the character of these stones was tempered, how they were educated out of the savagery still evident in the craggy cliff-faces from which they were heaved. They had to surrender their defiance, trim their mossy beards, and smooth their warts and bunions, all for the sake of communal discipline – contributing to a floor where, as we make our way across it, we can appreciate order without danger of boredom and vigour without the shadow of anarchy.

  Wooden floors offer analogous pleasures when planks, which once had the pulse of nature flowing through them, submit to the will of the saw and yet when, within each plank, enough signs of life remain to counterpoint the carpenter’s geometry. We can see eddies, swirls and imperfections, as if the wood were a turbulent but frozen river. Irregularities remain – a knot that hasn’t been planed down, or a dip or buckle that hasn’t been smoothed – and yet these features are gracious rather than threatening, reminders of complexity, for they are neatly contained within a series of calm parallel lines and right angles, fixed in formation by long iron nails.

  The animating tension between order and chaos can be explored not only through materials but also through contours and sites. John Nash’s Park Crescent in Marylebone, for example, had it been laid out in a straight line, would have amounted to a relatively banal row of terraced houses. What advances its particular beauty is our sense that the order it displays has been achieved against the contrary and subversive pull exerted by a curve. We can imagine the difficulty involved in setting each building at a finely graded angle to its neighbours, and in moulding a façade around the recalcitrant arc of a semicircle.

  In Diener and Diener’s Langhaus apartment block in Amsterdam’s eastern docklands, a massive, highly repetitive structure finds its regularity mitigated by the combination of an asymmetrical rhythm in the windows (6:12:21), the coarse, variegated bricks of the façades and the siting of the block on the edge of a sombre, tempestuous waterway – details which ensure that the building will end up on the correct, magnificent side of ordered.

  In an adjoining part of the same Dutch development, a strict building code forces rows of terraced houses to adopt identical dimensions, a width of 4.2 metres and a height of 9.5 metres. Yet within these boundaries, a high degree of exuberance and inventiveness is allowed in terms of materials, window styles and individual floor heights. As our eyes scan the façades fronting the canals, we delight in their variations while admiring the rigorous parameters within which they play themselves out. A similar ethic obtains in Telč, in the Czech Republic, where the rigid ground plan specified for the houses which line the main square is offset by a liberal attitude towards colours, mouldings and roof shapes. The result recalls an endearing line-up of schoolchildren whose chief (and perhaps only) resemblance consists in being all of the same height.

  Diener and Diener, Langhaus, Java Island, Amsterdam, 2001

  West 8/Borneo Sporenburg Houses, Amsterdam, 1997

  Main Square, Telč, South Moravia, sixteenth century

  7.

  Such works emphasise the truth of the ancient maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity. Just as we cannot appreciate the attractions of safety without a background impression of danger, so, too, it is only in a building which flirts with confusion that we can apprehend the scale of our debt to our ordering capacities.

  Flirting with being boring, rescued by the scale and the curve:

  John Nash, Park Crescent, 1812

  Remove either one, and something is lost:

  Karljosef Schattner, Institute of Journalism, Eichstätt, 1987

  Balance.

  1.

  Beneath 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.

  2.

  For decades the U-shaped Baroque building which houses the Institute of Journalism in Eichstätt had a courtyard in the middle, empty save for a flower bed and a bicycle rack. Then, in the mid 1980s, pressure for space led the institute’s trustees to commission a new structure from the architect Karljosef Schattner, who dropped an unapologetically modern concrete and glass block into the void between the existing gabled and decorated wings. Although dramatically different in style, the old and new parts have nevertheless achieved a seductive harmony as well as a curious codependence, with each relying on the other to downplay its faults and enhance its charms. Removing either building would render the remaining one pedantically hidebound or brutally modern, while together they accomplish a beguiling synthesis of emotional temperaments.

  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. The strength, longevity and nobility of oak have long furnished the English with an idealised image of their own character. It is against backgrounds of richly textured oak that generations of gentlemen have read the Daily Telegraph in their clubs and dons have lunched in Oxbridge colleges. It was in oak trees that Robin Hood escaped the law and Charles II hid from Cromwell’s armies. It was English oak that provided Westminster Abbey with its ceiling and Nelson’s navy with its ships. Around polished panels of the wood, there therefore hover associations of rural life, aristocracy, history, the smells of leather and whisky – not to mention romantic notions of nationhood.

  We are far from all of this with concrete, a material which embodies speed, economy and, in its reinforced variety, brute might. It is a quintessentially modern, democratic medium whose rediscovery by architects in the early twentieth century made possible many of the overtly functional structures of the technological age, including grain silos, garages, tower blocks and warehouses.

  However, like an intelligent host faced with a couple of dinner guests from sharply opposed worlds, Kahn helps these two un
like elements to acknowledge each other’s virtues and surmount their mutual suspicion. He manages to reconcile them by making no attempt to disguise or minimise their differences. Unembarrassed to leave his concrete bare and unafraid to emphasise its poverty and starkness, Kahn encourages us to discover a new kind of beauty in its elephant-grey massing. At the same time, he lets us openly savour and celebrate the antique pleasures of oak, showing to full advantage the warm tones, clarity and striated grain with which time endowed it. As befits a building dedicated to the paintings of a nation more tortured than most by the competing claims of history and modernity, the Yale Center for British Art delivers an elegant essay on how past and present might learn to coexist and complement each other. In doing so, it sketches for us the dimensions of an ideal contemporary Englishness.

  High in the Italian Alps, yet another building resolves a comparable tension between the country and the city, and the agrarian and the industrial. Herzog and de Meuron’s Stone House consists of an exposed concrete frame within which are set loose, mortarless stones quarried from the surrounding slopes. These stones, of the type used for centuries to build the region’s barns and farmhouses, are so irregular in colour and shape as to teeter on the edge of rustic incoherence, to be saved from it only by the rational geometry of their concrete frame. Like Kahn’s Yale Center, Herzog and de Meuron’s house achieves its effect by weaving a pattern of beauty from two aesthetic strands – meaning, also, two varieties of happiness – which we would never previously have imagined belonging together.

  An ideal contemporary Englishness: Louis Kahn, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1977

  Herzog and de Meuron, Stone House, Tavole, Liguria, 1988

  3.

  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.

  It appears we cannot keep ourselves from semiconsciously reading our own dynamics into buildings and correlating the oppositions that certain examples display with competing sides of our own characters. The tension between curves and straight lines in a façade carries echoes of the pull between reason and emotion in ourselves. It is a human integrity that we see in unvarnished wood, and a human hedonism in gilded panels. Panes of glass etched with imprints of flowers and black concrete blocks (such as those found on the exterior walls of the University Library in Utrecht) seem the natural twins of masculine and feminine traits.

  It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word ‘beautiful’, alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled. We, too, can descend towards extremes – of chaos or rigidity, decadence or austerity, machismo or effeminacy – even as we instinctively recognise that our well-being depends on our being able both to accommodate and to cancel out our polarities.

  Men and women: Wiel Arets, University Library, Utrecht, 2004

  Our attempts to harmonise our different aspects isn’t generally helped by the world around us, which tends to emphasise a range of awkward antitheses. Consider, for instance, the truisms which hold that one cannot be at the same time both funny and serious, democratic and refined, cosmopolitan and rural, practical and elegant, or masculine and delicate.

  Balanced buildings beg to differ. Take, for example, the traditional antithesis between luxury and simplicity. The idea of luxury has tended to be associated with grandeur, pomposity and arrogance – while simplicity has been equated variously with squalor, incompetence and inelegance. However, the interior of Skogaholm Manor in Sweden, decorated towards the end of the eighteenth century, triumphantly contradicts any inclination to render the pairing of these two qualities impossible.

  The furniture is detailed in a refined Rococo manner, carved with gentle, aristocratic curves and garlands of flowers. But as the eye moves towards the ground, something unusual comes into view. Where we might expect the chairs to meet a floor which resembled them in tone – made of marble, perhaps, or highly veneered parquetry – we instead find rough, unvarnished wooden planks, of the sort one might see in a hayloft. A similarly striking combination can be seen in the wall decorations, whose Neoclassical floral motifs, which might more predictably have been coloured in rich reds and golds, are instead executed in muted greys and browns.

  A balanced building as a promise of a balanced life:

  Interior, Skogaholm Manor, Närke, c. 1790

  The manor house proposes a new human ideal, in which luxury would entail neither decadence nor a loss of contact with the democratic truths of the soul, and in which simplicity could be synthesised with nobility and refinement.

  If certain subtly balanced buildings touch us, it is because they stand as exemplars of how we might adjudicate between the conflicting aspects of our characters, how we, too, might aspire to make something beautiful of our troubling opposites.

  Elegance

  1.

  For the traveller who sets out from Zurich on a summer’s morning on a train bound south, for the Alps, the view is initially of a rolling pastoral landscape, in which cows feast on luminously green grass and occasionally glance up at the passing carriages with sad, almost wise brown eyes. For an hour, at least, nature is at her most benevolent. It is only beyond the town of Chur that the bucolic scene gives way to something more severe. The lush grass is gradually replaced by a terrain strewn with rubble and rock. Sheer walls of granite shoot up by the side of the train, alternating with precipitous canyons, silent but for the call of eagles and the cracking of branches. Along implausibly steep mountainsides, families of pine trees cling to narrow ledges like diligent soldiers on watch. While inside the carriage, everything remains as it was in the lowlands – pictures of a lake are still neatly screwed to the wall by the door, a bottle of apple juice continues to sit undrunk on the table – outside, we have journeyed to a place which resembles one of the less hospitable moons of Jupiter.

  In a valley so steep that its gelatinous walls seem never to have been warmed by the sun, a drop of hundreds of feet ends in a furious brown river clotted with stones and brambles. As the train curves around the mountainside, a view opens up along its length, revealing that, several carriages ahead, the burgundy-red locomotive has taken the unexpected decision to cross from one side of the valley to the other, a manoeuvre it proceeds to execute without so much as pausing to confer with higher authorities. It makes its way over the gap, and through a small cloud, with the brisk formality one might associate with the most routine of activities, to which prayer and worship would be at once unnecessary and theatrical supplements. What has rendered this supernatural feat possible is a bridge for which nothing in this setting has prepared us – a perfectly massive yet perfectly delicate concrete bridge, marred by not the slightest stain or impurity, which can only have been dropped from the air by the gods, for we cannot imagine that there would be anywhere in this forsaken spot for humans to rest their tools. The bridge seems unimpressed by the razor-sharp stones around it, by the childish moods of the river and the contorted, ugly grimaces of the rock-face. It stands content to reconcile the two sides of the ravine like an impartial judge, modest and willingly literal-minded about its own achievements, ashamed lest it detain our attention or attract our gratitude.

  Yet the bridge testifies to how closely a certain kind of beauty is bound up with our admiration for strength, for man-made objects which can withstand the life-destroying forces of heat, cold, gravity or wind. We see beauty in thick slate roofs that challenge hailstones to do their worst, in sea defences that shrug off the waves which batter them, and in bolts, rivets, cables, beams and buttresses. We feel moved by edifices – cathedrals, skyscrapers, hangars, tunnels, pylons – which compensate
for our inadequacies, our inability to cross mountains or carry cables between cities. We respond with emotion to creations which transport us across distances we could never walk, which shelter us during storms we could not weather, which pick up signals we could never hear with our own ears and which hang daintily off cliffs from which we would fall instantly to our deaths.

  Bernard Lovell, Charles Husband, Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 1957

  2.

  It follows from this that the impression of beauty we derive from an architectural work may be proportionally related to the intensity of the forces against which it is pitted. The emotional power of a bridge over a swollen river, for example, is concentrated at the point where the piers meet but resist the waters which rise threateningly around them. We shudder to think of sinking our own feet into such turbulent depths and venerate the bridge’s reinforced concrete for the sanguine way it deflects the currents which tyrannise it. Likewise, the heavy stone walls of a lighthouse acquire the character of a forbearing and kindly giant during a spiteful gale which does its best to pant them down, just as in a plane passing through an electrical storm, we can feel something approaching love for the aeronautical engineers who, in quiet offices in Bristol or Toulouse, designed dark grey aluminium wings that could flex through tempests with all the grace of a swan’s feathered ones. We feel as safe as we did when we were children being driven home in the early hours by our parents, lying curled up on the backseat under a blanket in our pyjamas, sensing the darkness and cold of the night through the window against which we rested our cheek. There is beauty in that which is stronger than we are.