The Architecture of Happiness

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The Architecture of Happiness Page 14

by Alain De Botton


  But on the road west from Amsterdam, on the way to Haarlem and the coast, I came across a new quarter of the village of Vijfhuizen, which triumphantly corrected all the errors of which the Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village had been so guilty, for its houses had not only grown up in the appropriate country, they had also beautifully adapted themselves to the century in which they were built.

  From a distance, the village looked traditional. The roofs were pitched, and the houses spaced out as on a typical suburban grid. Only on nearing the site did one start to notice particularly contemporary touches: the profiles of the buildings were sharply edged, as though suggesting a touch of irony or self-consciousness about their primordial shapes. The roofs, instead of being tiled, were made of ribbed-steel plating, while the walls, rather than being made of brick, were a mixture of steel panels and identically grooved wood. In this combination of traditional form and modern materials, one sensed the unfolding of a mutually respectful conversation between past and present.

  Reconciling the old and new on a Swiss mountain:

  Peter Zumthor, Gugalun House, Versam, 1994

  The houses knew how to accommodate themselves to the realities of the modern Netherlands while remaining quietly aware of their lineage. They looked like reinventions of the archetypal Dutch home that had succeeded in succumbing neither to nostalgia nor to amnesia.

  Coherence in place and in time:

  S333 Architects, New Quarter, Vijfhuizen, 2004

  Self-knowledge

  1.

  I once spent a summer in a small hotel in the second arrondissement in Paris, a stone’s throw away from the chilly seriousness of the old Bibliothèque Nationale, where I repaired every morning in a vain attempt to research a book I hoped to write (but never did). It was a lively part of town, and when I was bored with my work, which was most of the time, I would often sit in a café adjacent to my hotel named, as if out of a tourist guide, Chez Antoine. Antoine was dead, but his brother-in-law, Bertrand, had taken over the café and ran it with unusual conviviality and charisma. Everyone, it seemed, dropped by Chez Antoine at some point in the day. Elegant women would have coffee and a cigarette at the counter in the morning. Policemen lunched there, students whiled away the afternoons on the covered terrace, and by evening there’d be a mixture of scholars, politicians, prostitutes, divorcees and tourists, flirting, arguing, having dinner, smoking and playing pinball. As a result, although I was alone in Paris, and went for days hardly speaking to anyone, I felt none of the alienation with which I was familiar in other cities – in Los Angeles, for example, where I had once lived for a few weeks in a block between freeways. That summer, like many people before and since, I imagined no greater happiness than to be able to live in Paris for ever, pursuing a routine of going to the library, ambling the streets and watching the world from a corner table at Chez Antoine.

  2.

  I was therefore surprised to find out, some years later, while looking through an illustrated book on urban planning, that the very area in which I had stayed, including my hotel, the café, the local laundry, the newspaper shop, even the National Library, had all fallen within a zone which one of the most intelligent and influential architects of the twentieth century had wanted systematically to dynamite and replace with a great park punctuated at intervals with eighteen sixty-storey cruciform towers stretching up to the lower slopes of Montmartre.

  The future of a great city:

  Le Corbusier, Plan ‘Voisin’ for Paris, 1922

  The plan seemed so obviously demented that it intrigued me. I discovered photos of Le Corbusier leaning over his model, explaining it to a line of local councillors and businessmen. He had no tail or horns. He appeared intelligent and humane. Only after properly understanding how a rational person might come up with an idea to destroy half of central Paris, only after sympathising with the aspirations behind the plan and respecting its logic, did it seem fair to begin to mock, or indeed feel superior to, this remarkable conception of the future of a city.

  3.

  Le Corbusier had drawn up his Parisian scheme at a moment of unequalled urban crisis. Across the developing world, cities were exploding in size. In 1800 the French capital was home to 647,000 people. By 1910 three million were squeezed within its inadequate confines. Much of France’s peasant class had within a few years decided that it would collectively put down its scythes in order to head for the greater opportunities of the city – unleashing an environmental and social catastrophe in the process.

  Under the eaves of apartment buildings, several families typically shared a single room. In 1900, in the poorer districts of Paris, one toilet generally served seventy residents. A cold-water tap was a luxury. Factories and workshops were sited in the middle of residential areas, emitting smoke and deadly effluents. Children played in courtyards awash with raw sewage. Cholera and tuberculosis were a constant threat. Streets were choked by traffic day and night. Evening papers reported a steady stream of accidents involving severed limbs. Following a collision with an omnibus, a horse was impaled on a lamp-post on the Avenue de l’Opéra. There was not much that was picturesque about the early-twentieth-century city.

  4.

  Le Corbusier, for one, was horrified by such conditions. ‘All cities have fallen into a state of anarchy,’ he remarked. ‘The world is sick.’ Given the scale of the crisis, drastic measures were in order, and the architect was in no mood to feel sentimental about their side effects. Historic Paris was, after all, just a byword for tubercular Paris.

  His manifesto, contained in two books, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (1925) and The Radiant City (1933), called for a dramatic break from the past: ‘The existing centres must come down. To save itself every great city must rebuild its centre.’ In order to alleviate overcrowding, the ancient low-rise buildings would have to be replaced by a new kind of structure only recently made possible by advances in reinforced concrete technology: the skyscraper. ‘2,700 people will use one front door,’ marvelled Le Corbusier, who went on to imagine ever taller towers, some housing as many as 40,000 people. When he visited New York for the first time, he came away disappointed by the scale of the buildings. ‘Your skyscrapers are too small,’ he told a surprised journalist from the Herald Tribune.

  By building upwards, two problems would be resolved at a stroke: overcrowding and urban sprawl. With room enough for everyone in towers, there would be no need for cities to spread outwards and devour the countryside in the process. ‘We must eliminate the suburbs,’ recommended Le Corbusier, whose objection was as much based on his hatred of what he took to be the narrow mental outlook of suburbanites as on the aesthetics of their picket-fenced villas. In the new kind of city, the pleasures of the town would be available to all. Despite a population density of 1,000 per hectare, everyone would be comfortably housed. Even the concierge would have his own study, added Le Corbusier.

  From Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning 1925

  A skyscraper for 40,000 people:

  From Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1925

  There would be ample green space as well, as up to 50 per cent of urban land would be devoted to parks – for, as the architect put it, ‘the sports ground must be at the door of the house.’ What was more, the new city would not merely have parks; it would itself be a vast park, with large towers dotted among the trees. On the roofs of the apartment blocks, there would be games of tennis, and sunbathing on the shores of artificial beaches.

  Simultaneously, Le Corbusier planned to abolish the city street: ‘Our streets no longer work. Streets are an obsolete notion. There ought not to be such things as streets; we have to create something that will replace them.’ He witheringly pointed out that the design of Paris’s street plan dated from the middle of the sixteenth century, when ‘the only wheeled traffic consisted of two vehicles, the Queen’s coach and that of the Princess Diane.’ He resented the fact that the legitimate demands of both cars and people were constantly
and needlessly compromised, and he therefore recommended that the two henceforth be separated. In the new city, people would have footpaths all to themselves, winding through woods and forests (‘No pedestrian will ever meet an automobile, ever!’), while cars would enjoy massive and dedicated motorways, with smooth, curving interchanges, thus guaranteeing that no driver would ever have to slow down for the sake of a pedestrian.

  From Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, 1933

  Even more than Paris, New York was for Le Corbusier the epitome of an illogical city, because it had managed to graft skyscrapers, the buildings of the future, onto a tight street plan better suited to a medieval settlement. On his trip around the United States, he advised his increasingly bemused American hosts that Manhattan ought to be demolished to make way for a fresh and more ‘Cartesian’ attempt at urban design.

  The division of cars and people was but one element in Le Corbusier’s plan for a thoroughgoing reorganisation of life in the new city. All functions would now be untangled. There would no longer be factories, for example, in the middle of residential areas, thus no more forging of iron while children were trying to sleep near by.

  The new city would be an arena of green space, clean air, ample accommodation and flowers – and not just for the few but, as a caption in The Radiant City promised, ‘for all of us!!!’

  5.

  Ironically, what Le Corbusier’s dreams helped to generate were the dystopian housing estates that now ring historic Paris, the waste lands from which tourists avert their eyes in confused horror and disbelief on their way into the city. To take an overland train to the most violent and degraded of these places is to realise all that Le Corbusier forgot about architecture and, in a wider sense, about human nature.

  For example, he forgot how tricky it is when just a few of one’s 2,699 neighbours decide to throw a party or buy a handgun. He forgot how drab reinforced concrete can seem under a grey sky. He forgot how awkward it is when someone lights a fire in the lift and home is on the forty-fourth floor. He forgot, too, that while there is much to hate about slums, one thing we don’t mind about them is their street plan. We appreciate buildings which form continuous lines around us and make us feel as safe in the open air as we do in a room. There is something enervating about a landscape neither predominantly free of buildings nor tightly compacted, but littered with towers distributed without respect for edges or lines, a landscape which denies us the true pleasures of both nature and urbanisation. And because such an environment is uncomfortable, there is always a greater risk that people will respond abusively to it, that they will come to the ragged patches of earth between their towers and urinate on tyres, burn cars, inject drugs – and express all the darkest sides of their nature against which the scenery can mount no protest.

  In his haste to distinguish cars from pedestrians, Le Corbusier also lost sight of the curious codependence of these two apparently antithetical forces. He forgot that without pedestrians to slow them down, cars are apt to go too fast and kill their drivers, and that without the eyes of cars on them, pedestrians can feel vulnerable and isolated. We admire New York precisely because the traffic and crowds have been coerced into a difficult but fruitful alliance.

  A city laid out on apparently rational grounds, where different specialised facilities (the houses, the shopping centre, the library) are separated from one another across a vast terrain connected by motorways, deprives its inhabitants of the pleasures of incidental discoveries and presupposes that we march from place to place with a sense of unflagging purpose. But whereas we may leave the house with the ostensible object of consulting a book in a library, we may nevertheless be delighted on the way by the sight of the fishmonger laying out his startled, bug-eyed catch on sheets of ice, by workmen hoisting patterned sofas into apartment blocks, by leaves opening their tender green palms to the spring sunshine, or by a girl with chestnut hair and glasses reading a book at the bus stop.

  The addition of shops and offices adds a degree of excitement to otherwise inert, dormitory areas. Contact, even of the most casual kind, with commercial enterprises gives us a transfusion of an energy we are not always capable of producing ourselves. Waking up isolated and confused at three in the morning, we can look out of the window and draw solace from the blinking neon signs in a storefront across the road, advertising bottled beer or twenty-four-hour pizza and, in their peculiar way, evoking a comforting human presence through the paranoid early hours.

  All of this, Le Corbusier forgot – as architects often will.

  6.

  Then again, omissions are to be expected given the difficulties of understanding our needs and converting this knowledge into the unambiguous language of the architectural plan. It is easy enough to recognise when a room is properly lit and a staircase easy to navigate, but so much harder to convert this intuitive sense of well-being into a logical understanding of the reasons for it. To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap.

  No wonder so many buildings provide sad testimony to the arduousness of self-knowledge. No wonder there are so many rooms and cities where architects have failed to convert an unconscious grasp of their own needs into reliable instructions for satisfying the needs of others.

  Our behaviour is riddled with eccentricities which frustrate casual attempts at prediction. Rather than sitting in the middle of a room on a soft armchair, we are capable of deciding that we feel more comfortable perched on a hard bench set against the walls. We may ignore the path built for us by a landscape architect in order to trace out our own shortcut – just as our children may find it more amusing to play around a car-park ventilation shaft than on a purpose-built playground.

  Our designs go wrong because our feelings of contentment are woven from fine and unexpected filaments. It isn’t sufficient that our chairs comfortably support us; they should in addition afford us a sense that our backs are covered, as though we were at some level still warding off ancestral fears of attacks by a predator. When we approach front doors, we appreciate those that have a small threshold in front of them, a piece of railing, a canopy or a simple line of flowers or stones – features that help us to mark the transition between public and private space and appease the anxiety of entering or leaving a house.

  We don’t generally experience chronic pain when the fine-grained features of design have been ignored; we are simply forced to work harder to overcome confusion and eddies of unease. Yet if someone were to ask us what was the matter, we might not know how to elaborate on the malign features of our environment. We might resort to mystical language, citing unlucky harmonies between the sofa and the carpet, inauspicious magnetisms emanating from the door or contrary energies flowing out of the window – such terms compensating for the difficulties we otherwise have in explaining our irritations. Although nothing in our feeling about places can honestly be said to defy reason, it is not hard to see why we might look to a religious superstructure to lend substance to our elusive discomforts.

  However, these can in the end always be traced back to nothing more occult than a failure of empathy, to architects who forgot to pay homage to the quirks of the human mind, who allowed themselves to be seduced by a simplistic vision of who we might be, rather than attending to the labyrinthine reality of who we are.

  7.

  The failure of architects to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives. Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendency which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

  In architecture, as in so much else, we cast around for explanations to our tro
ubles and fix on platitudinous targets. We get angry when we should realise we are sad and tear down ancient streets when we ought instead to introduce proper sanitation and street lights. We learn the wrong lessons from our griefs while grasping in vain for the origins of contentment.

  The places we call beautiful are, by contrast, the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans – a combination that enables them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we even had.

  VI. The Promise of a Field

  1.

  A field somewhere outside a town. For a few million years, it slept under a blanket of ice. Then a group of people with pronounced lower jaws settled on it, lit their fires and, on a stone plinth, sacrificed an occasional animal to strange gods. Millennia went by. The plough was invented, and wheat and barley were sown. The monks owned the field, then the king, then a merchant, and in the end a farmer, who received a generous sum from the government in return for surrendering it to the colourful progress of meadow buttercups, ox-eye daisies and red clover.

  The field has had an eventful life. A German bomber far off its target flew over it in the war. Children interrupted long car journeys to be sick on the edge of it. People lay down in it in the evenings and wondered whether the lights overhead were stars or satellites. Ornithologists tramped through it in oatmeal-coloured socks and spotted families of Black Redstarts. Two Norwegian couples on a bicycling tour of the British Isles camped here for a night and, in their tents, sang ‘Anne Knutsdotter’ and ‘Mellom Bakkar og Berg’. Foxes looked around. Mice made exploratory journeys. Worms kept their heads down.

 

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