De Botton and the ‘Architecture of Happiness’

A ‘beguiling tour through the philosophy and psychology of architecture’ its actually just a good read with wisdom and insight that is certainly not limited to the world of bricks and mortar or any of the other innumerable materials you might think of constructing with!

Much of his writing, as the title obviously suggests, is concerned with the kind of environment our buildings create. The premise being that buildings – and the objects we fill them with – affect us more profoundly than we might think. To take architecture seriously is to accept that we are, for better or worse, different people in different places. And I reckon he’s got a point, but what particularly struck me was much of what he wrote about beauty.

For instance, quoting some bloke called Stendhal he writes ‘beauty is the promise of happiness’.

Stating that ‘a lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception’ he goes on to contend that ‘it is in dialogue with pain that many architectural things (in life?) acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turn out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural (life?) appreciation. We might, quite aside form all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings (life?) can properly touch us.’

Examining the paradox of beauty further he shares his belief that a perplexing consequence of fixing our eyes on an ideal is that it may make us sad. The more beautiful something is, the sadder we risk feeling.

For De Botton the sadness isn’t of the searing kind but ‘more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things to always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.’

As the medieval thinker Hugh of St.Victor put it ‘when we admire the beauty of visible objects, we experience joy certainly, but at the same time, we experience a feeling of tremendous void’.

Anyway, that’s enough of an advert(!) – if you fancy reading something a little different this would be one to read.