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Reviewed by:
  • The Architecture of Happiness
  • James Trilling (bio)
Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 280 pp.

“There are few harsher indictments against architecture,” de Botton writes, “than the sadness we feel at the arrival of bulldozers, for our grief is in almost all cases fuelled more by a distaste for what is to be built than by any hatred of the idea of development itself.” Like John Ruskin 150 years ago, de Botton laments a public trapped by the insincerity of its own norms. People don’t know what kinds of buildings they want, so they settle for the kinds they think they’re supposed to want, then wonder dimly why the results do not make them happy.

De Botton takes happiness very seriously as he explores, with the help of almost two hundred small but well-chosen illustrations, the power of architecture to “rebalance our misshapen natures” and “render vivid to us who we might ideally be.” If anything, he lets the struggle between happiness and unhappiness eclipse the struggle between good and bad architecture. Drama thrives on strong villains, but de Botton miscalculates. What he calls unhappiness sounds more like severe depression, against which no architecture can be expected to prevail.

Is de Botton declaring war on all the sorrows of the human condition?—or on the specific sorrows of the modernized condition? We never find out, because he writes in a historical vacuum. There are no footnotes, not even a bibliography. References in the text are far between; even Ruskin’s shaping role in the discourse of architecture and human values would be hard for an untrained reader to deduce. As for modernism, except in the choice of illustrations, it might as well not have happened.

Writing a nineteenth-century book in the twenty-first century could be an amusing postmodern conceit, but de Botton’s tone is not ironic. His message is one of self-help: to achieve an architecture of happiness, we need only (!) know who we are and what we want. Such simplifications are, increasingly, the ones we live by. The rigor needed to correct them seems less and less pertinent. Set against the grandeur of the author’s project, it may even be impertinent. [End Page 516]

James Trilling

James Trilling, an independent scholar of Byzantine and medieval art, is the author of Grotesques and Arabesques and Ornament: A Modern Perspective.

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