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The Architecture of Happiness

Beauties and eyesores

Alain de Botton
Hamish Hamilton, 280pp, £17.99,

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 17th May 2006

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His favourite emotion is sadness. Many things evoke sadness. Botticelli’s angels in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Outer Tokyo and its ‘ruined landscapes of bland housing estates’. Buildings that ‘deny their setting’. Experiments like Poundbury which refuse to come to terms with the present. But the melancholy mood is fleeting. De Botton casts about for ‘aesthetic relief’ and his temper is sweetened by a graceful bridge across a ravine or a harmonious Swedish interior.

Another favourite disposition is the mask of forced naivety. Can buildings make us happy? he ponders winsomely. (Translation, does architecture influence conduct?) The answer is no. The murder rate in Venice is no lower than that of uglier cities. And the Nazi leaders, squatting in the most splendid palaces in Europe, continued to plot war and death. A building merely reinforces an existing mood, a well-established state of consciousness — which just happens to be the de Botton speciality. Wandering through an estate of tower blocks, he senses a powerful yearning for the noise and bustle of a busy street. Why?

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.

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