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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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A complex but familiar sensation lucidly expressed. De Botton is rightly haunted by the colossal blunders of 20th-century brutalism but he’s too high-minded to condemn their author, Le Corbusier, outright. The nearest he comes to a full-on attack is to juxtapose photographs of Le Corbusier’s houses at Passac, one taken in 1925, the other in 1995. The first is a gleaming miracle of pristine geometry, the second a mess of cracks and sprouting weeds. It takes half a minute to realise you’re looking at the same building. Le Corbusier’s architectural programme is examined in intricate and sympathetic detail and one begins to suspect that, like Jesus, de Botton is more interested in sinners than in saints because sinners give him scope to express the characteristics he most admires in himself, tolerance, understanding and forgiveness. We learn of Le Corbusier’s innocent idealism, his far-sighted humanity. We’re told that his plan to flatten half of central Paris and replace it with a forest of tower blocks 60 storeys high was motivated by a Geldofian desire to wipe away the rat-infested slums and to shine healing light on the starving, shivering, tuberculous poor. Le Corbusier’s only error was that he ‘forgot’ the range and variety of the human spirit. Unfortunately this forgetfulness is still at work and de Botton closes his book with a sustained appeal for planners of the future to build with imagination, grace and nobility. ‘The fates of cities,’ he warns, ‘are decided in the town hall.’ That’s where this book belongs.

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