Beauties and eyesores
Lloyd Evans
THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS by Alain de Botton Hamish Hamilton, £17.99, pp. 280, ISBN 9780241142486 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 To call him a polymath would be a gross slander. Alain de Botton knows everything. Simple as that. He’s just far too modest to admit it. And I’m happy to report that his great mission to turn every facet of civilisation into a coffee-table book continues. Philosophy, art, travel — all done. Buildings are next. His approach is studiously unhurried. He gives the impression that he didn’t set out to write a book at all. It just sort of happened. He apparently spends his life flitting from continent to continent, staying in fancy hotels, roaming capital cities, noticing things and examining the condition of his temperament. The charm, the good taste, the erudite sophistication and the generosity of spirit all get a bit irritating after a while. He writes like a wise and beautiful old matriarch rocking by the fireside, sipping mint tea and reminiscing about the passions that troubled her distant youth.
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.
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, under standing 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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