The Architecture of Happiness - Reviews
Kevin Gill in Entertainment Today, 08 March 2007
As I write this review, I am house-sitting for a friend in a suburb-to-remain-unnamed. Despite the house’s possession of sturdy walls, a sound roof, and a seven-figure price tag, I am left feeling unsheltered. The protection I seek is not from nature’s elements, but from the demons of ennui, apathy, and bourgeois complacency. More...
Alison Lurie in The New York Review of Books, 15 March 2007
Today we expect nonfiction to be either comic or somber: to make us laugh, or to inform us, warn us, or terrify us with accounts of miserable childhoods or natural and political disasters. The idea that prose might be both casual in manner and serious in intent is almost forgotten. It survives, however, in the work of Alain de Botton. More...
Robert Campbell in The Boston Globe, 14 January 2007
It's rare that you can recommend to the general reader a book about architecture. Too many books on that topic are clotted attempts at philosophy that read as if they'd been mistranslated from the German. Or they're sales jobs, plugging some single architect or point of view. More...
The New Yorker, 4 December 2006
Determined to avoid the “two great dogmas of aesthetics” - that there is only one valid visual style, and that all styles are equally acceptable - de Botton explores how particular works of architecture succeed, by offering “more or less adequate responses to our genuine psychological needs.” More...
John Massengale in The Wall Street Journal, 18 November 2006
Mr. de Botton's book is an interesting and perhaps important addition to the debate over the emotional effect that our cities and buildings have on us. More...
Maria Cook in The Ottawa Citizen, 29 October 2006
As I write this review, I am sitting in a living room lined with windows. Afternoon light spills onto the gleaming hardwood and plays on the white walls. Can better writing result from working in a beautiful space rather than in an office cubicle? Yes, or no, I feel happy here. More...
Henry Petroski in The New York Sun, 18 October 2006
When Mr. de Botton refers to or even just alludes to a building or a piece of art, a picture of it is usually no farther than the turn of a page away. Seldom has there been a more sensitive marriage of words and images. More...
Michael Di
