The Architecture of Happiness - Reviews

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.” Loosely adopting a set of criteria, or “virtues” - order, balance, elegance, coherence, and self-knowledge - he delineates the merits of, for instance, Herzog & de Meuron’s 1988 Stone House, in Liguria, whose exposed concrete frame saves rough, mortarless rock from “rustic incoherence.” Conversely, he excoriates the folly of Nagasaki’s massive Huis ten Bosch Dutch Village, a theme park containing a complete replica of The Hague’s royal palace. De Botton is a lively guide, and his eclectic choices of buildings and locations evince his conclusion, that “we should be as unintimidated by architectural mediocrity as we are by unjust laws.”