The Architecture of Happiness: Reviews

The New Yorker, 4 December 2006

Read at the New Yorker website

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.”