The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain De Botton

  For those of more modest means, new pattern books were created, the most popular of which, John Loudon’s The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (1833), presented self-builders with plans enabling them to construct houses from any part of the world, an initiative which rapidly wiped out regional types of architecture.

  Options for your next home:

  Humphry Repton, Characters of Houses, 1816

  Left to right: Swiss style cottage and Old English style cottage From John Loudon, The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, 1833

  Changes in the way property was developed served to promote further opportunities for eclecticism. In the eighteenth century, London, like most cities in Europe, had expanded primarily through the efforts of aristocratic landowners, who gave their names to the squares which they carved across their old farms and fields: Lord Southampton, the Earl of Bedford, Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Duke of Portland. These were men of shared taste: comfortable in Latin and Greek, students of Cicero and Tacitus, and unambivalent proponents of the Classical style. When the Earl of Bedford issued contracts for the building of his eponymous square in 1776, his stipulations revealed an almost maniacal obsession with Classical harmony, setting down as they did rules to govern the exact height of each storey, the depth of every window frame, the colour of the bricks and the specific kind of wood to be used in the floorboards (‘the best Memel or Riga timber without a trace of sap’). So concerned was the earl with Classical proportion and precision that he regularly rose at dawn and went out with a pair of garden scissors to ensure that the bushes at the centre of his square were trained to grow symmetrically.

  But in the century that followed, royals and aristocrats withdrew from speculative construction even as demand for housing exploded. Those who came in their wake were not typically readers of Cicero and Tacitus. More often, they were entrepreneurs with a penchant for variety and whimsy. Instinctively scornful of the martial sobriety of the Classical tradition, they competed to attract clients through the playfulness and exuberance of their developments, as epitomised by a street in Plymouth which combined, within only a few hundred metres, a row of Roman Corinthian terraced houses, a Doric town hall, an Oriental chapel, a pair of private homes in the Ionic style and an Egyptian library.

  A vanishing Classical consensus about beauty:

  Bedford Square, London, 1783

  New visions of beauty:

  John Foulston, Kerr Street, Devonport, Plymouth, 1824

  Front elevation, Castle Ward, Strangford Lough, 1767

  6.

  The only problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos.

  The danger inherent in such freedom first and famously broke through on the shores of a quiet lough in Northern Ireland, where, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a local aristocrat and his wife decided to build themselves a house. Both passionate about architecture, Viscount Bangor and Lady Anne Bligh nevertheless found that they couldn’t agree on an appropriate style. The viscount was a Classicist. He wanted something with three bays, engaged columns, Palladian proportions and windows topped with triangular consoled pediments. Anne, in contrast, was keener on the Gothic, preferring castellated roofs with pinnacles, centre-pointed windows and quatrefoils. She had heard about the ceilings at Strawberry Hill and longed to have a few of her own. The struggle grew stubborn and ill-natured, until the couple’s architect came up with a solution of Solomonic ingenuity: he would divide the house in two. The front half was built in the Classical style, the rear in the Gothic. The compromise continued inside, with the music room and stairwell being Classical in feeling, embellished with Doric friezes and columns, while the boudoir and private rooms had a Gothic air, complete with fan-vaulted ceilings and pointed-arched fireplaces.

  Rear elevation, Castle Ward

  The more sensitive critics were appalled and, with such buildings in mind, began an ardent search for a way to restore a measure of visual consensus. ‘We suffer from a carnival of architecture,’ complained Augustus Pugin in 1836. ‘Private judgement runs riot. Every architect has a theory of his own.’ In 1828 a young German practitioner named Heinrich Hübsch published a book whose title characterised the dilemma of an entire age: In What Style Shall We Build? There had to be a way for the defenders of the Gothic, Old English and Swiss styles to resolve their disputes; there had to be a way of knowing whether to furnish the dining room with Ancient Egyptian or Chinese chairs; a way of giving the upper hand to either Lady Anne or Viscount Bangor – and thus of ensuring that houses would never again be built facing in two different directions.

  But where could such a principle be found? Just what style were architects to build in?

  7.

  The answer that eventually emerged was not really an answer; rather, it was an admonishment that it might be irrelevant and even indulgent to raise the question in the first place.

  A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominance in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution. Mastering the technologies of iron and steel, of plate glass and concrete, they drew interest and inspired awe with their bridges, railway hangars, aqueducts and docks. More novel even than their abilities, perhaps, was the fact that they seemed to complete these projects without ever directly asking themselves what style it was best to adopt. Charged with erecting a bridge, they tried to design the lightest possible frame that could stretch over the widest span at the lowest cost. When they built a railway station, they aimed for a hall that would allow steam to disperse safely, let in a large amount of natural light and accommodate a constant crowd of travellers. They demanded that factories be able to house unwieldy machinery and that steamships carry cargoes of impatient passengers punctually across heavy seas. But they did not appear to give much thought to whether there should be a Corinthian or a Doric set of capitals gracing the upper galleries of a ship, whether a Chinese dragon might look pleasing at the end of a locomotive or whether suburban gas works should be done up in a Tuscan or Islamic style.

  Yet, despite this indifference, the new men of science seemed capable of building the most impressive and, in many cases, the most seductive structures of their confused age.

  8.

  The philosophy of the engineers flew in the face of everything the architectural profession had ever stood for. ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel. ‘Architecture, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction,’ echoed Sir George Gilbert Scott. If the Doge’s Palace deserved to be classified as great architecture, it was not because the roof was watertight or because it provided Venice’s civil servants with the necessary number of meeting rooms but rather, the architects defensively suggested, because it sported carvings on its roof, a delicate arrangement of white and pink bricks on its façades, and deliberately slender, tapering, pointed arches throughout – details that would have had no place in a design by a graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris or the Engineering Academy of Dresden. The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.

  The irrelevance of aesthetic discussion:

  John Fowler, Benjamin Baker, Forth Railway Bridge, construction of the central girder, September 1889

  ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty’:

  Doge’s Palace (detail), Venice, 1340–1420

  9.

  The principles of engineering may have brutally contradicted those of architecture, but a vocal minority of nineteenth-century architects nevertheless perceived that the engineers were capable of providing them with a critical key to their salvation – for what these men had, and they so
sorely lacked, was certainty. The engineers had landed on an apparently impregnable method of evaluating the wisdom of a design: they felt confidently able to declare that a structure was correct and honest in so far as it performed its mechanical functions efficiently; and false and immoral in so far as it was burdened with non-supporting pillars, decorative statues, frescos or carvings.

  Exchanging discussions of beauty for considerations of function promised to move architecture away from a morass of perplexing, insoluble disputes about aesthetics towards an uncontentious pursuit of technological truth, ensuring that it might henceforth be as peculiar to argue about the appearance of a building as it would be to argue about the answer to a simple algebraic equation.

  With functional principles standing as a new measure of worth, the entire history of architecture could be scanned and its masterworks reassessed in terms of their relative degrees of veracity and falsehood. The Romans were deemed dishonest for having added columns to the Colosseum, because these elegantly sculpted, costly pieces of stone only pretended to support the upper storeys, whereas in fact – as any engineer could see – the whole structure was being held up by the arches alone.

  Equally, Johann Balthasar Neumann had lied in almost every aspect of his Vierzehnheiligen Pilgrimage Church in Banz. Here the inside walls made a show of holding up the building, but in reality that task fell to a separate and hidden frame. Even Neumann’s domed, painted ceiling had nothing to do with the real roof but was merely a stucco skin nestled beneath the actual, conventionally pitched design.

  A mendacious ceiling:

  Johann Balthasar Neumann, Vierzehnheiligen Pilgrimage Church, Banz, 1772

  Charles Cockerell, Ashmolean and Taylorian Institute, Oxford, 1840

  Similarly, Charles Cockerell was judged to have been almost disgracefully deceptive and wasteful in his design for the Ashmolean Museum and Taylorian Institute in Oxford. His crime had been to place massive Ionic columns, which could have supported four storeys’ worth of masonry, around the outside of the building, where they carried nothing heavier than pots and statues, while leaving the real weight of the structure to be borne by another set of columns concealed within the walls.

  10.

  But what would a house look like whose architect had renounced any interest in beauty in order to focus exclusively on mechanical functioning? To believe its creator in certain of his moods, it might resemble the Villa Savoye.

  In the spring of 1928 a Parisian couple named Pierre and Emilie Savoye approached the 41-year-old Swiss architect Le Corbusier and asked him to design a country house for them and their young son Roger on a wooded plot of land they owned overlooking the Seine, in Poissy, west of Paris. Le Corbusier had by this point in his career built fifteen private houses and acquired international renown for his categorical views on architecture.

  ‘Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work,’ he exclaimed in Towards a New Architecture (1923), while ‘our architects are disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish. This is because there will soon be nothing more for them to do. We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time, everyone needs to wash! Our engineers provide for these things and so they will be our builders.’

  Le Corbusier recommended that the houses of the future be ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal. His hatred of any kind of decoration extended to a pity for the British Royal Family and the ornate, golden carriage in which they travelled to open Parliament every year. He suggested that they push the carved monstrosity off the cliffs of Dover and instead learn to travel around their realm in a Hispano-Suiza 1911 racing car. He even mocked Rome, the traditional destination for the education and edification of young architects, and renamed it the ‘city of horrors’, ‘the damnation of the half-educated’ and ‘the cancer of French architecture’ – on account of its violation of functional principles through an abundance of Baroque detailing, wall-painting and statuary.

  From Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1923

  For Le Corbusier, true, great architecture – meaning, architecture motivated by the quest for efficiency – was more likely to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt electricity turbine or a low-pressure ventilating fan. It was to these machines that his books accorded the reverential photographs which previous architectural writers had reserved for cathedrals and opera houses.

  Once asked by a magazine editor to name his favourite chair, Le Corbusier cited the seat of a cockpit, and described the first time he ever saw an aeroplane, in the spring of 1909, in the sky above Paris – it was the aviator the Comte de Lambert taking a turn around the Eiffel Tower – as the most significant moment of his life. He observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid aeroplanes of all superfluous decoration and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture. To place a Classical statue atop a house was as absurd as to add one to a plane, he noted, but at least by crashing in response to this addition, the plane had the advantage of rendering its absurdity starkly manifest. ‘L’avion accuse,’ he concluded.

  From Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1925

  From Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1923

  But if the function of a plane was to fly, what was the function of a house? Le Corbusier arrived (‘scientifically’ he assured his readers) at a simple list of requirements, beyond which all other ambitions were no more than ‘romantic cobwebs’. The function of a house was, he wrote, to provide: ‘1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.’

  11.

  Behind a wall on the summit of a hill in Poissy, a gravel path curves through dense trees before opening out into a clearing, in the middle of which stands a thin, white, rectangular box, with ribbon windows running along its sides, supported off the ground on a series of implausibly slender pillars. A structure on the roof of the Villa Savoye resembles a water tower or gas cylinder, but turns out on closer inspection to be a terrace with a semicircular protecting wall. The house looks like a piece of finely tooled precision machinery, some industrial object of unknown purpose, with flawless white surfaces that on a bright day reflect back the sun with the luminescent intensity of fishermen’s cottages on the islands of the Aegean. It seems that the house may be no more than a temporary visitor and that its roof-top equipment could at any point receive a signal that would lead it to fire its concealed engines and rise slowly over the surrounding trees and historically styled villas on the beginning of a long journey home to a remote galaxy.

  The influence of science and aeronautics continues inside. A front door made of steel opens onto a hallway as clean, bright and bare as an operating theatre. There are tiles on the floor, naked bulbs on the ceiling and, in the middle of the hall, a basin which invites guests to cleanse themselves of the impurities of the outside world. Dominating the room is a large ramp with a simple tubular rail which leads up to the main living quarters. Here a large kitchen is equipped with all the conveniences of its era. Steel-framed strip windows feed natural light into the principal rooms. The bathrooms are shrines to hygiene and athleticism; the exposed pipe work would do justice to a submarine.

  Even in these intimate spaces, the mood remains technical and astringent. There is nothing extraneous or decorative here, no rosettes or mouldings, no flourishes or ornaments. Walls meet ceilings at perfect right angles, without the softening influence of borders. The visual language is drawn exclusively from industry, the artificial light provided by factory lamps. There are few pieces of furniture, for Le Corbusier had recommended to his clients that they keep their belongings to a minimum, reacting with injured alarm when Madame Savoye expressed a desire to fit an armchair and two sofas in the living room. ‘Home life today is being paralysed by the deplorable notion that we must have furniture,’ her architect protested. ‘This notion should be
rooted out and replaced by that of equipment.’

  Le Corbusier, living room, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1931

  ‘What [modern man] wants is a monk’s cell, well lit and heated, with a corner from which he can look at the stars,’ Le Corbusier had written. As the builders finished their work, the Savoye family had reason to feel confident that in the house he had designed for them, these aspirations, at least, would be consummately met.

  Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1931

  12.

  Governed by an ethos conceived by engineers, Modernism claimed to have supplied a definitive answer to the question of beauty in architecture: the point of a house was not to be beautiful but to function well.

  Yet this neat separation between the vexed matter of appearance and the more straightforward one of performance has always hung on an illusory distinction. Although we may at first glance associate the word ‘function’ with the efficient provision of physical sanctuary, we are in the end unlikely to respect a structure which does no more than keep us dry and warm.

  Of almost any building, we ask not only that it do a certain thing but also that it look a certain way, that it contribute to a given mood: of religiosity or scholarship, rusticity or modernity, commerce or domesticity. We may require it to generate a feeling of reassurance or of excitement, of harmony or of containment. We may hope that it will connect us to the past or stand as a symbol of the future, and we would complain, no less than we would about a malfunctioning bathroom, if this second, aesthetic, expressive level of function were left unattended.