The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain De Botton

  3.

  Nevertheless, because beauty is typically the result of a few qualities working in concert, it can take more to guarantee the appeal of a bridge or a house than strength alone. Both Robert Maillart’s Salginatobel and Isambard Brunei’s Clifton Suspension bridges are structures of strength; both attract our veneration for carrying us safely across a fatal drop – and yet Maillart’s bridge is the more beautiful of the pair for the exceptionally nimble, apparently effortless way in which it carries out its duty. With its ponderous masonry and heavy steel chains, Brunei’s construction has something to it of a stocky middle-aged man who hoists his trousers and loudly solicits the attention of others before making a jump between two points, whereas Maillart’s bridge resembles a lithe athlete who leaps without ceremony and bows demurely to his audience before leaving the stage. Both bridges accomplish daring feats, but Maillart’s possesses the added virtue of making its achievement look effortless – and because we sense it isn’t, we wonder at it and admire it all the more. The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance – holding, spanning, sheltering – with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted.

  Robert Maillart, Salginatobel Bridge, Schiers, 1930

  Isambard Brunei, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, 1864

  4.

  We would not, by this measure, describe a heavy steel beam as elegant if it carried only a tabletop, nor a teacup if its sides were four centimeters thick. Michael Hopkins’s canopy for Bracken House is liable to displease us because of the fuss it makes, through multiple bulky struts, of the task of holding up a few relatively light pieces of glass. There is a disproportion between the modest challenge the canopy is set and the laboured response it offers that violates the principles of elegance – just as Santiago Calatrava awes us through the economy and discreet intelligence with which his sculptures defy the pressures of gravity.

  In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. ‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,’ writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of a Maillart bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity.

  Michael Hopkins, Bracken House, London, 1991

  Santiago Calatrava, Running Torso, 1985

  staircase, Shaker House, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, 1841

  Silvia Gmür and Livio Vacchini, house in Beinweil am See, 1999

  5.

  For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of a demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know – without ever having constructed one ourselves – that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Shakers’ work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we note how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated.

  6.

  Cardinal opportunities for elegance or its opposite lie in the way that columns are designed to hold up ceilings. Even as laypeople, we are adept at guessing the thickness that would be required safely to support a structure and esteem those columns that appear most diffident about the weight they are supporting. Whereas some varieties have broad enough shoulders but look disgruntled at having been asked to carry even a single storey, others hoist up ceilings as high as those of cathedrals without apparent strain, balancing massive weights on their narrow necks as if they were holding aloft a canopy made of linen. We welcome an appearance of lightness, or even daintiness, in the face of downward pressure – columns which seem to offer us a metaphor of how we, too, should like to stand in relation to our burdens.

  How we should like to stand in relation to our burdens:

  Left: Foster and Partners, Underground Station, Canary Wharf, 1999

  Right: The Comares Palace, Alhambra, Granada, 1370

  Windows offer further opportunities for the expression of architectural elegance, the determinant here being the relationship between the amount of glass and the extent of the frame that supports it. When diminutive panes are clasped within heavy, unapologetically broad mountings, we are likely to feel some of the same discomfort as when too many words are being employed to say too little. By contrast, the Georgian houses of Bath charm us by the ethereal way in which the windows appear to hover over their façades. Recognising, as their subsequent colleagues often have not, the intense beauty of the tenderly held pane, the city’s eighteenth-century architects competed with each other to develop frames in which the slenderest fingers of wood could fasten around the greatest expanses of glass. Pushing at the technological boundaries, they reduced glazing bars from 38mm (in the earliest houses in Queen Square) to 29mm and eventually to a mere 16 – contributing to windows with some of the same impelling grace as a Degas ballerina, fluidly pirouetting her sylph-like body on an axis of a mere five toes.

  A magical ratio of frame to glass, and foot to body:

  Left: Marlborough Buildings, Bath, eighteenth century

  Right: Edgar Degas, The Star, 1879

  7.

  If we define elegance as arising in part from the triumph over a given architectural challenge – spanning a river, supporting a ceiling or holding glazing in place – then to the list of challenges we might add the more abstract one of neglect. We appreciate buildings that seem to have shrugged off the weight of carelessness and indifference.

  Within the robust arches of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, the observant visitor will notice a series of small flowers fashioned out of wrought iron. To think these elegant is to acknowledge how unusual was the care that lay behind their creation. In a busy, often heedless world, they stand as markers of patience and generosity, of a kind of sweetness and even love: a kindness without ulterior motive. They are there for no other reason than that the architect believed they might entertain our eyes and charm our reason. They are markers of politeness, too, the impulse to go beyond what is required to discharge brute tasks – and of sacrifice as well, for it would have been easier to support the iron arches with straight-sided struts. Below, the mood may be workmanlike, and outside, in the streets, there will always be hurry and cruelty, but up on the ceiling, in a limited realm, flowers swirl and perhaps even laugh as they wend their way around a sequence of arches.

  Henri Labrouste, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1850

  Although we belong to a species which spends an alarming amount of its time blowing things up, every now and then we are moved to add gargoyles or garlands, stars or wreaths, to our buildings for no practical reason whatever. In the finest of these flourishes, we can read signs of goodness in a material register, a form of frozen benevolence. We see in them evidence of those sides of human nature which enable us to thrive rather than simply survive. These elegant touches remind us that we are not exclusively pragmatic or sensible: we are also creatures who, with no possibility of profit or power, occasionally carve friars out of stone and mould angels onto walls. In order not to mock such details, we need a culture confident enough about its pragmatism and aggression that it can also acknowledge the contrary demands of vulnerability and play – a culture, that is, sufficiently unthreatened by weakness and decadence as to allow for visible celebrations of tenderness.<
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  William Kinman (to a design by Robert Adam), detail of ironwork balusters, 20 St James’s Square, London, 1774

  friar, Wells Cathedral, Somerset, 1326

  Coherence

  1.

  For years, on my way to and from the shops, I passed a house which, despite being one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen, taught me more about architecture than many masterpieces have done.

  The house was positioned at one end of a tree-lined avenue in north London, where it attracted my attention through the evidence it gave of having undergone a severe identity crisis. It looked as though each wing and each floor of the house had been designed by a different team of architects, none of which had been permitted any knowledge of the work of its predecessors, so that the collective result was an uncomfortable patchwork of contrasting styles. While some aspects of the house aped the look of a Tudor cottage, others tugged towards the Gothic. There were clashing hints of the vocabularies of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Queen Anne. Even the top floor was contorted, seeming undecided as to whether it wanted to be a mansard or a regular, straight-sided storey.

  Signs of an identity crisis: Left: London, NW3

  The aesthetics of an English seaside bungalow applied to the dimensions of a skyscraper:

  Right: Sidney Kaye, Tower Block, Shepherd’s Bush, 1971

  2.

  A few years later, I moved west, and there began to have similarly strong feelings about a tower block (one of four) on Shepherd’s Bush Green, built in the early 1970s by the architect Sidney Kaye. The block was imposing for this part of the capital, twenty storeys high, and visible from as far away as Hampstead. Its height did not, however, prevent it from seeming resolutely squat. Its roof ended dumbly, in a flat plane, below which a series of heavy white bands accentuated the horizontal axis. The windows, meanwhile, made no concession either to their views or to their upward progression, but remained identically shaped and sized from the ground floor to the top. It was as though the aesthetics of a post-war seaside bungalow had been applied to the dimensions of a skyscraper, resulting in a building which was unsure whether it wished to be seen from Hampstead or preferred to nestle modestly amid the dark, low, brick buildings more common to the area. Irritated by its uncertainty, I wanted to demand that it either make itself properly unobtrusive or else make the most of its height and bulk – but, in any case, that it stop straddling the line between meekness and assertion, like an adolescent who insists on taking to the stage but, once there, can only stare mutely and sullenly at the audience.

  Not until several years later did I come to understand my dissatisfaction with the tower, thanks to an essay by Louis Sullivan with one of the more intriguing titles in the history of architectural criticism: ‘The Tall Office Artistically Considered’ (1896). Writing at the dawn of the age of the skyscraper, Sullivan advised his readers that many of the new tall buildings were in danger of stylistic incoherence. The problem was that even as their massing thrust upwards to a height of twenty or thirty storeys, their decorative motifs emphasised the horizontal axis, an orientation better suited to a two-storey Palladian villa. The combination caused them to seem artlessly conflicted about their aims, as if they were pulling at once upwards and sideways. Sullivan urged architects to let their skyscraper designs be guided by one coherent principle. ‘The chief characteristic of the tall building is that it is lofty,’ he proposed. ‘It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line.’ Within a few years, his suggestion would be consummately realised in the great skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, whose beauty seems the result of just such a decision to speak solely and in unison about height. From their tapered ground-floor entrances to their ruby-red lights blinking at the suburbs from the tips of their radio masts, these tall offices would be everything Sullivan wished: proud, soaring, exultant and inarguably coherent.

  ‘Every inch a proud and soaring thing’:

  Cass Gilbert, Woolworth Building, New York, 1913

  3.

  When buildings talk, it is never with a single voice. Buildings are choirs rather than soloists; they possess a multiple nature from which arise opportunities for beautiful consonance as well as dissension and discord.

  While certain buildings appear to have agreed on their aesthetic mission, persuading their disparate elements to pull together to make a logical contribution to the whole, others seem more conflicted about their intentions, their features heaving querulously in contrary directions. They may disagree about their size, with windows, roofs and doors clashing over questions of precedence. Or their forms may testify to unresolved squabbles about the nature of happiness.

  Thus, in the portico of a Viennese villa designed by Otto Wagner, a statue speaks to us of the East, the columns around it of Ancient Greece and the ironwork of rustic Austrian lace, which generates a sense of a chaos nowhere evident in Palladio’s Villa Contarini, where the archway reconciles the columns, the plaster helps to counterpoint the roughness of the stonework and the statue offsets the austerity of the whole.

  Otto Wagner, villa, Hüttelbergstrasse 26, Vienna, 1886

  Andrea Palladio, Villa Contarini, Padova, 1546

  We could say that nothing in architecture is ever ugly in itself; it is merely in the wrong place or of the wrong size, while beauty is the child of the coherent relationship between parts.

  4.

  Architectural incoherence is not limited to the designs of individual buildings. It can also, and no less grievously, reside in the relationship between a building and its context, geographical or chronological.

  One summer, keen to take a break from routine, I booked myself into the Hotel de l’Europe, a vast red-brick building done up in the Neo-Renaissance style, of a kind often observed in the more expensive districts of Amsterdam. Rooms weren’t cheap: a standard double cost ¥42,000 (breakfast was a further ¥2,300 for the simplest order of rice, miso soup and vegetables). But at least the hotel was optimally positioned. It was only a five-minute walk from the Huis Ten Bosch royal palace in The Hague and, in the opposite direction, a ten-minute walk from Utrecht’s twelfth-century Nijenrode Castle. There were cheese shops everywhere, teams of Friesian horses and five ancient windmills. Furthermore, a field of 300,000 tulips bordered the buildings, giving way only where the ground began its steep ascent into mountains covered in dense Japanese cedar.

  However, none of these details seemed able to shake me from an increasingly peculiar and heavy mood which had settled on me shortly after my arrival at the Hotel de l’Europe. My unhappiness must have had something to do with the fact that, certain appearances to the contrary, I was not in the Netherlands at all but rather in Japan, a forty-minute train ride outside Nagasaki, at a 152-acre theme park named Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village. This surreal playland had been designed to re-create, with astonishing fidelity, the look of pre-twentieth-century Holland, complete with streets and squares, a network of canals and The Hague’s royal palace. In building it, the Japanese, masters of handicraft, had been meticulous in their concern for authenticity: they had consulted original architectural plans and imported wood and bricks from the other side of the world. But such historical exactitude had succeeded only in rendering the place more eerie and unnerving.

  The discomfort generated by finding oneself in a corner of the Netherlands in rural Japan alerts us to a further requirement that we might have of buildings: that they should not only harmonise their parts but in addition cohere with their settings; that they should speak to us of the significant values and characteristics of their own locations and eras. For a building to reflect its cultural context may be as central to its mission as that it should respond to its meteorological one – a building which ignores it having the troubling quality of one whose windows fail to open in the tropics or to close in the mountains.

  Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village, Nagasaki, 1992

  Hotel de l’Europe, Hui
s Ten Bosch, 1992

  5.

  Just as it is perturbing when our buildings deny their settings, so it can be pleasurable to find evidence of the opposite tendency – when buildings are marked by distinctly local architectural traits, even of the minor kind that often strike our eyes on touching down in a new country.

  A few hours after having arrived in Japan, lying in bed in a Tokyo hotel vainly attempting to sleep, I noticed for the first time just how unusual were the light switches and plugs in my room. The excitement of having arrived in an unknown country coalesced around these fittings, which can be to a building what shoes are to a person: unexpectedly strong indicators of character. I discovered in them harbingers of the national particularities that had motivated my travels. They were promises of a distinctively local kind of happiness. My feelings stemmed not from a naive longing for folkloric exoticism, but from a wish to discover that the genuine differences that exist between lands might find adequate expression on an architectural plane. I wanted light switches, and by extension entire buildings, that could help to signal to me that I was here rather than there and alive now rather than then.