The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain De Botton

  Taking a midnight walk around my hotel, I saw many more signs of an incontrovertibly Japanese identity. In a restaurant, I marvelled at the complex fascia of an electronically controlled toilet. Near a subway station, a vending machine offered bottled water and, as if this were an ordinary snack, packets of dried lobster claws. There were buildings fitted with rows of multicoloured fire-hydrants, and in a supermarket, tubs of seaweed floating in clear jelly. In an arcade, among driving and skiing games, a slot machine challenged me to make arrangements for dinner by catching a weary and confused crab using a set of motor-operated pincers.

  I returned to bed and slipped into jet-lagged dreams illuminated by fractured images of neon signs, moss gardens, bullet trains, kimonos and crustaceans.

  Marine Catcher, Shinjuku, Tokyo

  6.

  Unfortunately, the next morning found Tokyo less disposed to indulge my desire for local colour. A practical mood had settled over the city, as twenty million people made their way to work. The streets of the business districts were jammed with cars and dark-suited commuters: I might have been anywhere. With their advertising hoardings unlit, the buildings appeared wilfully ordinary. Clusters of bland skyscrapers dominated the skyline, their pedestrian forms mutely mocking the twelve hours of cloud and snow over which I had flown to reach them. For architectural interest, I might as well have been in Frankfurt or Detroit.

  Even in more residential quarters, the architecture was almost entirely lacking in ethnic roots or local flavour. Vast new developments were everywhere, each house assembled of generic materials and forms which would have been unsurprising in almost any part of the developed world. There seemed precious little that was Japanese in Japanese architecture.

  The early Modernists would not have complained of this, for they had looked forward to a rational era when local styles would vanish entirely from their profession, as they had done from industrial and product design. There was, after all, no such thing as a local-looking modern bridge or umbrella. Adolf Loos had compared the absurdity of asking for a specifically Austrian kind of architecture to asking for a particularly Austrian-looking bicycle or telephone. If the truth was universal, why demand a local variety of architecture? Tokyo seemed to epitomise the Modernist dream of a place where one might never know from the buildings alone what country one had strayed into.

  7.

  There were, nevertheless, a few places to turn for aesthetic relief. A friend recommended that I spend a night in an old-fashioned ryokan, or inn, faithful in most details to the architecture and design of the Edo period (1615–1868).

  skyscrapers, Shiodome, Tokyo

  Kamagaya City, Chiba Prefecture, 1993

  The ryokan was an hour’s train ride outside Tokyo, nestled among hills and shrouded in mist. Surrounded by pine trees and a moss garden, it was housed in a long wooden pavilion capped with a traditional kawarane yane (tiled roof). A receptionist wearing a kimono and tabi (split-toed socks) guided me to my room, which was lined with fusuma (sliding doors) and shoji (paper) screens decorated with calligraphy. The view was onto a river and a forested slope. Before sunset, I enjoyed an onsen (outdoor bath) in an adjacent natural spring, then drank an iced barley tea in an alcove in the garden. Dinner came in a set of immaculate boxes. I savoured the yose-nabe (Japanese chowder) and kounomono (pickles) – then fell asleep to the sound of water pursuing a path down the mountain side over smooth flat ancient volcanic stones.

  But in the morning, my sadness returned at the prospect of having to go back to Tokyo. Disconsolate, I ate a bowl of dried seaweed and ruminated on the schism between the aesthetic perfection of historic Japan and the graceless tedium of its modern incarnation.

  On the train journey back, speeding again through a ruined landscape of bland housing estates and apartment blocks, I even began to take exception with the world of the ryokan, annoyed at its inability to translate and adapt itself to modern realities, its failure to work out some way to carry over its old charms into a new idiom.

  My frustration with the ryokan was similar to a feeling I had once experienced in England, on a visit to the traditionally styled village of Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester. Despite its qualified success in capturing the spirit of country life in the eighteenth century, the place was ultimately maddening for its disconnection from the psychological and practical demands of contemporary society. It resembled an ancient relative to whom one was very close as a child, but who lacked any understanding of the adult whom circumstances had in the interim formed, whether for better or worse.

  An architecture that cannot accept who we have grown into:

  Poundbury, Dorchester, 1994

  8.

  During my stay, I did see occasional signs that the Japanese were inclined to connect their new buildings with their country’s past. But for the most part such attempts seemed half-hearted, overly sentimental or even downright impatient.

  In a crowded section of Kyoto, atop an innocuous office block, amidst air conditioners and aerials, a tiny traditional shrine looked as if it had been dropped from the air to answer to certain inner needs left unmet by modern architecture. Past and present made no move here towards integration; instead they were happy to coexist, while seeming positive that there was nothing they might do to imbibe each other’s strengths.

  Elsewhere, apartments had miniature pruned cedar trees outside their entrances and moss gardens in tubs hanging off balconies. I saw calligraphy on shower curtains and shoji screens fixed to kitchen doors. I ate in restaurants offering ‘authentic ancient rooms’ to tourists unbothered by plastic re-creations. The roof of an insurance company or a post office would occasionally curve upwards gently at the edges in a nod to the Tokugawa style.

  Shijo-dori, Kyoto

  But the failure of such attempts to rise beyond the kitsch illustrates the difficulties of finding a modern form to embody traditional features of a culture. Paper screens will not necessarily make a house Japanese in spirit; nor will concrete and patinated copper guarantee that it won’t be. The true heirs of Tokugawa houses frequently bear no simple outward resemblance to their masters: the resemblance is more subtle, relying on proportions and relations – just as the finest translators of Lady Murasaki are often those who take extensive liberties with individual words, knowing that methodical transposition is rarely the way to stay true to original intentions.

  9.

  I’d first noted some of the difficulties of translation in a new development in one of London’s most famous Classical squares. The architects responsible for the office block which dominates the north-western side of Manchester Square correctly sensed that the handling of the windows was key to harmonising with the existing façades, and so gave their building white rectangular window frames.

  Unfortunately, these architects failed to register that Classical frames are noteworthy not because of their colour or shape but because of their slenderness and its associated elegance – qualities which the architects grievously sacrificed by resorting to peculiar and massive frames formed of steel I-beams. Despite their sincere wish to respect the past, the architects had spectacularly bypassed the real reasons why the past might have been worth respecting in the first place. They would have been better off had they taken their guidance from another set of windows entirely, those on the façade of the Queen’s Building in Cambridge. Though these frames aren’t white but a silvery black, and horizontal rather than vertical, they appear more richly endowed with the true qualities of Classical architecture than any of their counterparts on the apparently more respectful London block. A true homage seldom looks exactly like one.

  GMW Architects, north-west side, Manchester Square, London, 2001

  south-east side, Manchester Square, late eighteenth century

  Classicism in modern guise:

  Michael Hopkins, Queen’s Building, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1995

  10.

  What, I wondered, might a successful example of modern Japanese architecture
look like – one which avoided kitsch and was properly coherent with its place and time?

  The national angle to this question has at times, of other countries, been answered in quasi-mystical ways, as if to suggest that borderlines somehow demarcate objective, knowable personalities which the buildings within ought to take a reading of and then passively reflect. In ‘On German Architecture’ (1772), J. W. Goethe declared that Germany was in its ‘essence’ a Christian land, and that the only appropriate style for new German buildings was therefore Gothic. On seeing a cathedral, wrote Goethe, ‘a German ought to thank God for being able to proclaim aloud, “That is German architecture, our architecture.’ ”

  But, in reality, no country ever either owns a style or is locked into it through precedent. National architectural identity, like national identity overall, is created rather than dictated by the soil. History, culture, weather and geography will offer up a great range of possible themes for architects to respond to (not so broad a range as the builders of Huis Ten Bosch may have hoped, perhaps, nor as restricted a one as Goethe proposed). If we end up thinking of certain styles as the indissoluble products of specific places, it is only a tribute to the skill with which architects have coaxed us into seeing the environment through their eyes, and so made their achievements appear inevitable.

  At issue, therefore, is not so much what a national style is as what it could be made to be. It is the privilege of architects to be selective about which aspects of the local spirit they want to throw into relief. While most societies experience varying degrees of violence and chaos, for example, we are unlikely to want our buildings to reflect those features of the Zeitgeist. Then again, we would feel uncomfortable if architects abandoned reality altogether to produce designs which alluded to none of our prevailing morals or goals. We no more favour delusion in our built environment than we do in individuals.

  An adequately contextual building might thus be defined as one which embodies some of the most desirable values and the highest ambitions of its era and place – a building which serves as a repository for a workable ideal.

  The attributes of such a building might be compared with those of a prototypically admirable human being in an identical context. Oscar Niemeyer once expressed the wish that his architectural works should share the outlook and attitudes of the most enlightened Brazilians of the era: they should appreciate the burdens and privileges of their country’s colonial past without being overwhelmed by them, should be sympathetic to modern technology, yet should retain a healthy playfulness and sensuality. And, above all, he noted, they should indicate their affinity for Brazil’s ‘white beaches, its huge mountains – and its beautiful tanned women’.

  A similar portrait, this time of an ideal Sri Lankan, animates Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament Island on the outskirts of Colombo. Here the buildings are a synthesis of local and international, historical and modern, concerns, the roofs evoking the double pitch of the monasteries and royal palaces of precolonial Kandy, while the interiors successfully combine Sinhalese, Buddhist and Western features. Not only do Bawa’s buildings provide a home for the nation’s legislative government, they also grant us a seductive image of what a modern Sri Lankan citizen might be like.

  A Brazilian ideal, sympathetic to the country’s ‘white beaches, its huge mountains – and its beautiful tanned women’:

  Oscar Niemeyer, Kubitschek House, Pampulha, Minas Gerais, 1943

  11.

  There turned out to be a number of domestic buildings, in Tokyo and elsewhere, in subtle sympathy with the inner aspirations of the great traditional works of Japanese architecture.

  The virtues of the nation’s architecture – simplicity, efficiency, modesty, elegance – could be re-encountered in houses which to the casual eye seemed to have no contact with the past. Only on closer inspection did one realise that a sensibility almost identical to that of ancient houses had been embedded in contemporary materials.

  ‘A house like me’:

  Geoffrey Bawa, Parliament Island, Colombo, 1982

  On a back street in Tokyo, one such house showed a blank concrete face to the world. A front door made of steel gave onto a narrow passage which in turn opened out into a whitewashed two-storey atrium, illuminated by diffused light that shone through frosted windows in the roof. Although this was a domestic space, it had a quality of emptiness and purity more typically associated with religious buildings. In inviting a retreat from the world, the house seemed to be honouring the Zen Buddhist belief in a need to create a refuge from daily life, not in order to forgo reality but so as more closely to approach certain of its central inner truths.

  There were no windows with views in this house, perhaps the better to help its inhabitants see what truly needed to be observed. The light which washed down from above had the same gentle, indirect value as the glow emanating from a shoji screen. The architect had realised, as many of his lesser colleagues had not, that this luminous effect was in no way dependent on the use of paper and wood and could be achieved just as well, and in a more enduring manner, through panes of sandblasted glass. Thanks to these, the house had an otherworldly, abstracted air: to be inside it was to feel close to a realm of shadows and mist. When it rained, the pitter-patter of water sounded overhead, but the glass revealed nothing of the clouds from which the raindrops fell. This was an architecture designed to train the mind away from phenomena and towards essences.

  Tezuka Architects, Jyubako House, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, 2004

  In a second house, the two wings of the property were connected by an open atrium, so that even in winter it was necessary to walk outside in order to pass between the living and sleeping areas. While it did confirm a frequent Western complaint regarding the mysteriously glacial aspect of Japanese houses, this lack of insulation was evidently far from accidental, being tied instead to a desire, Zen in origin, to remind the occupants of their connection to, and dependence on, nature, and of the unity of all living things. A walk to the kitchen in midwinter delivered a brief and tart lesson about man’s place in a larger and more powerful universe. Yet this wider natural world was evoked in the most abstract of ways, not through a view onto a lawn planted with mature specimens, but through the very temperature of the air, a thin carpeting of moss and the careful placement of three volcanic rocks.

  These great modern houses I encountered were often simple in their furnishings, echoing the long-standing pull of Japanese aesthetics towards emptiness and austerity. The medieval courtier Kamo no Chomei, in his Tale of the Ten Foot Square Hut (1212), had described the liberation that awaits those who strip themselves of superfluous possessions and attend to the murmurings of their own souls. Simple wooden huts had as a result acquired a privileged place in the Japanese imagination. The great lords of the Momoyama (1573–1614) and Edo periods had every few months left their mansions and castles behind to spend time in huts, in obedience to the Zen insight that spiritual enlightenment can come only through a life without embellishment.

  Others of these modern dwellings were just as faithful to the traditional Japanese fondness for material imperfection. The heavy outside walls of one weekend house a few hours’ drive out of Tokyo were constructed from panels of rough and rusting iron, stained by moss and water. No attempt had been made to clean up these stains or to protect the material with a network of drainpipes; indeed, there seemed a deliberate joy to be had here in watching nature attack the works of man. The architects of the older tea houses had for much the same reason left their wood unvarnished, treasuring the ensuing patina and marks of age, which they saw as wise symbols of the passing of all things. In his In Praise of Shadows (1933) Junichiro Tanizaki attempted to explain why he and his countrymen found flaws so beautiful: ‘We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or sake cups, we prefer not to
polish it. On the contrary we begin to enjoy it only when the lustre has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky, patina.’ Buddhist writings associated an intolerance for the imperfections of wood and stone with the failure to accept the inherently frustrating nature of existence. Unlike our own disappointments and decline, however, those represented in architectural materials were of an eminently graceful kind, for wood and stone, and now concrete and wood, age slowly and with dignity. They do not shatter hysterically like glass, or tear like paper, but discolour with a melancholy, noble air. The rusted and stained walls of the weekend house made for a most artful receptacle in which to entertain thoughts of decline and mortality.

  12.

  Successful modern reinterpretations of traditional architectural styles move us not only at an aesthetic level. They show us how we, too, might straddle eras and countries, holding on to our own precedents and regions while drawing on the modern and the universal.

  The great modern houses are happy to admit to their youth and honestly to benefit from the advances of contemporary materials, but they also know how to respond to the appealing themes of their ancestry and can thereby heal the traumas generated by an era of brutally rapid change. Without patronising the history they profess to love, they show us how we, too, might carry the valuable parts of the past and the local into a restless global future.

  13.

  A few months after returning from Japan, I found myself on a road trip through Holland, and realised that the Dutch were on occasion as capable of pastiche as the Japanese. Here also were many houses that gave no clue as to how a fulfilled life might be lived in the present and therefore, while a great deal more coherent with their location than their brethren near Nagasaki, were no less incoherent with their era.