In his 2006 book “The Architecture of Happiness,” Alain de Botton lays out his theory of art as applied to architecture. Architecture as art has been the most permanently accessible to all in the sense that it is almost impossible to privatize the view to a building in the same way that other works of art can be taken out of the public realm. Additionally, architecture can be uniquely personal as when a mere house becomes one’s home. Architecture is therefore a form of art that is more accessible to more people in a more personal and permanent way than any other form of art. Good architecture provides both physical and psychological sanctuary while also being a guardian of identity and offering us the opportunity to flourish. Bad architecture fails on all these points. “Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places – and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be….Taking architecture seriously therefore makes singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we ae inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread.”
In the modern world the notion of beauty has moved from the public sense to the private – where anything can be beautiful to the right person. This relativism, while liberating from a doctrinal orthodoxy that we in the west suffered from up until recently, is most certainly not the case. There are biological constraints to what can be beautiful. Architecture has not pursued this knowledge until very recently. Instead it sought to eliminate the discussions of beauty and replace them with discussions of form fitting the function thereby moving “towards an uncontentious pursuit of technological truth” believing that this would become a convergence problem rather than the divergent problem that the “question what is beauty?” generates. “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.” This answer became unsatisfactory to most. Yes we want buildings to function well and do their job but also “we want them to speak to us – to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of….Buildings are not simply visual objects without any connection to concepts which we can analyse and then evaluate. Buildings speak – and on topics which can readily be discerned. They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.” Any object can speak to us of any value good or bad. We may need to simply stop for a minute and decern its message. “In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak to us of visions of happiness.”
The notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is only partly true. Not everything can be beautiful not even to any beholder. Beauty can only exist in things that can speak to us of visions of happiness. “To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.” Conversely offensive buildings are material manifestations that conflict with our values. This is why people can often invest so much time describing why a building does not fit. The advantage of describing beauty in terms of values promoted means that anyone can take part as a measure of the values of the community. “The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by – rather than merely of how we want things to look.”
It is now important to explain how “arrangements of stone, steel, concrete, wood and glass seem able to express themselves”. Consider first the lessons from abstract artists: artworks without discernible physical representation can nonetheless convey thematic meaning. “[W]e should allow abstract sculptures to demonstrate to us the range of thoughts and emotions that every kind of non-representational object can convey….these sculptures afford us an opportunity to focus with unaccustomed intensity on the communicative powers of all objects, including our buildings and their furnishings.” And with their communication to us a revealing of our values. Consider second the lessons from biology: “If we can judge the personality of objects from apparently minuscule features…it is because we first acquired this skill in relation to humans, whose characters we can impute from microscopic aspects of their skin tissue and muscle. An eye will move from implying apology to suggesting self-righteousness by way of a movement that is in a mechanical sense implausibly small.” We have the capacity to judge in people’s minute changes of expression profoundly different meanings likewise we can get that from inanimate objects designed by humans as well. “What we search for in a work of architecture is not in the end so far from what we search for in a friend. The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love.” A third way is by association with earlier life experiences. Often a happy, sad, or traumatic childhood can affect how we feel around objects and buildings that resemble those around us in our childhood. Therefore, “[t]o call a work of architecture or design beautiful is to recognise it as a rendition of values critical to our flourishing, a transubstantiation of our individual ideals in a material medium.”
A good home incorporates two uniquely personal themes: our memories and our ideals. A psychological fact about humanity is that we have many different selves. In the sense that we are different people in different locations and situations, consider your behaviour, mood, attitude, and expectations at a McDonalds restaurant compared to in a medieval cathedral. Which one (if any) is your true self? In the first case, “We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them.” We need our home to remind us and ground us in the values that we identify with. “We need a home in the psychological sense as much as wee need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances.” In this psychological sense you may be housed, and have many homes or none at all. “[A]t its most genuine, the architectural impulse seems connected to a longing for communication and commemoration, a longing to declare ourselves to the world through a register other than words, through the language of objects, colours and bricks: an ambition to let others know who we are – and, in the process, to remind ourselves.” In the second case, in addition to reminding us of who we are, we need to aspire to an ideal, towards our ideal’s perfection. We want a vision of what we want to become. We seek beauty in art both for what we are and what we want. This applies even on a general society level. Societies often have a collective attraction to an art style that embodies what they lack but wish to have more of. This is one reason why societies or periods change their allegiance to a particular art style. The same can happen to individuals. de Botton give the example of the western world’s fascination with nature in the 18th century right at the time we were losing our connection to nature during the industrial revolution. Clashes of taste are symptoms of difference in what we lack and value.
While theories of beauty have not faired well, the author believes that we can approach a theory of beauty in architecture (though he is quite sure that his is only an approach that does not meet the criteria for a full theory of beauty) that can capture enough aspects to help us judge architecture better. The first virtue is Order. Knowing that we will die and that nature will eventually swallow up anything we do, order provides a psychological reassurance that that day is still far away. Order represents a (temporary) triumph over nature that is psychologically pleasing despite its ephemeralness. It is not just any order. It is order with complexity, that tames the complex and makes it easier to comprehend. Order too simple is boring. Order that is too complex is confusing. Beauty makes order out of complexity in an understandable flavour. A second virtue is balance. “Beauty is the likely outcome whenever architects skillfully mediate between any number of oppositions, including the old and the new, the natural and the man-made, the luxurious and the modest, and the masculine and the feminine.” Like all people our buildings are made up of opposites and psychologically we are successful when we mediate our opposites skillfully. So see it done in a building is a kin to balancing correctly our own contradictions. A third virtue is elegance. Elegance starts with the observation that a great feat has been achieved. The feat can be achieved elegantly if it is made to look effortlessly. “[W]e 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.” A fourth virtue is coherence. For beauty in architecture, buildings “should not only harmonise their parts but in addition cohere with their setting; that they should speak to us of the significant values and characteristics of their own locations and eras….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 of a workable ideal.” A fifth virtue is self-knowledge. When a building just is wrong but we can’t say why, it is a failure of self-knowledge. “The place se call beautiful are…the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehension of joy into logical plans – a combination that enables them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we had.”