Monday,
January 15, 2007
Architecture: Something Everyone Can Argue
About :)
The
ANNOTICO Report
First,
we can not discuss Architecture without remembering the Importance of
Italy to Western Architecture. Starting with the styles of
Roman-Greco, Romanesque, Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo.
Even
Georgian Colonial imitated those in
Likewise,
the Neo Classical/Federalist/Idealist reflected a renewed interest in ideas of
Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.
Italianate
(was Americanized versions of English fanciful recreations of
Italian Renaissance villas) became the most popular housing style in Victorian
America. Italianate is also known as the Tuscan, the
So
with that intro we can now properly discuss Architecture in it's
broader sense. :)
The
reviewer calls ”The Architecture of
Happiness," one of the worst titles ever, AND is the best introduction to architecture he
had ever seen.
The
author makes an obvious, yet not so obvious statement:
"Buildings speak," he writes.
"They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or
threat, sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past."
Buildings speak of risk-taking or cowardice, of individualism or conformity, of
nature or artifice, of wealth or poverty, of handicraft or machinery, of the
local or the global, of representation or abstraction, of permanence or change.
And so on. We admire the buildings that speak our values -- or, at least, the
values we wish other people to perceive in us.
The book is
filled with well-reproduced photos that always illustrate the author's
argument. Some, like Villa
Rotunda by the Italian
Renaissance architect Palladio, are examples of how one age
often imitates the work of a respected earlier one, in this case Roman antiquity. Others,
like the Doge's Palace in
Venice, not far from the Rotunda, are praised for striking a
balance between too much order and too much chaos.
Why we like the
buildings we like
A thoughtful and
provocative book explores the origins of differing tastes in architectural
styles
By
Robert Campbell,
Globe
Correspondent
January
14, 2007
Review
of: "The Architecture of Happiness," by Alain de Botton
It's rare that
you can recommend to the general reader a book about architecture. Too many
books on that topic are clotted attempts at philosophy that read as if they'd
been mistranslated from the German. Or they're sales jobs, plugging some single
architect or point of view. Or they're stuffed with too many facts and dates.
Or they're overpriced picture books.
It's a joy,
therefore, to applaud a new title that's none of those things. Well, almost new
-- I'm late getting to it. "The Architecture of Happiness," by Alain
de Botton, a Swiss writer who lives in
De Botton isn't an architect himself, nor
a historian of art and architecture. He seems, in fact, to write about
everything. I hated his last book, which was inanely titled "How Proust
Can Change Your Life." I don't much like the title of this one, either,
because it makes architecture sound like some New Age blissfulness drug. One
reviewer called the book "cultural Valium." Don't believe it.
What de Botton tries to do is figure out why there have been, and
still are, so many different styles of architecture. Why do some of us like one
thing -- let's say, glass-and-steel modernism -- while others despise it? Why
do so many Americans in 2007 wish to live in copies of the red-brick-white-trim
Georgian architecture of the 18th century?
The author
understands that sometimes we seek what is familiar, orderly, and predictable
in the world we build, as in that Georgian house. But he also understands that
sometimes we don't. Sometimes we seek the new, the shocking, the
slightly crazy.
Both reactions
are fine with de Botton. He's not interested in
pushing one or the other. Instead he wants to figure out where our different
tastes come from.
His answer is
that every building embodies a message. It billboards a certain set of values.
"Buildings speak," he writes.
"They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or
threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for
the past." He could have added more such words. Buildings speak of
risk-taking or cowardice, of individualism or conformity, of nature or
artifice, of wealth or poverty, of handicraft or machinery, of the local or the
global, of representation or abstraction, of permanence or change. And so on.
We admire the buildings that speak our values -- or, at least, the values we
wish other people to perceive in us.
De Botton is not the first person to notice that works of
architecture talk about cultural values. But for him this is a discovery and,
as discoverers do, he writes about it with an engaging freshness.
The author makes
one other major point. It's an obvious one, but it's often overlooked. It's
simply that we seek, in our architecture, an antidote to the world we otherwise
inhabit. That's why CEO s in
De Botton likes both order and disorder. More than that, he
wisely argues that you can't have one without the other. "Just as we
cannot appreciate the attractions of safety without a background impression of
danger, so, too, it is only in a building which flirts with confusion that we
can apprehend the scale of our debt to our ordering capacities."
The book is
filled with well-reproduced photos that always illustrate the author's
argument. Some, like Villa Rotunda by the Italian Renaissance architect
Palladio, are examples of how one age often imitates the work of a respected
earlier one, in this case Roman antiquity. Others, like the Doge's Palace in
The biggest
problem in architecture today is that nobody can agree on what's good or
beautiful and what's bad or ugly. It's a situation in which creative architects
are often viewed with distrust by the public, and vice versa. De Botton's is a book that both sides can read with profit. It
can bring them a little closer to consensus.
De Botton is an outsider in relation to architecture.
Outsiders often see a subject more clearly than people who are up to their
necks in it. The British author V.S. Pritchett said that best, in his
autobiography: "For myself that is what a writer
is -- a man living on the other side of a frontier."
I can't recommend
this book too highly. It gets just about everything right. I do suggest that
the reader skim Chapter One . Chapter Two, on the
other hand, which is titled "In What Style Shall We Build?," is a remarkable potted history of Western
architecture.
Robert
Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.
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