| |  | Author: Alain De Botton
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Category: Book
Buy Used: $12.95
Used (3) from $12.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Format: Import
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 280
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
ISBN: 0241142490
EAN: 9780241142493
ASIN: 0241142490
Publication Date: January 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS by Alain de Botton. Same 2006 trade paperback edition with matching ISBN as listed. LIKE NEW. No notable wear, flaws or defects. Pages are mint with no creases or markings. Perfect binding and smooth spine. Covers have no creases, bends, scuffs, marks or stains. Smoke-free. Not ex-library or remainder copy. ISBN 0241142490, Published by Hamish Hamilton (Great Britain), 2006, 280 pages. Ready for prompt and secure shipping with e-mail notification when mailed.
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| Customer Reviews:
 thought provoking February 17, 2008
de Botton always writes dense thought provoking reviews often on things we know about but don't ruminate about. So it was with his Proust book. Of course since Lehrer has told us that Proust was a neuroscientist Proust is now more widely mentioned, though probably not read. One would need to take to his bed.... The architecture of happiness in a like manner encourages one to think about how design works on us and throughout time has influenced us. It encourages us to ruminate about the things we make and see. I have given a copy to a young girl who wants to go into architecture as I believe it will widen her horizon. I highly encourage reading of this short tome and studying the pictures for any who can sit in a comfortable chair.
The author reflects on architecture January 13, 2008
Considering the significance of architecture, the author remarks that beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness and can also be accused of failing to improve the characters of those who live in them and proceeds by explaining why this is so. Karl Friedrich Schinkel for example stated that to turn something useful, practical, and functional into something beautiful is the architect's duty. Architecture should thus be the decoration of construction as distinguished from mere building. The architects of the Modernist movement, like all their predecessors, wanted their houses to speak and express emotions. Indeed buildings speak. They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.
Interestingly enough what we search for in a work of architecture is not so far from what we search for in a friend because the objects we describe as beautiful art versions of the people we love. The buildings we admire are those which extol values we think are worthwhile: through their materials, shapes and colours they express qualities such as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. As Stendhal wrote, "Beauty is the promise of happiness."
We are vulnerable to what the spaces we inhabit are saying. In a drab hotel room our optimism and sense of purpose are liable to drain away. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need a home in the physical sense: to compensate for vulnerability, we need a refuge.
We may feel joy at the architectural perfection we see before us and at the same time melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. And sadness is conducive to receptivity: our downhearted moments provide architecture and art with their best openings because it is at such times that our hunger for their ideal qualities is at its height.
Such thoughts and many other are contained in this study of architecture and make for a valuable and interesting read.
Beautiful book January 12, 2008
I learnt a lot from this book, usually Alain de Botton's books are not very easy to read but this one is so simple and pictures help a lot. I have seen so many Roman and ancient Greek buildings, I only appreciate how good they look. Now I know more about the styles and relationship with the human pyschology. Really great book for architecture-illiterate.
 An interesting essay on form... January 4, 2008
I suppose all art attempts to bring essence into form and architecture is no exception. De Botton digs right in and starts analyzing the ingredients that bring space to life, and poetically decodes the language of form and attempts to explain how it resonates and entices the observer and for what reasons different people are drawn to different architectural forms based on their own lacking qualities. It sounds pretty heady and it is. The author opens the book with the most poignant description of the unfailingly loyal character of a house which brought shivers to me as I recounted my love affairs with all the houses I grew up in. His writing style instantly drew me in- with his clever pepperings of metaphor and other literary communicative techniques. By the end of the book, however, as the subject material became a little more obtuse, his writing style seemed to become more pompous and strayed from effective communication into the realm of word-smithing bravado. You know, kind of like those inexperienced jazz musicians who run off into incomprehensibly difficult solos - more intent on displaying superlative technique and ego fattening talent than eliciting a gentle stirring of the soul. It became somewhat annoying, but I am going to re-read some of it and see if a 2nd reading bears this out. In any case, the mental journey he provides for any architecture freak like me is truly thrilling albeit somewhat laborious! -
EXQUISITE RUMINATIONS! October 25, 2007
The Architecture of Happiness is about beauty, in our physical surroundings and in our lives. The elegant style of writing, spare, essential and learned, takes us on a sublime tour of art as architecture and architecture as art, gently prodding us to take stock of all manner of aesthetic detail in our man-made environments, from follies and foibles, to superb examples of man's strivings to create lasting, transformng public and private spaces, as well as to ponder the historical/artistic links, which lead us from "then," to now, and beyond. This lovely book reminds us, advises us, to take a moment and "see" what is right before our eyes.
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