The Beauty of Alain de Botton
Wunderkind of pop-philosophy and psychology, Alain de Botton, talked to AMY BROWN about aesthetics, education, and his latest book, The Architecture of Happiness.
ON A WET Tuesday afternoon, Alain de Botton sits in Nikau café, laughing conspicuously at a story his publicist is telling. A baby begins crying, the young, female barista tries not to stare too openly, and I stand outside in the rain, wondering how to make a suitable entrance. Pushing the door that says PULL then slipping a little on the wet tiles, I grin dumbly and approach the table. From that point on all I can remember is a blur of bald head, lovely accent, friendly eyes and the smell of coffee. Without the dictophone, I wouldn’t be sure now if the interview had actually happened.
Why all so star-strucked? As a teenager, I’d read de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy and How Proust Can Change Your Life, avidly. They sounded hard. I liked that. What I liked even more was that I could understand the writing. There was something about de Botton’s chatty style, generous use of illustrations and clarity of prose that made everything he wrote about seem interesting. He’d brought non-fiction to life for me. When he began presenting documentaries on TV my interest in him increased. I kept my ear to the ground, and hunted down each of his books as they were released.
Sitting opposite the man himself, who’s written such approachable guides to subjects that are usually only discussed in difficult, scholarly tomes, I ask if he sees himself as an academic.
‘No, no I don’t. I deal with a lot of the same material that academics deal with, but I’m not one.’
‘You taught at London University though?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘In philosophy?’
‘Yes.’
If his pursuit isn’t academic, then I wonder what he is trying to do through his books.
‘I don’t know, what am I trying to do?’ He thinks about it. ‘I’m trying to find words to define particular kinds of experiences related to different subjects, be they architecture, love, travel, etcetera. I’m trying to find a style with which to express ideas that is personal, intellectual, digressive.’
He stresses each word carefully. That’s part of the beauty of de Botton, in his writing, and in person, his top priority seems to be clarity of expression. Many philosophers seem to shy away from being too straight-forward; it’s harder to argue with someone who isn’t lucid. The word de Botton prefers to use for his accessible is the word, “essay”.
‘I’m a great fan of some of the essays of Virginia Woolf, which have all the qualities to which my own writing aspires, if it doesn’t always reach it.’
He freely admits that he imitated his style from the likes of Woolf and Montaigne.
‘People are always borrowing from one another,’ he says.
‘So, would you like to be imitated?’
‘I, well, you know, mostly when I’m dead. But essayistic, poetic non-fiction writing – surely there’s a space for that.’
I agree warmly. Although he’s just got off a plane, he seems focussed and energetic – hard to disagree with. I marvel once again that he’s had eight books published and is only in his mid-30s. And, he’s been on TV.
I ask how he’s found adapting his books to television.
‘It’s very different; I don’t feel that I’m adapting the books so much as taking certain ideas from the books and happeneing to make a TV series out of them. I’m primarily a writer and television, for me, is a way of making friends, earning more money and spending time away from my study. I don’t primarily see it as a sort of artistic mission, but it’s got a lot of other good things. And I think, especially when you’re making a film about architecture, you can show things which you simply can’t show through a book.’
THE TITLE of his latest book, The Architecture of Happiness, implies that it will be about what makes us happy – the architecture reference seems nothing more than a metaphor. It is in fact a nice little pun. The crux of the book suggests that our surroundings, which are increasingly man-made, affect our state of mind. If we live in an ugly part of town, we have yet another reason to be unhappy. If we live in a beautiful house, we can always consol ourselves with this fact. Architecture, he suggests, has the power to change our mood, to tell us things about our friends, and to reveal secret aspirations and weaknesses. Using a sort of architectural palmistry, de Botton teaches his readers to hear what buildings are saying about us behind our backs.
He also tackles one of the big aesthetic questions – what is beauty? “Beauty is the promise of happiness,” de Botton writes, quoting Stendhal. It’s a seemingly simple claim that, when examined more closely, doesn’t actually answer the question. What is the promise of happiness? Beauty. Well, then, what is beauty? The promise of happiness. The accepted view is that beauty is indefinable, but de Botton believes we can do a lot better than that. In The Architecture of Happiness, he attempts to define this slippery noun.
I want to know whether this aesthetic question is the focus of the book, or whether it was merely a side-effect of writing about architecture.
‘I think it was about aesthetics, and then, as aesthetics relates to archtiecture, the two came together. I didn’t want to write about aesthetics in relation to art or sculpture, but at the same time I didn’t want to write about architecture in any other way than from an aesthetic perspective.’
‘Why not write about art or sculpture?’
‘I would like to write a book about architecture one day, but I don’t feel ready to write about it now. I think architecture is much simpler than art, a lot less going on, actually. I wanted to approach the subject [of aesthetics] gradually. I’ll get there one day.’
I chuckle embarrassingly and even mutter something patronising like, ‘I’m sure you will.’ Aghast at myself, I launch into one of the questions I’ve been most keen to ask.
‘You write that we “seek to inwardly resemble places that touch us through their beauty.” Which buildings that you researched particularly touched you?’
‘Gosh. And which buildings might I inwardly resemble? Let me give you an example.’
He reaches across the table for the review copy of his book. I’ve marked the page I suspect he’ll choose, but he flicks right past it.
‘I’d like to be this one, for example,’ he says, showing me a stone villa, designed by Herzog and de Meuron. I ask why he’s chosen that one.
‘Well, I like the marriage of the old and the new. I like the regularity of it mixed with the diversity of it.’ He continues flicking through his book, searching for something better to resemble.
‘And uh, I wouldn’t mind being this one as well.’ He’s turned to Louis I. Kahn’s Yale Centre for British Art. ‘That mixture of the elegant and the rough, the tough and the elegant.’
He certainly appears elegant. I’m not sure about rough, or tough. Fortunately I manage to refrain from saying so.
A CHAPTER in The Architecture of Happiness explores the possibility that our own homes are a “self portrait in stone”, in that our choice of curtains, our preference for minimalism over ornamentation or vice versa, can say a lot about us. I ask de Botton if his house is a “self portrait in stone.”
‘Not really, because my own house is just a compromise between all sorts of things. Like many people, the place you live doesn’t immediately resemble or reflect everything you like. So, not exactly. Ideally I’d like to flatten it and start again and totally express myself.’ Presumably this would result in an ordered, elegant, balanced house. These are the main sub-categories, which de Botton uses to help him define beauty in chapter five of his book.
His certainty that beauty has immutable features makes me a little suspicious. Will every person agree that ‘a tension between order and complexity, a kind of balance between contrary forces is often a feature of beautiful buildings’? I ask if he believes there’s such a thing as good taste.
‘Um, yes. I mean, it’s linked to beauty and ugliness as well. It’s like saying, do you think there’s such a thing as beauty? And yes, I think there is. I think it’s very difficult to say that someone might have bad taste; it’s a very tricky thing to do, because that’s immediately associated with snobbery or elitism or whatever. But I think it’s as acceptable to view somebody with bad taste as it is acceptable to view somebody with bad politics or bad mothering. These are uncomfortable things but they do exist.’
‘So if you thought a building was really beautiful, but someone else didn’t see its beauty at all, would they be wrong?’
‘I think there are all sorts of reasons [for disagreement]; the way in which we look at buildings is in part through associations. I might think a building’s very beautiful, but if someone were molested at the foot of it, that [association] would have a huge impact on how they saw that building. Also, I think, sometimes people do need to be guided towards what’s interesting in a building, like they might need to be guided towards what’s interesting in a book. The whole basis of teaching literature or teaching architecture is based on the fact that it’s not necessarily immediately obvious. And I do believe in the process of education, broadly defined. I do think it’s valuable to be educated in the arts.’
In another interview de Botton had suggested he was unimpressed by his, traditionally very good, education at Oxford. I ask him how he’d found university.
‘Well, it was wanting aesthetically, I think. No one ever taught me about architecture.’ He pauses. ‘It was more what I wasn’t taught.’
I sense that I’m not going to get anymore out of him on this subject, so I turn to New Zealand education, more specifically, what he advice he could give to architecture students.
‘I don’t know. Partly to be very ambitious. There are a lot of depressing things about architect’s lives. I mean, they might just end up doing a few schools and then at the end of their life be invited to make a bid for the municipal fire station, full stop. And they might find that life very depressing – you know, a lot of architects start out with great dreams to be the next le Corbusier or whatever. So, I guess it’s important to always be ambitious. Also, I urge them to understand money and to become property developers in their own right rather than letting property developers squeeze them out. Architects should build, and learn about business so that they can seize the instruments of construction.’
I asked this question mostly due to the last sentence in The Archtiecture of Happiness. It makes a plea for responsible building. “We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and the most intelligent kinds of happiness.” I ask him at whom that plea was aimed.
‘Anyone who was about to bulldoze a field. It could be an architect, a property developer, it could be lots of people. Yeah, it’s a serious business; if you make a mark on the earth it lasts hundreds of years, so you have to be sure what you’re doing. It’s a great imposition, architecture.’
I ask if the idea for this part of the book came about due to our growing population and the increasing urban drift that’s swallowing our countryside.
‘I think we all know that we’ll be living in a time when more will be built rather than less, and there’s terrific anxiety about how much more, and there’s often a feeling that what’s going to come will be ugly. And it probably will be – it’s best not to think about it. But it’s important to realise that it doesn’t have to be ugly. It’s only because we’re stupid as a society, a collective.’
Speaking of stupidity and societies, I ask him about the chapter in his book which details le Corbusier’s original plan for the first state housing; I found it interesting because le Corbusier’s idea sounded so attractive, despite not actually being very good. He proposed flattening a whole arrondisement in Paris, and replacing it with sky scrapers. There would be no roads around them, only park land. Everyone would live in a pleasant apartment, surrounded by greenery. Le Corbusier hadn’t considered the affect bad neighbours would have on this set up.
‘A lot of architects’ ideas sound good on paper,’ de Botton explains. ‘I guess it’s humbling lesson, seeing just how many things need to be done right. A really great architect is one who picks up on those subtle things that we might not think about, you know, how to put the light at just the right level, or remembers that it’s good to see a bit of wood as you’re walking out of the bathroom. The little things that are often in all buildings, that you need to think about consciously when you’re actually designing.’
IT’S A CRUEL irony that just as I’ve started to relax and enjoy the interview process, Alain de Botton’s publicist taps her watch and apologises that they have a tight schedule. It’s time for the last question. I pull out the obvious one.
‘So, what are you working on now?’
There’s a pause. A long one.
‘I’m just beginning a project, but it’s at that undiscussable stage.’
I had a feeling he might say that.
‘I read in another interview that you were considering writing something about jobs and the working environment?’
‘Hm, yeah, that’s a nice idea. We’ll see where that goes.’
Indeed we will. But not today. I’ve heard rumours that he might be planning a book about marriage. And he’s just admitted to wanting to write a book about art. It seems that, now he’s found his style, he can accommodate it to fit almost any subject.
As we leave the busy little café, I notice people turn and stare slightly at de Botton, as if they’ve seen him somewhere before. The only thing I can safely predict about his next book is that it will be popular.
Alain de Botton visited New Zealand as a guest author of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2006.
ON A WET Tuesday afternoon, Alain de Botton sits in Nikau café, laughing conspicuously at a story his publicist is telling. A baby begins crying, the young, female barista tries not to stare too openly, and I stand outside in the rain, wondering how to make a suitable entrance. Pushing the door that says PULL then slipping a little on the wet tiles, I grin dumbly and approach the table. From that point on all I can remember is a blur of bald head, lovely accent, friendly eyes and the smell of coffee. Without the dictophone, I wouldn’t be sure now if the interview had actually happened.
Why all so star-strucked? As a teenager, I’d read de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy and How Proust Can Change Your Life, avidly. They sounded hard. I liked that. What I liked even more was that I could understand the writing. There was something about de Botton’s chatty style, generous use of illustrations and clarity of prose that made everything he wrote about seem interesting. He’d brought non-fiction to life for me. When he began presenting documentaries on TV my interest in him increased. I kept my ear to the ground, and hunted down each of his books as they were released.
Sitting opposite the man himself, who’s written such approachable guides to subjects that are usually only discussed in difficult, scholarly tomes, I ask if he sees himself as an academic.
‘No, no I don’t. I deal with a lot of the same material that academics deal with, but I’m not one.’
‘You taught at London University though?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘In philosophy?’
‘Yes.’
If his pursuit isn’t academic, then I wonder what he is trying to do through his books.
‘I don’t know, what am I trying to do?’ He thinks about it. ‘I’m trying to find words to define particular kinds of experiences related to different subjects, be they architecture, love, travel, etcetera. I’m trying to find a style with which to express ideas that is personal, intellectual, digressive.’
He stresses each word carefully. That’s part of the beauty of de Botton, in his writing, and in person, his top priority seems to be clarity of expression. Many philosophers seem to shy away from being too straight-forward; it’s harder to argue with someone who isn’t lucid. The word de Botton prefers to use for his accessible is the word, “essay”.
‘I’m a great fan of some of the essays of Virginia Woolf, which have all the qualities to which my own writing aspires, if it doesn’t always reach it.’
He freely admits that he imitated his style from the likes of Woolf and Montaigne.
‘People are always borrowing from one another,’ he says.
‘So, would you like to be imitated?’
‘I, well, you know, mostly when I’m dead. But essayistic, poetic non-fiction writing – surely there’s a space for that.’
I agree warmly. Although he’s just got off a plane, he seems focussed and energetic – hard to disagree with. I marvel once again that he’s had eight books published and is only in his mid-30s. And, he’s been on TV.
I ask how he’s found adapting his books to television.
‘It’s very different; I don’t feel that I’m adapting the books so much as taking certain ideas from the books and happeneing to make a TV series out of them. I’m primarily a writer and television, for me, is a way of making friends, earning more money and spending time away from my study. I don’t primarily see it as a sort of artistic mission, but it’s got a lot of other good things. And I think, especially when you’re making a film about architecture, you can show things which you simply can’t show through a book.’
THE TITLE of his latest book, The Architecture of Happiness, implies that it will be about what makes us happy – the architecture reference seems nothing more than a metaphor. It is in fact a nice little pun. The crux of the book suggests that our surroundings, which are increasingly man-made, affect our state of mind. If we live in an ugly part of town, we have yet another reason to be unhappy. If we live in a beautiful house, we can always consol ourselves with this fact. Architecture, he suggests, has the power to change our mood, to tell us things about our friends, and to reveal secret aspirations and weaknesses. Using a sort of architectural palmistry, de Botton teaches his readers to hear what buildings are saying about us behind our backs.
He also tackles one of the big aesthetic questions – what is beauty? “Beauty is the promise of happiness,” de Botton writes, quoting Stendhal. It’s a seemingly simple claim that, when examined more closely, doesn’t actually answer the question. What is the promise of happiness? Beauty. Well, then, what is beauty? The promise of happiness. The accepted view is that beauty is indefinable, but de Botton believes we can do a lot better than that. In The Architecture of Happiness, he attempts to define this slippery noun.
I want to know whether this aesthetic question is the focus of the book, or whether it was merely a side-effect of writing about architecture.
‘I think it was about aesthetics, and then, as aesthetics relates to archtiecture, the two came together. I didn’t want to write about aesthetics in relation to art or sculpture, but at the same time I didn’t want to write about architecture in any other way than from an aesthetic perspective.’
‘Why not write about art or sculpture?’
‘I would like to write a book about architecture one day, but I don’t feel ready to write about it now. I think architecture is much simpler than art, a lot less going on, actually. I wanted to approach the subject [of aesthetics] gradually. I’ll get there one day.’
I chuckle embarrassingly and even mutter something patronising like, ‘I’m sure you will.’ Aghast at myself, I launch into one of the questions I’ve been most keen to ask.
‘You write that we “seek to inwardly resemble places that touch us through their beauty.” Which buildings that you researched particularly touched you?’
‘Gosh. And which buildings might I inwardly resemble? Let me give you an example.’
He reaches across the table for the review copy of his book. I’ve marked the page I suspect he’ll choose, but he flicks right past it.
‘I’d like to be this one, for example,’ he says, showing me a stone villa, designed by Herzog and de Meuron. I ask why he’s chosen that one.
‘Well, I like the marriage of the old and the new. I like the regularity of it mixed with the diversity of it.’ He continues flicking through his book, searching for something better to resemble.
‘And uh, I wouldn’t mind being this one as well.’ He’s turned to Louis I. Kahn’s Yale Centre for British Art. ‘That mixture of the elegant and the rough, the tough and the elegant.’
He certainly appears elegant. I’m not sure about rough, or tough. Fortunately I manage to refrain from saying so.
A CHAPTER in The Architecture of Happiness explores the possibility that our own homes are a “self portrait in stone”, in that our choice of curtains, our preference for minimalism over ornamentation or vice versa, can say a lot about us. I ask de Botton if his house is a “self portrait in stone.”
‘Not really, because my own house is just a compromise between all sorts of things. Like many people, the place you live doesn’t immediately resemble or reflect everything you like. So, not exactly. Ideally I’d like to flatten it and start again and totally express myself.’ Presumably this would result in an ordered, elegant, balanced house. These are the main sub-categories, which de Botton uses to help him define beauty in chapter five of his book.
His certainty that beauty has immutable features makes me a little suspicious. Will every person agree that ‘a tension between order and complexity, a kind of balance between contrary forces is often a feature of beautiful buildings’? I ask if he believes there’s such a thing as good taste.
‘Um, yes. I mean, it’s linked to beauty and ugliness as well. It’s like saying, do you think there’s such a thing as beauty? And yes, I think there is. I think it’s very difficult to say that someone might have bad taste; it’s a very tricky thing to do, because that’s immediately associated with snobbery or elitism or whatever. But I think it’s as acceptable to view somebody with bad taste as it is acceptable to view somebody with bad politics or bad mothering. These are uncomfortable things but they do exist.’
‘So if you thought a building was really beautiful, but someone else didn’t see its beauty at all, would they be wrong?’
‘I think there are all sorts of reasons [for disagreement]; the way in which we look at buildings is in part through associations. I might think a building’s very beautiful, but if someone were molested at the foot of it, that [association] would have a huge impact on how they saw that building. Also, I think, sometimes people do need to be guided towards what’s interesting in a building, like they might need to be guided towards what’s interesting in a book. The whole basis of teaching literature or teaching architecture is based on the fact that it’s not necessarily immediately obvious. And I do believe in the process of education, broadly defined. I do think it’s valuable to be educated in the arts.’
In another interview de Botton had suggested he was unimpressed by his, traditionally very good, education at Oxford. I ask him how he’d found university.
‘Well, it was wanting aesthetically, I think. No one ever taught me about architecture.’ He pauses. ‘It was more what I wasn’t taught.’
I sense that I’m not going to get anymore out of him on this subject, so I turn to New Zealand education, more specifically, what he advice he could give to architecture students.
‘I don’t know. Partly to be very ambitious. There are a lot of depressing things about architect’s lives. I mean, they might just end up doing a few schools and then at the end of their life be invited to make a bid for the municipal fire station, full stop. And they might find that life very depressing – you know, a lot of architects start out with great dreams to be the next le Corbusier or whatever. So, I guess it’s important to always be ambitious. Also, I urge them to understand money and to become property developers in their own right rather than letting property developers squeeze them out. Architects should build, and learn about business so that they can seize the instruments of construction.’
I asked this question mostly due to the last sentence in The Archtiecture of Happiness. It makes a plea for responsible building. “We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and the most intelligent kinds of happiness.” I ask him at whom that plea was aimed.
‘Anyone who was about to bulldoze a field. It could be an architect, a property developer, it could be lots of people. Yeah, it’s a serious business; if you make a mark on the earth it lasts hundreds of years, so you have to be sure what you’re doing. It’s a great imposition, architecture.’
I ask if the idea for this part of the book came about due to our growing population and the increasing urban drift that’s swallowing our countryside.
‘I think we all know that we’ll be living in a time when more will be built rather than less, and there’s terrific anxiety about how much more, and there’s often a feeling that what’s going to come will be ugly. And it probably will be – it’s best not to think about it. But it’s important to realise that it doesn’t have to be ugly. It’s only because we’re stupid as a society, a collective.’
Speaking of stupidity and societies, I ask him about the chapter in his book which details le Corbusier’s original plan for the first state housing; I found it interesting because le Corbusier’s idea sounded so attractive, despite not actually being very good. He proposed flattening a whole arrondisement in Paris, and replacing it with sky scrapers. There would be no roads around them, only park land. Everyone would live in a pleasant apartment, surrounded by greenery. Le Corbusier hadn’t considered the affect bad neighbours would have on this set up.
‘A lot of architects’ ideas sound good on paper,’ de Botton explains. ‘I guess it’s humbling lesson, seeing just how many things need to be done right. A really great architect is one who picks up on those subtle things that we might not think about, you know, how to put the light at just the right level, or remembers that it’s good to see a bit of wood as you’re walking out of the bathroom. The little things that are often in all buildings, that you need to think about consciously when you’re actually designing.’
IT’S A CRUEL irony that just as I’ve started to relax and enjoy the interview process, Alain de Botton’s publicist taps her watch and apologises that they have a tight schedule. It’s time for the last question. I pull out the obvious one.
‘So, what are you working on now?’
There’s a pause. A long one.
‘I’m just beginning a project, but it’s at that undiscussable stage.’
I had a feeling he might say that.
‘I read in another interview that you were considering writing something about jobs and the working environment?’
‘Hm, yeah, that’s a nice idea. We’ll see where that goes.’
Indeed we will. But not today. I’ve heard rumours that he might be planning a book about marriage. And he’s just admitted to wanting to write a book about art. It seems that, now he’s found his style, he can accommodate it to fit almost any subject.
As we leave the busy little café, I notice people turn and stare slightly at de Botton, as if they’ve seen him somewhere before. The only thing I can safely predict about his next book is that it will be popular.
Alain de Botton visited New Zealand as a guest author of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2006.
