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December 12, 2006
Dream Houses
The NY Times, Sunday Book Review By Jim Holt
THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS
By Alain de Botton
Illustrated. 280 pp. Pantheon Books. $25
A review of the perfect gift for the Brooklynite who has been spending way too much time talking about architecture during the past three years:
It is because architecture is an essentially public art that we need some shared sense of architectural value. Do we want to live amid the rationally ordered boulevards of Paris, or the complexity and contradiction of the Vegas Strip? Is less more, or a bore? Will a new museum in the form of a gigantic titanium-clad blob transform our backwater hometown into an exciting cultural capital? Can the right sort of architecture even improve our character?
These are the sort of reflections prompted by Alain de Botton’s latest book, “The Architecture of Happiness.” De Botton, a young author of briskly selling meditations on such themes as status anxiety, travel and the life-changing power of Proust, here turns his attention to architecture, pondering the question of just what are the elusive qualities that make one building beautiful and another hideous.
Posted by lumi at December 12, 2006 7:13 PM