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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
I have to say that I didn't finish this book because the author annoyed me. His writing style is pedantic and I really disliked the idea that we can only appreciate great architecture because of something miserable elsewhere in our lives. I don't look at a new building and mourn its inevitable loss, which is what this author purports. New doesn't necessarily mean beautiful to me. While I can appreciate glorious buildings like Versailles and the Budapest Opera House, I also find beauty in decay, in cracks in the sidewalk, dried roses and wilted flowers.
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
Although it can come off a bit pretentious and contrived (much of which stems from personal opinion meant only as guidance can come off as authoritative), the book is sweetly written with care and love for the subject matter.
It’s about as much about architecture as it is about people and the psychology behind what makes us happy. I think that’s the most important part in opening our eyes to how things were originally conceived and how we perceive them. A fascinating book and makes me want to read more is his works.
It’s about as much about architecture as it is about people and the psychology behind what makes us happy. I think that’s the most important part in opening our eyes to how things were originally conceived and how we perceive them. A fascinating book and makes me want to read more is his works.
informative
slow-paced
I adore this book.
Alain de Botton is poetic and philosophical and inspiring.
He makes wonderful arguments for personality and personification in architecture and design and why we are affected by it.
Would that we were more thoughtful in our urban and suburban design and understand that a beautiful and user-friendly city should always be our aim.
"When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt. Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty."
Alain de Botton is poetic and philosophical and inspiring.
He makes wonderful arguments for personality and personification in architecture and design and why we are affected by it.
Would that we were more thoughtful in our urban and suburban design and understand that a beautiful and user-friendly city should always be our aim.
"When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt. Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty."
This is by no means de Botton's strongest work, but it may be one of the dearest to my heart. More than just a treatise on architecture, he uses this topic as an extended example of how the aesthetics of things with which we come into contact every day affect our ideas of virtue. It is not as well organized or clear as some of his later books, but the rambling style rather suits the subject matter.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing