Alain de Botton: Nice buildings don’t always make us better people

Posted by JJ on Thursday, August 14, 2008

Beauty these days is subjective, with the onslaught of fantastically ugly icon-spectacles that have risen from the foundation piles around the world. Sometimes, people call it architecture.

Writing as commentator for The Independent, Alain de Botton, Author of The Architecture of Happiness and The Consolations of Philosophy, amongst other works, talks about beauty, beautiful architecture, and its necessary effects on people and their behavior, in an edited extract from a lecture given at Gresham College as part of the City of London Festival this year. An excerpt reads:

“Of course, it is possible to take architecture so seriously that your love becomes a little bit ridiculous. There are lots of claims upon our time and our resources, and it is almost as though, if you put beauty in architecture at the top of your list, it is in danger of unbalancing your perspective on things. For instance, people who love beautiful things often make the huge claim that if you gather together a sufficient amount of beautiful things and put them in beautiful surroundings, people will become better.”

more after the jump