Date: 10 April 08
Author: Johnny Rodger
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Alain de Botton, writer, philosopher and broadcaster has written and published several very successful books including his worldwide bestselling non fiction work How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), and his novel Essays in Love (1993). His latest book The Architecture of Happiness (2006) explores beauty in Architecture, and this will form the basis of the author’s address as one of the key speaker’s at this year’s RIAS Convention, which will take place in Edinburgh in May. Johnny Rodger interviewed Alain de Botton exclusively for www.scottisharchitecture.com ahead of the forthcoming event.
JR: You made your name as a literary figure and a thinker, and now you’ve published a book on architecture. You’re also going to be speaking at the Edinburgh Conference of the RIAS. So how did you first get to be interested in architecture?
AdB: I was always sensitive to materials and forms, always aware of when somewhere felt like a good place and when it didn’t. I was visually sensitive, with an encyclopaedic memory for materials, colours and textures. Even today I’ve got a very strong ability to evoke all these things…
As for the inspiration to write the book, well part of me felt that this was a subject I was very interested in, but I had not read many good books on architecture for the lay person.
But (it was) something deeper than that, it was the question ‘how does one write about architecture, what are we trying to say about a building?’ Architects might have certain answers and lay people have other answers. I was trying to put down some thoughts as a way of saying what I like about certain buildings and what I don’t like. So, it’s a very opinionated kind of idea, a way of trying to form my own aesthetic, because as you wander through the world, you think, well, that’s pretty or that’s ugly and I wanted to try and see if there were themes holding my enthusiasms and my repulsions together. And if I could find them then I might be happier when I got to nice places because I’d have a stronger hold on what I thought was beautiful and I’d be less unhappy when I was in what I thought were miserable places because I’d know what the problem was and a little bit about why it had come about.
To some people it might seem a bit of leap from Proust to Architecture, but of course Proust was very interested in the writings of Ruskin…
Yes, through Proust I discovered Ruskin and through Ruskin I discovered architecture.
So there is an obvious progression there?
Yes, Ruskin is a furious maverick in the history of architecture, no-one quite knows what to do with him he’s so weird, but he’s wonderfully weird. But also just the lyrical way in which Ruskin describes buildings, the amount of meaning that he is prepared to freight them with, all of this was highly unusual and inspiring…
There’s a long tradition of involvement of Philosophy and philosophers in architecture - we think about Plato and Pythagoras, and proportion in the work of Palladio for instance. Does that technical side interest you?
Not really. I mean, to look at it from a distance there is the idea that maybe there is some principle which underlies all beautiful buildings. Let’s try and discover what it is, yes, but I don’t think these guys really got there. They certainly had some good ideas about certain sorts of buildings, and I guess that I admire their theoretical ambition. And also you get this theoretical ambition in the Renaissance when any architect worth their salt would at the close of their career try and write a treatise on what makes good architecture, and this seems like an interesting ambition that has slightly disappeared from modern architecture.
Yes, although in the 20th century there was important influence brought to bear on architecture by some philosophers - such as Heidegger and his alleged influence on say Hans Scharoun and Aldo Van Eyck; and Derrida on Bernard Tshumi and Daniel Liebeskind. Do you think that overall it has been a fruitful involvement, and a good thing?
Part of the problem for me was that it was no longer a literary or philosophical exercise at the level of the prose. It was almost a technical, quasi-scientific thing. What characterises 20th century ruminations on architecture is the sheer impenetrability of it. I was trained in philosophy and history and my real background is in literature and good prose writing, and after a little while of ploughing through Heidegger a certain impatience sets in whereby I think that the idea may be interesting but he has entirely failed to give it a form which can carry the meaning of the idea. Architecture schools are full of people reading Bachelard and Heidegger and I wanted to look at some alternative traditions and bring some different sort of voices to bear.
There are architects who are definitely influenced by certain philosophers. But when I come at it as a non-architect or as a philosopher type, I sort of want these architects to be more self-confident to talk to me as architects, not as architects who read an interesting theory. I do feel on the whole that some of the theories that are applied to architecture have really only a tenuous connection to the real role of the building. Architects are impatient with bad ideas of what they are doing, because it sometimes seems as though they are just craftsmen who are putting together boxes, like people have been putting together boxes for thousands of years, and it can seem a little depressing to be doing that when you really want to be a philosopher thinker and hip heroic figure.
But if I think of many of my favourite architects, if you take someone like Peter Zumthor, he’s recently published a book in English translation and the wonderful thing is that the prose is almost childlike - it’s full of things like ‘there’s nothing as nice as putting your hand on a cool door’. I mean here’s a man who’s clearly very clever, but I think he understands where real intelligence comes in when it’s applied to architecture
Talking about materials, I’ve read somewhere, and I may be quoting out of context, that you believe in an ‘urban authoritarianism’, in imposing codes to ensure urban coherency and so on?
I think it’s a real challenge for people who believe in the free market and liberal economics that you can’t help observing that the free market has made a real pig’s ear of producing good architecture. But if you simply surrender a bit of land and say, ‘right, the highest bidder gets the land, and so long as there are no gross violations of planning restrictions you can do what you like’, then you end up with a real mess, you end up with very unsatisfying results. It does seem that satisfying areas of the world need rules and they need powerful or supreme authorities that can make sure that architects and everyone involved are following those rules.
But do you think that this strict regulation would in any way restrict architects’ freedom of expression, and delay or hinder vital programmes?
Well, the country that has got this quite right in many ways, as we all know, is Holland - a liberal democratic country. The reason why the Dutch have managed is that they realise that their whole lives should not be controlled by the free market. And when it comes to their very strict planning regulations they very much believe that each ounce of Dutch soil belongs in a sense to the whole nation. And so the whole nation should have a say and benefit from it. All countries have got to limit freedom in some ways. In the UK at the moment most of the regulation adds up to a headache that strangely ends up benefiting the most relentless property developers…it benefits (the likes of) Tesco.
Do you think that cities like Edinburgh, or say, Bath which have strong conservation lobbies come closest in the UK to the Dutch model that you admire?
Edinburgh is an object lesson in the power of a strong local authority in setting out what can and cannot be built. The problem in the UK with places like Edinburgh and Bath is that these things have descended into preservation movements. And I think there’s a real difference between creating building codes and creating codes that are primarily concerned with preserving existing fabric or copying it. So while I am very keen on cities like Bath and Edinburgh I do think it ought not to be just about copying or restriction but finding a way of creating something that could be particular to Edinburgh or Glasgow or wherever…
What are you going to talk about at the forthcoming RIAS Conference in Edinburgh?
I’m going to talk about the idea of beauty in architecture. About why the word beauty itself has become taboo and how we might benefit from bringing it out of the closet.
Why this reluctance to deal with the question of beauty - could it be that in the past century the notion of beauty was tainted by association with Nazis, for example?
No, I think it’s to do with left wing politics. The feeling you can’t be a nice person and be politically correct and be interested in something as potentially frivolous and useless as beauty. This is the whole thrust of 20th century architecture and the political climate in which architecture was made. The socialist idea was that what workers need is useful places, they don’t need beautiful places. We’ve had beauty, beauty was Versailles, and we have revolution on our hands, and now we’re building for the workers of tomorrow.
And this has been the biggest disaster, the fact that the worldwide working classes have been housed in these brutal concrete towers designed by an urban elite. It’s the typical sort of experiment applied to the masses of the population with terrible results. In fact I made a documentary a few years ago for Channel 4, we went to film in housing estates around Paris, in Bobigny, which is a deprived suburb, and we talked to the residents of the town specifically about beauty and asked them about where they wanted to live. And they almost invariably arrived at descriptions of a suburban idyll with a picket fence and so on, and waxed lyrical about flowers and told us about the pain of seeing damp concrete. So there’s this strange denial of the very basic things that architecture should be doing, and this has really hit the poorest
How does it feel coming to speak to this conference as an outsider, as it were, to the profession. What voice do you feel the outsider to the architecture profession is allowed? There is always the example of the interventions made by Prince Charles, and these have met generally with a good deal of cynicism from professional architects.
It’s a difficult thing to try and talk to architects and to try to belong to the profession as an outsider - I’m not trying to do that. The obvious charge is ‘who the hell is he, what the hell does he know?’ And many architects remember their seven years of very expensive training as a kind of burden they have to carry, or in terms of a kind of psychological debt. And the fact that someone can come along and write a book without having gone through the suffering, without knowing how to do some application drawings or whatever it is, they are naturally suspicious, which I understand.
The 2008 RIAS Convention – ‘Influence at the Intersection’, took place on 9th May at the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena, Ratho.
Main Image: Alain de Botton. Photo by Phil Fisk at Camera Press.
