Few contemporary essayists can match Alain De Botton's remarkable clarity, his dizzying productivity, and the sheer breadth of subjects he traverses with ease. The author of numerous books on love, travel, philosophy, status, and literature, De Botton has turned lately to the built environment. In The Architecture of Happiness , he sets out to understand why we find certain buildings beautiful, and what that beauty does for us. He spoke to Boldtype Editor Toby Warner about the consolations of architecture, Proust's cork-lined bedroom, and where he's most at home.

Boldtype :

After tackling so many other subjects, what pushed you to write about architecture?

Alain De Botton :

I was motivated by a sense of how important architecture can be in determining our state of mind — and also by how few buildings are satisfying. A lot of the built environment has gone wrong in one way or another. So my book was an attempt to ask some simple questions: Why are so few buildings beautiful? And, more importantly, What do we mean when we say that a building is beautiful?

BT :

In your book, you maintain that the comfort architecture offers is minor, but crucial. A beautiful building is not going to help us drop 40 pounds or get over a breakup, but it could be a decisive nudge in a more positive direction. What is it about these small consolations that intrigues you?

ADB :

My interest in small consolations flows from the feeling that the large-scale solutions to life's problems are frequently ineffective. Or rather, there are many problems for which there are no solutions‚ and therefore, we'd be wise to look into strategies to alleviate, rather than cure our woes. In thinking this, I'm really expressing a stance that goes to the heart of what art can do for us: on a good day, art can change our lives, but on a more regular day, it can merely make us look with a little more interest and sympathy on ourselves and others. I say in my book that even if we lived in the Villa Rotonda (arguably one of the great works of domestic architecture in the Western canon), we'd frequently be in a bad mood. That isn't to disparage the villa; merely to point out what tricky animals we are.

BT :

You write that our homes compensate for our psychological vulnerability as much as our physical vulnerability. Proust famously lived in a cork-lined room, with the shades perpetually drawn. What do you make of his idea of home?

ADB :

Proust merely dramatizes what we all attempt to do with our homes: insulate ourselves from certain negative forces. Physically speaking, houses shelter us. But to speak of home also implies some kind of psychological shelter. To say that one is at home somewhere is to recognize that the environment reflects back to us certain attitudes and memories which we value, but perhaps can't generate enough of on our own.

BT :

You also write that our passion for our home reflects our inability to be completely in control of who we are — that our homes are a "helpful vision of ourselves." Isn't there a fine line between reflecting who one is or would like to be, and simply showing off one's wealth or status?

ADB :

I think there's nothing wrong with using one's home as a medium for communicating who one is or wants to be (not in a delusional sense, but in a properly aspirational one: i.e. in the way that a Cathedral is a building that shows off what a Christian might want to be). That doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is going to want to show off that they are wealthy. Of course, wealth is what some people want to display. But people might also want to send out other, and in many ways more interesting, messages. They might use their homes to say, "Nature matters a lot to me," or, "Creating intimacy between new friends is of paramount importance‚" or simply, "My children are my life." All these messages and more are part of what we encode when we decorate and build houses. We speak to the world through our homes, as we do through our clothes. To say that building is all about showing off material wealth is like saying that all dressing up is about saying one is wealthy. Clearly there's a whole range of messages to choose from.

BT :

Do you feel that the British and the Americans have very different ideas of what makes a home?

ADB :

There are great similarities between British and American homes. In both countries, there's a remarkable emphasis on building homes that in some ways look old and traditional. In both countries, the classical style continues to be hugely popular. I think the reasons are similar. Both countries industrialized very fast and brutally; both countries are highly innovative technologically and it's left their respective populations hankering for the stability and tradition that one associates with classicism.

BT :

Where do you do most of your writing? How important is the space that you write in, and what does it look like?

ADB :

I write in a Victorian house in West London. The surroundings aren't ideal, but provided the necessary grit of dissatisfaction for me to write my book. If I lived in completely beautiful surroundings, I might not be so inspired to write about beautiful architecture. Writing is, after all, some kind of compensation (it's not people who are madly in love who write the love stories).

BT :

You suggest that one might find one's true home in an airport, a library, a garden, a ceiling, or even a diner. What drew you to the space you feel most at home in?

ADB :

I tend to feel very much at home in transitory spaces — the sort of spaces that Edward Hopper often painted. Put me in a diner or airport lounge, a hotel or railway station, and I'm generally very much on home-ground. I've tried to analyze why. I think it has to do with the curious comfort these places offer: they make you feel that you're not alone in being alone. They are places where everyone is on the way somewhere else, where everyone is an outsider, and so this can be strangely more comforting than feeling alienated in a domestic, supposedly cozy environment.

BT :

As an essayist, you're something of a generalist. Are you at home everywhere as a writer, or do you find a certain genre to be more your cup of tea?

ADB :

I am aware of not being a typical writer, in that I don't have a particular area of expertise. The genre I'm really attracted to is the essay, as practiced by Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Emerson, Joseph Brodsky, Roland Barthes. These are all very well known names, but the writing they do hasn't spawned a distinct genre. The essay is always on the margins of literature in some way. It's a situation I've learned to live with — or rather, I've made myself at home in the essay.

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