A lyrical and generously illustrated monograph about the intimate relationship between our buildings and ourselves.
Graceful disquisition on the significance of architecture, by a novelist and essayist whose eclectic interests range from How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) to Status Anxiety (2004).
In what may be the only contemporary volume on architecture that doesn’t discuss Frank Lloyd Wright, de Botton sticks to the basics. He deals with questions of style, ideas of beauty, notions about why certain structures appeal to us. One of the most engaging chapters discusses the elements that beautiful buildings require: order, balance, elegance, coherence and self-knowledge. The author argues that we love beautiful buildings because they solidify ideas we have about ourselves and our world. They put into concrete form our aspirations; they compensate for our human weaknesses; in short, they make us happy. He believes that favored architectural styles change because of the “manifold nature of our inner needs.” The author moves easily through historical periods, through fashions and fads, through architects many have heard of (Louis Sullivan) to those known principally to professionals (Michael Hopkins). He offers photographic backup for just about every point he makes and every concept he wishes to elucidate. He is adept, as well, at pointing out relationships between architecture and writing, architecture and painting. He keeps his tone personal and amiable, especially in a vivid section about a recent sojourn in Japan, where he’d hoped to see in contemporary buildings more allusions to the country’s traditional and historical styles. Evident throughout is the author’s fine craftsmanship. Virtually every page contains a sentence any essayist would be proud to have written. Considering the concept of elegance, de Botton writes, “We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity.” Gentle affection pervades these pages, as does knowledge of architecture that is both broad and deep.
A lyrical and generously illustrated monograph about the intimate relationship between our buildings and ourselves. (To be a three-part PBS series, Fall 2006)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-42443-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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