It's easy to overlook the impact that the places we live in have on us, both good and bad. It's an issue that the pop philosopher Alain de Botton wants to focus on, writes Gemma Tipton
In a society where, increasingly, the only reason you are likely to go hungry is because you are on a diet, our problems are becoming more and more difficult to pin down. They are complaints the French might call malaise or ennui; not threats to life, perhaps, but serious enough for their sufferers. An industry has grown up around them, not least in publishing, which has produced shelves of books about how to be happier, healthier, more loved and more loving. As with diet books, if just one worked, there would be no need for any of the others. Instead, The Ultimate Way to Perfect Happiness, as one of them is doubtless called, sits beside The Ultimate Way to Even More Perfect Happiness. These books have now been joined by The Architecture of Happiness, by the popular philosopher Alain de Botton.
Why are we so discontented? Why do we need so many cheering-up publications? One reason is that we have the time and economic space to consider the more abstract human needs that lie beyond mere survival. Another lies with the spaces and places where we live, literally the concrete reason why so many of us seem so unhappy.
Why, when it surrounds us, when it affects every aspect of how we live, play and work, are so few people interested in architecture or aware of its influence on our lives? The rooms, buildings and streets around us create the spaces where we live out our days. From the inspirational vaulted quiet of a church or the safe regularity of the suburbs to the frantic fluorescence of a shopping mall or the listlessness of sealed, air-conditioned office blocks, architecture, as the artist and writer Brian O'Doherty remarks, inflects behaviour. Different places make different people of us.
De Botton is the philosopher who popularised Proust and helped bring the work of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Socrates, Seneca and other thinkers to contemporary discussions of such problems as fear of failure, loss of love and lack of money. The Architecture of Happiness proposes to examine how buildings affect us and how certain kinds of buildings could make us happier.
If only the book did. If only The Architecture of Happiness explained how and why the sameness of contemporary apartment blocks creates apathy in some and impotent anger in others. If only de Botton discussed the isolating effect of fortress-style fences that separate neighbours. If only he addressed the idea that the real problem with architecture is that the people made most unhappy by it are the people who have least choice about how they are going to live in it.
Instead, the book is an elegant, stimulating read about the issues that affect people who are rich enough to be able to influence the designs of the spaces that surround them. From the debates that once divided those wealthy enough to care about the difference between neoclassical and Gothic architecture to the rise of engineering and the onslaught of modernism - in which people often seemed all but forgotten in the sweeping excitement of what cement and plate glass could be made to do - de Botton looks at the ways that tastes change and how our idea of what is normal differs from age to age and place to place.
He examines how some architects have built to reflect personality and bolster power - mansions, town houses, villas - while others have had a stab at social engineering. Le Corbusier, for example, wanted to solve the problems of the slums of Paris by bulldozing them and replacing their narrow streets with parks punctuated by tower blocks. The trouble is that while it is easy to sit in an office and imagine the delights of an urban parkland, it is harder to create environments for the messy reality of humanity.
Expansive plazas suit military and civic displays - they may also photograph well for tourist guides and postcards - but people's nature is to gather in cafes in more intimate squares and courtyards. In his plans for Paris, Le Corbusier, as de Botton puts it, "forgot about architecture and, in a wider sense, about human nature". This is the most interesting part of a book that elsewhere devotes itself to discussions of symmetry and of the accommodation of modernity with antiquity, and seems engaged in a love affair with the past.
It's true that many buildings are softened by age. Nonetheless, the grand buildings of Dublin - the Bank of Ireland at College Green, Leinster House, the terraced rows of the city's elegant Georgian squares - destroyed in their own time winding medieval streets of a charm and character that can be experienced today in Edinburgh's Old Town. Even the most uncomfortable of buildings may become beloved in time.
To de Botton, good architecture is partly aspirational. It reflects, he says, the best parts of our natures: order, stability, harmony, security and beauty. Living in such buildings can make us better, happier people. But reading The Architecture of Happiness back to back with Chaos at the Crossroads, by Frank McDonald of this newspaper and James Nix, underpins the gulf between how we might like to live and how increasing numbers in Ireland are forced to live.
"A development," says de Botton, "which spoils 10 square miles of countryside will be the work of a few people neither particularly sinful nor malevolent." A visit to the planning tribunals might have led de Botton to qualify that statement, although blame must lie with avaricious developers and corrupt planners as much as with poor architecture.
The middle classes displaced by the legacies of planning corruption - and simple planning stupidity - to live in hinterland estates have to replace the kind of aspiration described by de Botton with the marketed aspirations of interior- design magazines and TV shows.
The unhappiness caused by bad architecture might not seem life-threatening to most of us, but to those in bad estates and ill-considered tower blocks it genuinely can be. The questions raised by the idea of "the architecture of happiness", though not necessarily answered by this book, are far too important to reduce to ideas of taste and design. Alongside the ephemera of the happiness industry, there must be room for a bigger discussion of the spaces we are creating for ourselves and our children to live.
The Architecture of Happiness, by Alain de Botton, is published by Hamish Hamilton, £17.99