The Architecture of Happiness

Acclaim for Alain de Botton’s

The Architecture of Happiness

“A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

—The New York Review of Books

“Heartfelt … graceful.… [De Botton has] quiet intelligence, passionate conviction and the charm of a personality lightly tinged with melancholy.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“De Botton has a marvelous knack for coming at weighty subjects from entertainingly eccentric angles.”

—The Seattle Times

“De Botton is a lively guide, and his eclectic choices of buildings and locations evince his conclusion, that ‘we should be as unintimidated by architectural mediocrity as we are by unjust laws.’ ”

—The New Yorker

“Erudite and readable.… As much a psychological investigation as an aesthetic one, plumbing the emotional content of buildings.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] lively, philosophical and joyful book.… It works on a reader like the tuneup of a piano, realigning the mind and eye to pay attention to our built environments.”

—The Plain Dealer

“Ingenious.… De Botton analyzes the psychological, biological, and historical idioms that enable boxes of wood, stone, brick, and mortar to come alive and address our deepest spiritual concerns.… De Botton is a graceful and engaging essayist, miraculously combining both levity and profundity.”

—Entertainment Today

“An interesting and perhaps important addition to the debate over the emotional effect that our cities and buildings have on us.… The Architecture of Happiness rightly tells us to trust our senses and personal experience.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“The elegant clarity and brisk humour of his style, accompanied by pages of photos, opens your eyes to the rich possibility of thinking about your home, and your city, in a new way.”

—The Toronto Star

“Singlehandedly, de Botton has taken philosophy back to its simplest and most important purpose: helping us live our lives.”

—The Independent (London)

“De Botton wants to encourage his readers, and societies more generally, to pay more attention to the psychological consequences of design in architecture: that architecture should not be treated as an arcane and specialist discipline to be left to professionals, but as something that affects all our lives, our happiness and our well-being.”

—The Observer (London)