The Architecture of Happiness

V. The Virtues of Buildings

1.

When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt.

Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty.

Yet architecture has repeatedly defied attempts for it to be set on a more scientific, rule-laden path. Just as the secrets of good literature have not been for ever unlocked by the existence of Hamlet or Mansfield Park, so the works of Otto Wagner or Sigurd Lewerentz have done nothing to reduce the proliferation of inferior buildings. The masterpieces of art continue to seem like chance occurrences and artists to resemble cavemen who succeed in periodically igniting a flame, without being able to fathom how they did so, let alone communicate the basis of their achievements to others. Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.

Even those who privately harbour a notion of the operative principles behind architectural beauty are unlikely to make their suppositions public, for fear of committing an illogicality or of being attacked by the guardians of relativism, who stand ready to censure all those who would dress up individual tastes as objective laws.

2.

Fear has not always been so prevalent. In previous periods, architectural theorists held fervently to the claim that great buildings could be made to yield up their secrets. Architecture was thought as susceptible to rational analysis as any other human or natural phenomenon. The careful study of the finest buildings promised to lead to laws of beauty, whose crisp expression would inspire apprentices, rightfully intimidate clients and spread sympathetic architecture more widely across the earth.

It was in the Renaissance that this sporadic codifying ambition reached an apogee with the publication of Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture (1570), perhaps the West’s most influential attempt systematically to decorticate the secrets of successful buildings.

Palladio specified that when designing Ionic columns, a pleasing result could be achieved only if the architrave, frieze and cornice were designed to be one fifth of the height of the column, while a Corinthian capital had to be equal in height to the breadth of the column at its lowest point. With regard to the interior, he insisted that rooms should be at least as high as they were broad, that the correct ratios between the lengths and the sides of rooms were 1:1, 2:3, 3:4 and that a hall should be placed on a central axis, in absolute symmetry to both wings of a house.

3.

Yet, despite the confidence of such assertions, Palladio’s laws were not to prove as enduring as the reputations of his houses. What discredited these laws – and indeed spelt the gradual end of any attempt to develop a science of attractive buildings – was the number of exceptions which they seemed to let through with all the regularity of a torn fishing net.

At the northern end of London’s Regent’s Park stands a mansion, constructed over 400 years after Palladio’s treatise was first published, which dutifully follows many of its tenets about proportion, the positioning of rooms, the axes of corridors and the diameters of columns. We might expect the house to have been recognised as one of the superlative buildings of contemporary London, an Anglo-Saxon heir to the Villa Rotonda, and yet, in reality, the structure has garnered less flattering verdicts and, among the more forthright, outright ridicule.

What laws allow: Quinlan Terry and Raymond Erith, Ionic Villa, London, 1990

The villa’s problems are multiple. Its forms seem out of sympathy with their era, they communicate feelings of aristocratic pride which sit oddly with contemporary ideals, the walls are too creamy in colour, while the materials have a lustre and flawlessness that mar the impression of aged dignity which endows Palladio’s own villas with charm. One regrets that Palladio found no opportunity to include another two dozen laws of beauty which might have placed additional tourniquets around the many sources of the mansion’s failings.

Just as following Palladio seems not to lead us ineluctably towards beauty, so ignoring his advice far from condemns a house to ugliness. Imagine a cottage in the Lake District: its hall is crammed into one corner, its rooms are on no axes at all, its columns are made of thick, untreated oak, its ceilings are hardly the height of a man, and its proportions seem to hew to no mathematical formula whatsoever. And yet such a cottage may profoundly seduce us despite its violation of almost every principle contained in the authoritative pages of The Four Books of Architecture.

4.

Such omissions have struck architects hard. In frustration, they have turned against the very idea of laws, declaring them naive and absurd, symptoms of Utopian and rigid minds. The concept of beauty has been deemed inherently elusive and therefore quietly sidestepped.

Yet a fairer response to the setbacks associated with Neo-Palladian principles would be greater subtlety rather than nervous silence. Even without knowing the sum of what contributes to the beauty of a building, we should find it possible to venture theories on the subject in the hope of provoking others to contribute further and complementary ideas to an evolving body of knowledge.

To help overcome our reluctance to pass open judgement on the aesthetic side of buildings, we should consider our comparative confidence in discussing the strengths and failings of our fellow human beings. Much of social conversation amounts to a survey of the different ways in which absent third parties have departed from or, much less commonly, have matched an implicit ideal of behaviour. In both casual and erudite registers, we are drawn to identifying vices and virtues, ‘gossip’ being only a vernacular version of ethical philosophy. Even though we seldom distil our grudges and admirations into abstract hypotheses, we frequently follow in the footsteps of philosophers who have written treatises aiming to identify and dissect human goodness.

We might learn to put names to the virtues of buildings as these philosophers have done to those of people, carefully pinning down the architectural equivalents of generosity or modesty, honesty or gentleness. Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person. Traits need to arise at congruous moments, and in particular combinations, to be effective. A building of the right proportions which is assembled out of inappropriate materials will be no less compromised than a courageous man lacking in patience or insight.

Armed with a comprehensive list of aesthetic virtues, architects and their clients would be freed from over-reliance on Romantic myths concerning the chance or divine origins of beauty. With virtues better defined and more readily integrated into architectural discussions, we would stand a fairer chance of systematically understanding and re-creating the environments we intuitively love.

Order

1.

From a traffic island at the upper end of a wide Parisian street, the view takes in a symmetrical, spacious corridor of stately apartment buildings, which culminate in a wide square in which a man stands proudly on top of a column. Despite the discord of the world, these blocks have settled their differences and humbly arranged themselves in perfect repetitive patterns, each one ensuring that its roof, façade and materials exactly match those of its neighbours. As far as the eye can see, not a single mansard or railing is out of line. The height of every floor and the position of every window are echoed along and across the street. Arcades rise to balconies which give way to three storeys of weathered sandstone, which in turn meet gently domed, lead-covered roofs, interrupted every few metres by solemn, geometric chimney stacks. The buildings seem to have shuffled forward like a troupe of ballet dancers, each one aligning its toes to the very same point on the pavement as though in obedience to the baton of a strict dancing-master. The dominant rhythm of the blocks is accompanied by subsidiary harmonic progressions, made up of lamps and benches. To the visitor or responsive inhabitant, this spectacle of precision presents an impression of beauty tied to qualities of regularity and uniformity, inviting the conclusion that at the heart of a certain kind of architectural greatness there lies the concept of order.

The street is the product of a distinctively human intelligence. We sense the sheer improbability of nature ever creating anything that could rival this setting for coherence and linearity. The scene confronts us with an externalisation of the most rational, deliberate workings of our minds. We can imagine the tumult that would have preceded the calm which now reigns in this place: the stifling summer days that would have echoed to the hammering and sawing of hundreds of labourers. The materials that make up the street would have had to be gathered from across the country over a period of years by a legion of suppliers, many unaware of their colleagues, all of them working under the guidance of the same master planner. Groups of stonemasons in quarries to the east and south would have spent months striking their chisels in similar configurations, so as to produce stones that would settle uncomplainingly beside their neighbours.

The street speaks of the sacrifice demanded by all works of architecture. The stones might have preferred to continue sleeping where they had lain down to rest at their geological bedtime 200 million years before, just as the iron ore of the balustrades might have opted to remain lodged in the Massif Central under forests of pine trees, before they were coaxed from their somnolence along with a symphony of other raw materials in order to partake in a colossal urban composition. An artisan’s cart would have travelled for days to reach the city, the driver having left behind a family and stayed in cheap inns, so that one day a piece of piping could quietly be united on the second floor of an apartment block with a hand basin, rendering life undramatically but significantly more habitable.

The Parisian street moves us because we recognise how sharply its qualities contrast with those which generally colour our lives. We call it beautiful from a humbling overfamiliarity with its antitheses: in domestic life, with sulks and petty disputes, and in architecture, with streets whose elements crossly decide to pay no heed to the appearance of their neighbours and instead cry out chaotically for attention, like jealous and enraged lovers. This ordered street offers a lesson in the benefits of surrendering individual freedom for the sake of a higher and collective scheme, in which all parts become something greater by contributing to the whole. Though we are creatures inclined to squabble, kill, steal and lie, the street reminds us that we can occasionally master our baser impulses and turn a waste land, where for centuries wolves howled, into a monument of civilisation.

Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, rue de Castigslione, Paris, 1802

2.

Order contributes to the appeal of almost all substantial works of architecture. So fundamental is this quality, in fact, that it is written into even the most modest of projects at their very inception, in careful diagrams of electricity circuits and pipework, in elevations and plans – documents of beauty in which every cable and door frame has been measured and in which, though we may fail to grasp the exact meaning of certain symbols and numbers, we may nonetheless sense, and delight in, the overwhelming presence of precision and intent.

‘You like to complain that these dry numbers are the opposite of poetry!’ scolded Le Corbusier, frustrated that we might overlook the beauty inherent in such plans and in the forms of symmetrical bridges, blocks and squares. ‘These things are beautiful because in the middle of the apparent incoherence of nature or the cities of men, they are places of geometry, a realm where practical mathematics reigns … And is not geometry pure joy?’

Joy because geometry represents a victory over nature and because, despite what a sentimental reading might suggest, nature is in truth opposed to the order we rely on to survive. Left to its own devices, nature will not hesitate to crumble our roads, claw down our buildings, push wild vines through our walls and return every other feature of our carefully plotted geometric world to primal chaos. Nature’s way is to corrode, melt, soften, stain and chew on the works of man. And eventually it will win. Eventually we will find ourselves too worn out to resist its destructive centrifugal forces: we will grow weary of repairing roofs and balconies, we will long for sleep, the lights will dim, and the weeds will be left to spread their cancerous tentacles unchecked over our libraries and shops. Our background awareness of inevitable calamity is what can make us especially sensitive to the beauty of a street, in which we recognise the very qualities on which our survival hangs. The drive towards order reveals itself as synonymous with the drive towards life.

The pure joy of geometry:

Ludwig Wittgenstein, plan, Wittgenstein House, Vienna, 1928

3.

Architectural order attracts us, too, as a defence against feelings of over-complication. We welcome man-made environments which grant us an impression of regularity and predictability, on which we can rely to rest our minds. We don’t, in the end, much like perpetual surprises.

A sign of just how little we appreciate them is the lengths to which we often go to take in a view. We delight in reaching hill-tops, panoramic terraces, skyline restaurants and observation posts, where we encounter the basic pleasure of being able to see what lies in the far distance, and can follow roads and rivers across the landscape, rather than have them surge ahead of us without notice.

A comparable pleasure can be found in buildings, for example at the window of a country house which gives out onto a long regular driveway, or in a corridor extending from one extremity of a house to the other, or in a series of courtyards on a perfect axis. In these manifestations of ordered construction, we are granted a feeling of having tamed the unpredictabilities to which we are subject and, in a symbolic way, acquired command over a disturbingly unknowable future.

The pleasures of an ordered view:

Top: Carl Frederik Adelcrantz, Sturehof Estate, near Stockholm, 1781

Bottom: Christopher Wren and his successors, Greenwich Hospital, c. 1695

4.

Though we tend to believe, in architecture as in literature, that an important work should be complicated, many appealing buildings are surprisingly simple, even repetitive in their designs. The beguiling terraced houses of Bloomsbury or the apartment buildings of central Paris are assembled according to an unvarying and singularly basic pattern, once laid down in forceful municipal building codes. Over generations, these codes prevented architects from using their imaginations; they handcuffed them to a narrow palette of acceptable materials and forms, and, like the institution of marriage, restricted choice in the name of delivering the satisfactions of restraint.

That building codes have disappeared in many cities, and the modest ordered but satisfying edifices along with them, can be traced back to a perverse dogma which overtook the architectural profession in the Romantic period: a faith in a necessary connection between architectural greatness and originality. Over the nineteenth century, architects came to be rewarded according to the uniqueness of their work, so that constructing a new house or office in a familiar form grew no less contemptible than plagiarising a novel or poem.

This emphasis on individual genius had the unintended effect of tearing apart the carefully woven fabric of cities. ‘A day never passes without our hearing our architects called upon to be original and to invent a new style,’ observed John Ruskin in 1849, bewildered by the sudden loss of visual harmony. What could be more harmful, he asked, than to believe that a ‘new architecture is to be invented fresh every time we build a workhouse or parish church?’ He proposed that architecture should be the work of ‘one school, so that from the cottage to the palace, and from the chapel to the basilica, every feature of the architecture of the nation shall be as commonly current as its language or its coin’. Half a century later and in a similar vein, Adolf Loos appealed to architects to put aside their individual ambitions for the sake of collective coherence: ‘The best form is there already and no one should be afraid of using it, even if the basic idea for it comes from someone else. Enough of our geniuses and their originality. Let us keep on repeating ourselves. Let one building be like another. We won’t be published in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and we won’t be made professors of applied art, but we will have served ourselves, our times, our nation and mankind to the best of our ability.’

Few architects have listened. A commission for a house or an office remains an opportunity to reconsider from first principles the design of a window frame or front door. But an architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor. However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and adherence to procedure emerge as the more significant virtues in a great many others. We rarely wish to be surprised by novelty as we round street corners. We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy. We need the discipline offered by similarity, as children need regular bedtimes and familiar, bland foods. We require that our environments act as guardians of a calmness and direction on which we have a precarious hold. The architects who benefit us most may be those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.

5.

Then again, our love of order is not without limit, as we will recognise when we stand in front of a multistorey office building whose every window consists of an identical square of reflective glass locked into an identical aluminium frame, whose every floor resembles every other, which makes no obvious distinctions between right and left or front and back, and on whose surface not even a stray aerial or security camera is allowed to disturb the harmony of a master grid. Rather than exciting our admiration with evidence of its ordered nature, such a box may provoke feelings of lassitude or irritation. In its presence, we are likely to forget the effort that would have been required to wrest order out of chaos – and instead of praising the building for its regularity, we may condemn it for its tedium.

Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order – that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. Thus, in St Mark’s Square in Venice, it is the façade of the Doge’s Palace which arrests and enchants us, not that of the Procuratie Vecchie, for though both façades are programmatic, only the palace’s is endowed with a pattern sufficiently elaborate to render vivid a sense of order. This great Gothic box, in which no one storey duplicates any other in its height or decorative motif, confidently holds our gaze as we try to decipher in its forms an intelligence we can intimate but not immediately understand. There is no simple system of repetition at work here. The top-floor windows and ground-floor arches are of the same family and yet are variously sized and interspaced. The cloverleaf niches at the very top echo the carvings over the columns of the first-floor gallery, without, however, being aligned with them, each storey seeming to pursue a congruent but independent path. There are shifts of mood as the eye ascends the façade, so that whereas the ground floor conveys a sensible and workmanlike air, with feet dug plainly and uncomplainingly into the ground, the first floor takes on the character of an embroidered dress. The smooth mass of white and pink brickwork which sits above evokes a patterned tablecloth, with the arches of the gallery now transformed into tassels and the ground-floor arches into table legs. The whole ends on a joyful note, the decorations of the roof line hinting at carnival hats saluting the skies of Venice.

The limits of order:

Office building, Trenton, New Jersey, 1995

By comparison, there are no puzzles to detain or astonish us in the Classical front of the Procuratie Vecchie. The eye at once deduces the scheme behind its design, where the ground floor sets a pattern which is unimaginatively imitated on a smaller scale on both the first and second floors. The difference between this building and the Doge’s Palace is like the difference between a monotone drum beat and a Bach fugue.

6.

The most obvious means of creating complexity in a façade is through variations in the handling of doors and windows. But a pleasingly complex effect can also be attained through the use of brick, limestone, marble, patinated copper, wood and concrete, materials somewhat rough and uncivilised in appearance, in each of which something organic and untamed seems to stir. Beauty is a likely offspring when order is imposed on such vital materials: when spirit is aligned with logic. As Novalis advised: ‘In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.’

The tedium of order: Mauro Coducci, Procuratie Vecchie, Venice, 1532

There are masonry walls that perfectly honour the German poet’s insight, where every brick seems alive, unruly and individual, freighted with a distinctive personality and story. One brick may be gnarled and dark, another pink and innocent, a third stubbornly small, a fourth coloured and textured like walnut bread. Yet all these disparate characters will settle side by side, end to end, in creamy mortar, conforming to the selfsame master scheme, perfectly balanced between singularity and concord.

The pleasure of order combined with complexity: Doge’s Palace, Venice, 1340–1420

Flagstone floors can present us with a similar picture of harmony between contrary forces. There are floors in which large, obtuse stones have been persuaded by a mason to take their place within a methodical grid. One senses how the excesses in the character of these stones was tempered, how they were educated out of the savagery still evident in the craggy cliff-faces from which they were heaved. They had to surrender their defiance, trim their mossy beards, and smooth their warts and bunions, all for the sake of communal discipline – contributing to a floor where, as we make our way across it, we can appreciate order without danger of boredom and vigour without the shadow of anarchy.

Wooden floors offer analogous pleasures when planks, which once had the pulse of nature flowing through them, submit to the will of the saw and yet when, within each plank, enough signs of life remain to counterpoint the carpenter’s geometry. We can see eddies, swirls and imperfections, as if the wood were a turbulent but frozen river. Irregularities remain – a knot that hasn’t been planed down, or a dip or buckle that hasn’t been smoothed – and yet these features are gracious rather than threatening, reminders of complexity, for they are neatly contained within a series of calm parallel lines and right angles, fixed in formation by long iron nails.

The animating tension between order and chaos can be explored not only through materials but also through contours and sites. John Nash’s Park Crescent in Marylebone, for example, had it been laid out in a straight line, would have amounted to a relatively banal row of terraced houses. What advances its particular beauty is our sense that the order it displays has been achieved against the contrary and subversive pull exerted by a curve. We can imagine the difficulty involved in setting each building at a finely graded angle to its neighbours, and in moulding a façade around the recalcitrant arc of a semicircle.

In Diener and Diener’s Langhaus apartment block in Amsterdam’s eastern docklands, a massive, highly repetitive structure finds its regularity mitigated by the combination of an asymmetrical rhythm in the windows (6:12:21), the coarse, variegated bricks of the façades and the siting of the block on the edge of a sombre, tempestuous waterway – details which ensure that the building will end up on the correct, magnificent side of ordered.

In an adjoining part of the same Dutch development, a strict building code forces rows of terraced houses to adopt identical dimensions, a width of 4.2 metres and a height of 9.5 metres. Yet within these boundaries, a high degree of exuberance and inventiveness is allowed in terms of materials, window styles and individual floor heights. As our eyes scan the façades fronting the canals, we delight in their variations while admiring the rigorous parameters within which they play themselves out. A similar ethic obtains in Telč, in the Czech Republic, where the rigid ground plan specified for the houses which line the main square is offset by a liberal attitude towards colours, mouldings and roof shapes. The result recalls an endearing line-up of schoolchildren whose chief (and perhaps only) resemblance consists in being all of the same height.

Diener and Diener, Langhaus, Java Island, Amsterdam, 2001

West 8/Borneo Sporenburg Houses, Amsterdam, 1997

Main Square, Telč, South Moravia, sixteenth century

7.

Such works emphasise the truth of the ancient maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity. Just as we cannot appreciate the attractions of safety without a background impression of danger, so, too, it is only in a building which flirts with confusion that we can apprehend the scale of our debt to our ordering capacities.

Flirting with being boring, rescued by the scale and the curve:

John Nash, Park Crescent, 1812

Remove either one, and something is lost:

Karljosef Schattner, Institute of Journalism, Eichstätt, 1987

Balance.

1.

Beneath the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is a likely outcome whenever architects skilfully mediate between any number of oppositions, including the old and the new, the natural and the man-made, the luxurious and the modest, and the masculine and the feminine.

2.

For decades the U-shaped Baroque building which houses the Institute of Journalism in Eichstätt had a courtyard in the middle, empty save for a flower bed and a bicycle rack. Then, in the mid 1980s, pressure for space led the institute’s trustees to commission a new structure from the architect Karljosef Schattner, who dropped an unapologetically modern concrete and glass block into the void between the existing gabled and decorated wings. Although dramatically different in style, the old and new parts have nevertheless achieved a seductive harmony as well as a curious codependence, with each relying on the other to downplay its faults and enhance its charms. Removing either building would render the remaining one pedantically hidebound or brutally modern, while together they accomplish a beguiling synthesis of emotional temperaments.

In the lobby of Louis Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, another reconciliation of opposites is effected through the interplay of concrete walls and inset panels made of English oak. It would be hard to name two materials with less in common than this pair. The strength, longevity and nobility of oak have long furnished the English with an idealised image of their own character. It is against backgrounds of richly textured oak that generations of gentlemen have read the Daily Telegraph in their clubs and dons have lunched in Oxbridge colleges. It was in oak trees that Robin Hood escaped the law and Charles II hid from Cromwell’s armies. It was English oak that provided Westminster Abbey with its ceiling and Nelson’s navy with its ships. Around polished panels of the wood, there therefore hover associations of rural life, aristocracy, history, the smells of leather and whisky – not to mention romantic notions of nationhood.

We are far from all of this with concrete, a material which embodies speed, economy and, in its reinforced variety, brute might. It is a quintessentially modern, democratic medium whose rediscovery by architects in the early twentieth century made possible many of the overtly functional structures of the technological age, including grain silos, garages, tower blocks and warehouses.

However, like an intelligent host faced with a couple of dinner guests from sharply opposed worlds, Kahn helps these two unlike elements to acknowledge each other’s virtues and surmount their mutual suspicion. He manages to reconcile them by making no attempt to disguise or minimise their differences. Unembarrassed to leave his concrete bare and unafraid to emphasise its poverty and starkness, Kahn encourages us to discover a new kind of beauty in its elephant-grey massing. At the same time, he lets us openly savour and celebrate the antique pleasures of oak, showing to full advantage the warm tones, clarity and striated grain with which time endowed it. As befits a building dedicated to the paintings of a nation more tortured than most by the competing claims of history and modernity, the Yale Center for British Art delivers an elegant essay on how past and present might learn to coexist and complement each other. In doing so, it sketches for us the dimensions of an ideal contemporary Englishness.

High in the Italian Alps, yet another building resolves a comparable tension between the country and the city, and the agrarian and the industrial. Herzog and de Meuron’s Stone House consists of an exposed concrete frame within which are set loose, mortarless stones quarried from the surrounding slopes. These stones, of the type used for centuries to build the region’s barns and farmhouses, are so irregular in colour and shape as to teeter on the edge of rustic incoherence, to be saved from it only by the rational geometry of their concrete frame. Like Kahn’s Yale Center, Herzog and de Meuron’s house achieves its effect by weaving a pattern of beauty from two aesthetic strands – meaning, also, two varieties of happiness – which we would never previously have imagined belonging together.

An ideal contemporary Englishness: Louis Kahn, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1977

Herzog and de Meuron, Stone House, Tavole, Liguria, 1988

3.

To explain the appeal of balance between contrasting elements in buildings, it seems natural to move the discussion beyond architecture, for it is not only visual beauty which draws us to these balanced works, but also, and perhaps even principally, the evidence they emit of possessing a distinctively human kind of goodness, or maturity.

It appears we cannot keep ourselves from semiconsciously reading our own dynamics into buildings and correlating the oppositions that certain examples display with competing sides of our own characters. The tension between curves and straight lines in a façade carries echoes of the pull between reason and emotion in ourselves. It is a human integrity that we see in unvarnished wood, and a human hedonism in gilded panels. Panes of glass etched with imprints of flowers and black concrete blocks (such as those found on the exterior walls of the University Library in Utrecht) seem the natural twins of masculine and feminine traits.

It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word ‘beautiful’, alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled. We, too, can descend towards extremes – of chaos or rigidity, decadence or austerity, machismo or effeminacy – even as we instinctively recognise that our well-being depends on our being able both to accommodate and to cancel out our polarities.

Men and women: Wiel Arets, University Library, Utrecht, 2004

Our attempts to harmonise our different aspects isn’t generally helped by the world around us, which tends to emphasise a range of awkward antitheses. Consider, for instance, the truisms which hold that one cannot be at the same time both funny and serious, democratic and refined, cosmopolitan and rural, practical and elegant, or masculine and delicate.

Balanced buildings beg to differ. Take, for example, the traditional antithesis between luxury and simplicity. The idea of luxury has tended to be associated with grandeur, pomposity and arrogance – while simplicity has been equated variously with squalor, incompetence and inelegance. However, the interior of Skogaholm Manor in Sweden, decorated towards the end of the eighteenth century, triumphantly contradicts any inclination to render the pairing of these two qualities impossible.

The furniture is detailed in a refined Rococo manner, carved with gentle, aristocratic curves and garlands of flowers. But as the eye moves towards the ground, something unusual comes into view. Where we might expect the chairs to meet a floor which resembled them in tone – made of marble, perhaps, or highly veneered parquetry – we instead find rough, unvarnished wooden planks, of the sort one might see in a hayloft. A similarly striking combination can be seen in the wall decorations, whose Neoclassical floral motifs, which might more predictably have been coloured in rich reds and golds, are instead executed in muted greys and browns.

A balanced building as a promise of a balanced life:

Interior, Skogaholm Manor, Närke, c. 1790

The manor house proposes a new human ideal, in which luxury would entail neither decadence nor a loss of contact with the democratic truths of the soul, and in which simplicity could be synthesised with nobility and refinement.

If certain subtly balanced buildings touch us, it is because they stand as exemplars of how we might adjudicate between the conflicting aspects of our characters, how we, too, might aspire to make something beautiful of our troubling opposites.

Elegance

1.

For the traveller who sets out from Zurich on a summer’s morning on a train bound south, for the Alps, the view is initially of a rolling pastoral landscape, in which cows feast on luminously green grass and occasionally glance up at the passing carriages with sad, almost wise brown eyes. For an hour, at least, nature is at her most benevolent. It is only beyond the town of Chur that the bucolic scene gives way to something more severe. The lush grass is gradually replaced by a terrain strewn with rubble and rock. Sheer walls of granite shoot up by the side of the train, alternating with precipitous canyons, silent but for the call of eagles and the cracking of branches. Along implausibly steep mountainsides, families of pine trees cling to narrow ledges like diligent soldiers on watch. While inside the carriage, everything remains as it was in the lowlands – pictures of a lake are still neatly screwed to the wall by the door, a bottle of apple juice continues to sit undrunk on the table – outside, we have journeyed to a place which resembles one of the less hospitable moons of Jupiter.

In a valley so steep that its gelatinous walls seem never to have been warmed by the sun, a drop of hundreds of feet ends in a furious brown river clotted with stones and brambles. As the train curves around the mountainside, a view opens up along its length, revealing that, several carriages ahead, the burgundy-red locomotive has taken the unexpected decision to cross from one side of the valley to the other, a manoeuvre it proceeds to execute without so much as pausing to confer with higher authorities. It makes its way over the gap, and through a small cloud, with the brisk formality one might associate with the most routine of activities, to which prayer and worship would be at once unnecessary and theatrical supplements. What has rendered this supernatural feat possible is a bridge for which nothing in this setting has prepared us – a perfectly massive yet perfectly delicate concrete bridge, marred by not the slightest stain or impurity, which can only have been dropped from the air by the gods, for we cannot imagine that there would be anywhere in this forsaken spot for humans to rest their tools. The bridge seems unimpressed by the razor-sharp stones around it, by the childish moods of the river and the contorted, ugly grimaces of the rock-face. It stands content to reconcile the two sides of the ravine like an impartial judge, modest and willingly literal-minded about its own achievements, ashamed lest it detain our attention or attract our gratitude.

Yet the bridge testifies to how closely a certain kind of beauty is bound up with our admiration for strength, for man-made objects which can withstand the life-destroying forces of heat, cold, gravity or wind. We see beauty in thick slate roofs that challenge hailstones to do their worst, in sea defences that shrug off the waves which batter them, and in bolts, rivets, cables, beams and buttresses. We feel moved by edifices – cathedrals, skyscrapers, hangars, tunnels, pylons – which compensate for our inadequacies, our inability to cross mountains or carry cables between cities. We respond with emotion to creations which transport us across distances we could never walk, which shelter us during storms we could not weather, which pick up signals we could never hear with our own ears and which hang daintily off cliffs from which we would fall instantly to our deaths.

Bernard Lovell, Charles Husband, Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 1957

2.

It follows from this that the impression of beauty we derive from an architectural work may be proportionally related to the intensity of the forces against which it is pitted. The emotional power of a bridge over a swollen river, for example, is concentrated at the point where the piers meet but resist the waters which rise threateningly around them. We shudder to think of sinking our own feet into such turbulent depths and venerate the bridge’s reinforced concrete for the sanguine way it deflects the currents which tyrannise it. Likewise, the heavy stone walls of a lighthouse acquire the character of a forbearing and kindly giant during a spiteful gale which does its best to pant them down, just as in a plane passing through an electrical storm, we can feel something approaching love for the aeronautical engineers who, in quiet offices in Bristol or Toulouse, designed dark grey aluminium wings that could flex through tempests with all the grace of a swan’s feathered ones. We feel as safe as we did when we were children being driven home in the early hours by our parents, lying curled up on the backseat under a blanket in our pyjamas, sensing the darkness and cold of the night through the window against which we rested our cheek. There is beauty in that which is stronger than we are.

3.

Nevertheless, because beauty is typically the result of a few qualities working in concert, it can take more to guarantee the appeal of a bridge or a house than strength alone. Both Robert Maillart’s Salginatobel and Isambard Brunei’s Clifton Suspension bridges are structures of strength; both attract our veneration for carrying us safely across a fatal drop – and yet Maillart’s bridge is the more beautiful of the pair for the exceptionally nimble, apparently effortless way in which it carries out its duty. With its ponderous masonry and heavy steel chains, Brunei’s construction has something to it of a stocky middle-aged man who hoists his trousers and loudly solicits the attention of others before making a jump between two points, whereas Maillart’s bridge resembles a lithe athlete who leaps without ceremony and bows demurely to his audience before leaving the stage. Both bridges accomplish daring feats, but Maillart’s possesses the added virtue of making its achievement look effortless – and because we sense it isn’t, we wonder at it and admire it all the more. The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance – holding, spanning, sheltering – with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted.

Robert Maillart, Salginatobel Bridge, Schiers, 1930

Isambard Brunei, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, 1864

4.

We would not, by this measure, describe a heavy steel beam as elegant if it carried only a tabletop, nor a teacup if its sides were four centimeters thick. Michael Hopkins’s canopy for Bracken House is liable to displease us because of the fuss it makes, through multiple bulky struts, of the task of holding up a few relatively light pieces of glass. There is a disproportion between the modest challenge the canopy is set and the laboured response it offers that violates the principles of elegance – just as Santiago Calatrava awes us through the economy and discreet intelligence with which his sculptures defy the pressures of gravity.

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. ‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,’ writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of a Maillart bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity.

Michael Hopkins, Bracken House, London, 1991

Santiago Calatrava, Running Torso, 1985

staircase, Shaker House, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, 1841

Silvia Gmür and Livio Vacchini, house in Beinweil am See, 1999

5.

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of a demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know – without ever having constructed one ourselves – that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Shakers’ work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we note how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated.

6.

Cardinal opportunities for elegance or its opposite lie in the way that columns are designed to hold up ceilings. Even as laypeople, we are adept at guessing the thickness that would be required safely to support a structure and esteem those columns that appear most diffident about the weight they are supporting. Whereas some varieties have broad enough shoulders but look disgruntled at having been asked to carry even a single storey, others hoist up ceilings as high as those of cathedrals without apparent strain, balancing massive weights on their narrow necks as if they were holding aloft a canopy made of linen. We welcome an appearance of lightness, or even daintiness, in the face of downward pressure – columns which seem to offer us a metaphor of how we, too, should like to stand in relation to our burdens.

How we should like to stand in relation to our burdens:

Left: Foster and Partners, Underground Station, Canary Wharf, 1999

Right: The Comares Palace, Alhambra, Granada, 1370

Windows offer further opportunities for the expression of architectural elegance, the determinant here being the relationship between the amount of glass and the extent of the frame that supports it. When diminutive panes are clasped within heavy, unapologetically broad mountings, we are likely to feel some of the same discomfort as when too many words are being employed to say too little. By contrast, the Georgian houses of Bath charm us by the ethereal way in which the windows appear to hover over their façades. Recognising, as their subsequent colleagues often have not, the intense beauty of the tenderly held pane, the city’s eighteenth-century architects competed with each other to develop frames in which the slenderest fingers of wood could fasten around the greatest expanses of glass. Pushing at the technological boundaries, they reduced glazing bars from 38mm (in the earliest houses in Queen Square) to 29mm and eventually to a mere 16 – contributing to windows with some of the same impelling grace as a Degas ballerina, fluidly pirouetting her sylph-like body on an axis of a mere five toes.

A magical ratio of frame to glass, and foot to body:

Left: Marlborough Buildings, Bath, eighteenth century

Right: Edgar Degas, The Star, 1879

7.

If we define elegance as arising in part from the triumph over a given architectural challenge – spanning a river, supporting a ceiling or holding glazing in place – then to the list of challenges we might add the more abstract one of neglect. We appreciate buildings that seem to have shrugged off the weight of carelessness and indifference.

Within the robust arches of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, the observant visitor will notice a series of small flowers fashioned out of wrought iron. To think these elegant is to acknowledge how unusual was the care that lay behind their creation. In a busy, often heedless world, they stand as markers of patience and generosity, of a kind of sweetness and even love: a kindness without ulterior motive. They are there for no other reason than that the architect believed they might entertain our eyes and charm our reason. They are markers of politeness, too, the impulse to go beyond what is required to discharge brute tasks – and of sacrifice as well, for it would have been easier to support the iron arches with straight-sided struts. Below, the mood may be workmanlike, and outside, in the streets, there will always be hurry and cruelty, but up on the ceiling, in a limited realm, flowers swirl and perhaps even laugh as they wend their way around a sequence of arches.

Henri Labrouste, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1850

Although we belong to a species which spends an alarming amount of its time blowing things up, every now and then we are moved to add gargoyles or garlands, stars or wreaths, to our buildings for no practical reason whatever. In the finest of these flourishes, we can read signs of goodness in a material register, a form of frozen benevolence. We see in them evidence of those sides of human nature which enable us to thrive rather than simply survive. These elegant touches remind us that we are not exclusively pragmatic or sensible: we are also creatures who, with no possibility of profit or power, occasionally carve friars out of stone and mould angels onto walls. In order not to mock such details, we need a culture confident enough about its pragmatism and aggression that it can also acknowledge the contrary demands of vulnerability and play – a culture, that is, sufficiently unthreatened by weakness and decadence as to allow for visible celebrations of tenderness.

William Kinman (to a design by Robert Adam), detail of ironwork balusters, 20 St James’s Square, London, 1774

friar, Wells Cathedral, Somerset, 1326

Coherence

1.

For years, on my way to and from the shops, I passed a house which, despite being one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen, taught me more about architecture than many masterpieces have done.

The house was positioned at one end of a tree-lined avenue in north London, where it attracted my attention through the evidence it gave of having undergone a severe identity crisis. It looked as though each wing and each floor of the house had been designed by a different team of architects, none of which had been permitted any knowledge of the work of its predecessors, so that the collective result was an uncomfortable patchwork of contrasting styles. While some aspects of the house aped the look of a Tudor cottage, others tugged towards the Gothic. There were clashing hints of the vocabularies of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Queen Anne. Even the top floor was contorted, seeming undecided as to whether it wanted to be a mansard or a regular, straight-sided storey.

Signs of an identity crisis: Left: London, NW3

The aesthetics of an English seaside bungalow applied to the dimensions of a skyscraper:

Right: Sidney Kaye, Tower Block, Shepherd’s Bush, 1971

2.

A few years later, I moved west, and there began to have similarly strong feelings about a tower block (one of four) on Shepherd’s Bush Green, built in the early 1970s by the architect Sidney Kaye. The block was imposing for this part of the capital, twenty storeys high, and visible from as far away as Hampstead. Its height did not, however, prevent it from seeming resolutely squat. Its roof ended dumbly, in a flat plane, below which a series of heavy white bands accentuated the horizontal axis. The windows, meanwhile, made no concession either to their views or to their upward progression, but remained identically shaped and sized from the ground floor to the top. It was as though the aesthetics of a post-war seaside bungalow had been applied to the dimensions of a skyscraper, resulting in a building which was unsure whether it wished to be seen from Hampstead or preferred to nestle modestly amid the dark, low, brick buildings more common to the area. Irritated by its uncertainty, I wanted to demand that it either make itself properly unobtrusive or else make the most of its height and bulk – but, in any case, that it stop straddling the line between meekness and assertion, like an adolescent who insists on taking to the stage but, once there, can only stare mutely and sullenly at the audience.

Not until several years later did I come to understand my dissatisfaction with the tower, thanks to an essay by Louis Sullivan with one of the more intriguing titles in the history of architectural criticism: ‘The Tall Office Artistically Considered’ (1896). Writing at the dawn of the age of the skyscraper, Sullivan advised his readers that many of the new tall buildings were in danger of stylistic incoherence. The problem was that even as their massing thrust upwards to a height of twenty or thirty storeys, their decorative motifs emphasised the horizontal axis, an orientation better suited to a two-storey Palladian villa. The combination caused them to seem artlessly conflicted about their aims, as if they were pulling at once upwards and sideways. Sullivan urged architects to let their skyscraper designs be guided by one coherent principle. ‘The chief characteristic of the tall building is that it is lofty,’ he proposed. ‘It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line.’ Within a few years, his suggestion would be consummately realised in the great skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, whose beauty seems the result of just such a decision to speak solely and in unison about height. From their tapered ground-floor entrances to their ruby-red lights blinking at the suburbs from the tips of their radio masts, these tall offices would be everything Sullivan wished: proud, soaring, exultant and inarguably coherent.

‘Every inch a proud and soaring thing’:

Cass Gilbert, Woolworth Building, New York, 1913

3.

When buildings talk, it is never with a single voice. Buildings are choirs rather than soloists; they possess a multiple nature from which arise opportunities for beautiful consonance as well as dissension and discord.

While certain buildings appear to have agreed on their aesthetic mission, persuading their disparate elements to pull together to make a logical contribution to the whole, others seem more conflicted about their intentions, their features heaving querulously in contrary directions. They may disagree about their size, with windows, roofs and doors clashing over questions of precedence. Or their forms may testify to unresolved squabbles about the nature of happiness.

Thus, in the portico of a Viennese villa designed by Otto Wagner, a statue speaks to us of the East, the columns around it of Ancient Greece and the ironwork of rustic Austrian lace, which generates a sense of a chaos nowhere evident in Palladio’s Villa Contarini, where the archway reconciles the columns, the plaster helps to counterpoint the roughness of the stonework and the statue offsets the austerity of the whole.

Otto Wagner, villa, Hüttelbergstrasse 26, Vienna, 1886

Andrea Palladio, Villa Contarini, Padova, 1546

We could say that nothing in architecture is ever ugly in itself; it is merely in the wrong place or of the wrong size, while beauty is the child of the coherent relationship between parts.

4.

Architectural incoherence is not limited to the designs of individual buildings. It can also, and no less grievously, reside in the relationship between a building and its context, geographical or chronological.

One summer, keen to take a break from routine, I booked myself into the Hotel de l’Europe, a vast red-brick building done up in the Neo-Renaissance style, of a kind often observed in the more expensive districts of Amsterdam. Rooms weren’t cheap: a standard double cost ¥42,000 (breakfast was a further ¥2,300 for the simplest order of rice, miso soup and vegetables). But at least the hotel was optimally positioned. It was only a five-minute walk from the Huis Ten Bosch royal palace in The Hague and, in the opposite direction, a ten-minute walk from Utrecht’s twelfth-century Nijenrode Castle. There were cheese shops everywhere, teams of Friesian horses and five ancient windmills. Furthermore, a field of 300,000 tulips bordered the buildings, giving way only where the ground began its steep ascent into mountains covered in dense Japanese cedar.

However, none of these details seemed able to shake me from an increasingly peculiar and heavy mood which had settled on me shortly after my arrival at the Hotel de l’Europe. My unhappiness must have had something to do with the fact that, certain appearances to the contrary, I was not in the Netherlands at all but rather in Japan, a forty-minute train ride outside Nagasaki, at a 152-acre theme park named Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village. This surreal playland had been designed to re-create, with astonishing fidelity, the look of pre-twentieth-century Holland, complete with streets and squares, a network of canals and The Hague’s royal palace. In building it, the Japanese, masters of handicraft, had been meticulous in their concern for authenticity: they had consulted original architectural plans and imported wood and bricks from the other side of the world. But such historical exactitude had succeeded only in rendering the place more eerie and unnerving.

The discomfort generated by finding oneself in a corner of the Netherlands in rural Japan alerts us to a further requirement that we might have of buildings: that they should not only harmonise their parts but in addition cohere with their settings; that they should speak to us of the significant values and characteristics of their own locations and eras. For a building to reflect its cultural context may be as central to its mission as that it should respond to its meteorological one – a building which ignores it having the troubling quality of one whose windows fail to open in the tropics or to close in the mountains.

Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village, Nagasaki, 1992

Hotel de l’Europe, Huis Ten Bosch, 1992

5.

Just as it is perturbing when our buildings deny their settings, so it can be pleasurable to find evidence of the opposite tendency – when buildings are marked by distinctly local architectural traits, even of the minor kind that often strike our eyes on touching down in a new country.

A few hours after having arrived in Japan, lying in bed in a Tokyo hotel vainly attempting to sleep, I noticed for the first time just how unusual were the light switches and plugs in my room. The excitement of having arrived in an unknown country coalesced around these fittings, which can be to a building what shoes are to a person: unexpectedly strong indicators of character. I discovered in them harbingers of the national particularities that had motivated my travels. They were promises of a distinctively local kind of happiness. My feelings stemmed not from a naive longing for folkloric exoticism, but from a wish to discover that the genuine differences that exist between lands might find adequate expression on an architectural plane. I wanted light switches, and by extension entire buildings, that could help to signal to me that I was here rather than there and alive now rather than then.

Taking a midnight walk around my hotel, I saw many more signs of an incontrovertibly Japanese identity. In a restaurant, I marvelled at the complex fascia of an electronically controlled toilet. Near a subway station, a vending machine offered bottled water and, as if this were an ordinary snack, packets of dried lobster claws. There were buildings fitted with rows of multicoloured fire-hydrants, and in a supermarket, tubs of seaweed floating in clear jelly. In an arcade, among driving and skiing games, a slot machine challenged me to make arrangements for dinner by catching a weary and confused crab using a set of motor-operated pincers.

I returned to bed and slipped into jet-lagged dreams illuminated by fractured images of neon signs, moss gardens, bullet trains, kimonos and crustaceans.

Marine Catcher, Shinjuku, Tokyo

6.

Unfortunately, the next morning found Tokyo less disposed to indulge my desire for local colour. A practical mood had settled over the city, as twenty million people made their way to work. The streets of the business districts were jammed with cars and dark-suited commuters: I might have been anywhere. With their advertising hoardings unlit, the buildings appeared wilfully ordinary. Clusters of bland skyscrapers dominated the skyline, their pedestrian forms mutely mocking the twelve hours of cloud and snow over which I had flown to reach them. For architectural interest, I might as well have been in Frankfurt or Detroit.

Even in more residential quarters, the architecture was almost entirely lacking in ethnic roots or local flavour. Vast new developments were everywhere, each house assembled of generic materials and forms which would have been unsurprising in almost any part of the developed world. There seemed precious little that was Japanese in Japanese architecture.

The early Modernists would not have complained of this, for they had looked forward to a rational era when local styles would vanish entirely from their profession, as they had done from industrial and product design. There was, after all, no such thing as a local-looking modern bridge or umbrella. Adolf Loos had compared the absurdity of asking for a specifically Austrian kind of architecture to asking for a particularly Austrian-looking bicycle or telephone. If the truth was universal, why demand a local variety of architecture? Tokyo seemed to epitomise the Modernist dream of a place where one might never know from the buildings alone what country one had strayed into.

7.

There were, nevertheless, a few places to turn for aesthetic relief. A friend recommended that I spend a night in an old-fashioned ryokan, or inn, faithful in most details to the architecture and design of the Edo period (1615–1868).

skyscrapers, Shiodome, Tokyo

Kamagaya City, Chiba Prefecture, 1993

The ryokan was an hour’s train ride outside Tokyo, nestled among hills and shrouded in mist. Surrounded by pine trees and a moss garden, it was housed in a long wooden pavilion capped with a traditional kawarane yane (tiled roof). A receptionist wearing a kimono and tabi (split-toed socks) guided me to my room, which was lined with fusuma (sliding doors) and shoji (paper) screens decorated with calligraphy. The view was onto a river and a forested slope. Before sunset, I enjoyed an onsen (outdoor bath) in an adjacent natural spring, then drank an iced barley tea in an alcove in the garden. Dinner came in a set of immaculate boxes. I savoured the yose-nabe (Japanese chowder) and kounomono (pickles) – then fell asleep to the sound of water pursuing a path down the mountain side over smooth flat ancient volcanic stones.

But in the morning, my sadness returned at the prospect of having to go back to Tokyo. Disconsolate, I ate a bowl of dried seaweed and ruminated on the schism between the aesthetic perfection of historic Japan and the graceless tedium of its modern incarnation.

On the train journey back, speeding again through a ruined landscape of bland housing estates and apartment blocks, I even began to take exception with the world of the ryokan, annoyed at its inability to translate and adapt itself to modern realities, its failure to work out some way to carry over its old charms into a new idiom.

My frustration with the ryokan was similar to a feeling I had once experienced in England, on a visit to the traditionally styled village of Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester. Despite its qualified success in capturing the spirit of country life in the eighteenth century, the place was ultimately maddening for its disconnection from the psychological and practical demands of contemporary society. It resembled an ancient relative to whom one was very close as a child, but who lacked any understanding of the adult whom circumstances had in the interim formed, whether for better or worse.

An architecture that cannot accept who we have grown into:

Poundbury, Dorchester, 1994

8.

During my stay, I did see occasional signs that the Japanese were inclined to connect their new buildings with their country’s past. But for the most part such attempts seemed half-hearted, overly sentimental or even downright impatient.

In a crowded section of Kyoto, atop an innocuous office block, amidst air conditioners and aerials, a tiny traditional shrine looked as if it had been dropped from the air to answer to certain inner needs left unmet by modern architecture. Past and present made no move here towards integration; instead they were happy to coexist, while seeming positive that there was nothing they might do to imbibe each other’s strengths.

Elsewhere, apartments had miniature pruned cedar trees outside their entrances and moss gardens in tubs hanging off balconies. I saw calligraphy on shower curtains and shoji screens fixed to kitchen doors. I ate in restaurants offering ‘authentic ancient rooms’ to tourists unbothered by plastic re-creations. The roof of an insurance company or a post office would occasionally curve upwards gently at the edges in a nod to the Tokugawa style.

Shijo-dori, Kyoto

But the failure of such attempts to rise beyond the kitsch illustrates the difficulties of finding a modern form to embody traditional features of a culture. Paper screens will not necessarily make a house Japanese in spirit; nor will concrete and patinated copper guarantee that it won’t be. The true heirs of Tokugawa houses frequently bear no simple outward resemblance to their masters: the resemblance is more subtle, relying on proportions and relations – just as the finest translators of Lady Murasaki are often those who take extensive liberties with individual words, knowing that methodical transposition is rarely the way to stay true to original intentions.

9.

I’d first noted some of the difficulties of translation in a new development in one of London’s most famous Classical squares. The architects responsible for the office block which dominates the north-western side of Manchester Square correctly sensed that the handling of the windows was key to harmonising with the existing façades, and so gave their building white rectangular window frames.

Unfortunately, these architects failed to register that Classical frames are noteworthy not because of their colour or shape but because of their slenderness and its associated elegance – qualities which the architects grievously sacrificed by resorting to peculiar and massive frames formed of steel I-beams. Despite their sincere wish to respect the past, the architects had spectacularly bypassed the real reasons why the past might have been worth respecting in the first place. They would have been better off had they taken their guidance from another set of windows entirely, those on the façade of the Queen’s Building in Cambridge. Though these frames aren’t white but a silvery black, and horizontal rather than vertical, they appear more richly endowed with the true qualities of Classical architecture than any of their counterparts on the apparently more respectful London block. A true homage seldom looks exactly like one.

GMW Architects, north-west side, Manchester Square, London, 2001

south-east side, Manchester Square, late eighteenth century

Classicism in modern guise:

Michael Hopkins, Queen’s Building, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1995

10.

What, I wondered, might a successful example of modern Japanese architecture look like – one which avoided kitsch and was properly coherent with its place and time?

The national angle to this question has at times, of other countries, been answered in quasi-mystical ways, as if to suggest that borderlines somehow demarcate objective, knowable personalities which the buildings within ought to take a reading of and then passively reflect. In ‘On German Architecture’ (1772), J. W. Goethe declared that Germany was in its ‘essence’ a Christian land, and that the only appropriate style for new German buildings was therefore Gothic. On seeing a cathedral, wrote Goethe, ‘a German ought to thank God for being able to proclaim aloud, “That is German architecture, our architecture.’ ”

But, in reality, no country ever either owns a style or is locked into it through precedent. National architectural identity, like national identity overall, is created rather than dictated by the soil. History, culture, weather and geography will offer up a great range of possible themes for architects to respond to (not so broad a range as the builders of Huis Ten Bosch may have hoped, perhaps, nor as restricted a one as Goethe proposed). If we end up thinking of certain styles as the indissoluble products of specific places, it is only a tribute to the skill with which architects have coaxed us into seeing the environment through their eyes, and so made their achievements appear inevitable.

At issue, therefore, is not so much what a national style is as what it could be made to be. It is the privilege of architects to be selective about which aspects of the local spirit they want to throw into relief. While most societies experience varying degrees of violence and chaos, for example, we are unlikely to want our buildings to reflect those features of the Zeitgeist. Then again, we would feel uncomfortable if architects abandoned reality altogether to produce designs which alluded to none of our prevailing morals or goals. We no more favour delusion in our built environment than we do in individuals.

An adequately contextual building might thus be defined as one which embodies some of the most desirable values and the highest ambitions of its era and place – a building which serves as a repository for a workable ideal.

The attributes of such a building might be compared with those of a prototypically admirable human being in an identical context. Oscar Niemeyer once expressed the wish that his architectural works should share the outlook and attitudes of the most enlightened Brazilians of the era: they should appreciate the burdens and privileges of their country’s colonial past without being overwhelmed by them, should be sympathetic to modern technology, yet should retain a healthy playfulness and sensuality. And, above all, he noted, they should indicate their affinity for Brazil’s ‘white beaches, its huge mountains – and its beautiful tanned women’.

A similar portrait, this time of an ideal Sri Lankan, animates Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament Island on the outskirts of Colombo. Here the buildings are a synthesis of local and international, historical and modern, concerns, the roofs evoking the double pitch of the monasteries and royal palaces of precolonial Kandy, while the interiors successfully combine Sinhalese, Buddhist and Western features. Not only do Bawa’s buildings provide a home for the nation’s legislative government, they also grant us a seductive image of what a modern Sri Lankan citizen might be like.

A Brazilian ideal, sympathetic to the country’s ‘white beaches, its huge mountains – and its beautiful tanned women’:

Oscar Niemeyer, Kubitschek House, Pampulha, Minas Gerais, 1943

11.

There turned out to be a number of domestic buildings, in Tokyo and elsewhere, in subtle sympathy with the inner aspirations of the great traditional works of Japanese architecture.

The virtues of the nation’s architecture – simplicity, efficiency, modesty, elegance – could be re-encountered in houses which to the casual eye seemed to have no contact with the past. Only on closer inspection did one realise that a sensibility almost identical to that of ancient houses had been embedded in contemporary materials.

‘A house like me’:

Geoffrey Bawa, Parliament Island, Colombo, 1982

On a back street in Tokyo, one such house showed a blank concrete face to the world. A front door made of steel gave onto a narrow passage which in turn opened out into a whitewashed two-storey atrium, illuminated by diffused light that shone through frosted windows in the roof. Although this was a domestic space, it had a quality of emptiness and purity more typically associated with religious buildings. In inviting a retreat from the world, the house seemed to be honouring the Zen Buddhist belief in a need to create a refuge from daily life, not in order to forgo reality but so as more closely to approach certain of its central inner truths.

There were no windows with views in this house, perhaps the better to help its inhabitants see what truly needed to be observed. The light which washed down from above had the same gentle, indirect value as the glow emanating from a shoji screen. The architect had realised, as many of his lesser colleagues had not, that this luminous effect was in no way dependent on the use of paper and wood and could be achieved just as well, and in a more enduring manner, through panes of sandblasted glass. Thanks to these, the house had an otherworldly, abstracted air: to be inside it was to feel close to a realm of shadows and mist. When it rained, the pitter-patter of water sounded overhead, but the glass revealed nothing of the clouds from which the raindrops fell. This was an architecture designed to train the mind away from phenomena and towards essences.

Tezuka Architects, Jyubako House, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, 2004

In a second house, the two wings of the property were connected by an open atrium, so that even in winter it was necessary to walk outside in order to pass between the living and sleeping areas. While it did confirm a frequent Western complaint regarding the mysteriously glacial aspect of Japanese houses, this lack of insulation was evidently far from accidental, being tied instead to a desire, Zen in origin, to remind the occupants of their connection to, and dependence on, nature, and of the unity of all living things. A walk to the kitchen in midwinter delivered a brief and tart lesson about man’s place in a larger and more powerful universe. Yet this wider natural world was evoked in the most abstract of ways, not through a view onto a lawn planted with mature specimens, but through the very temperature of the air, a thin carpeting of moss and the careful placement of three volcanic rocks.

These great modern houses I encountered were often simple in their furnishings, echoing the long-standing pull of Japanese aesthetics towards emptiness and austerity. The medieval courtier Kamo no Chomei, in his Tale of the Ten Foot Square Hut (1212), had described the liberation that awaits those who strip themselves of superfluous possessions and attend to the murmurings of their own souls. Simple wooden huts had as a result acquired a privileged place in the Japanese imagination. The great lords of the Momoyama (1573–1614) and Edo periods had every few months left their mansions and castles behind to spend time in huts, in obedience to the Zen insight that spiritual enlightenment can come only through a life without embellishment.

Others of these modern dwellings were just as faithful to the traditional Japanese fondness for material imperfection. The heavy outside walls of one weekend house a few hours’ drive out of Tokyo were constructed from panels of rough and rusting iron, stained by moss and water. No attempt had been made to clean up these stains or to protect the material with a network of drainpipes; indeed, there seemed a deliberate joy to be had here in watching nature attack the works of man. The architects of the older tea houses had for much the same reason left their wood unvarnished, treasuring the ensuing patina and marks of age, which they saw as wise symbols of the passing of all things. In his In Praise of Shadows (1933) Junichiro Tanizaki attempted to explain why he and his countrymen found flaws so beautiful: ‘We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or sake cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary we begin to enjoy it only when the lustre has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky, patina.’ Buddhist writings associated an intolerance for the imperfections of wood and stone with the failure to accept the inherently frustrating nature of existence. Unlike our own disappointments and decline, however, those represented in architectural materials were of an eminently graceful kind, for wood and stone, and now concrete and wood, age slowly and with dignity. They do not shatter hysterically like glass, or tear like paper, but discolour with a melancholy, noble air. The rusted and stained walls of the weekend house made for a most artful receptacle in which to entertain thoughts of decline and mortality.

12.

Successful modern reinterpretations of traditional architectural styles move us not only at an aesthetic level. They show us how we, too, might straddle eras and countries, holding on to our own precedents and regions while drawing on the modern and the universal.

The great modern houses are happy to admit to their youth and honestly to benefit from the advances of contemporary materials, but they also know how to respond to the appealing themes of their ancestry and can thereby heal the traumas generated by an era of brutally rapid change. Without patronising the history they profess to love, they show us how we, too, might carry the valuable parts of the past and the local into a restless global future.

13.

A few months after returning from Japan, I found myself on a road trip through Holland, and realised that the Dutch were on occasion as capable of pastiche as the Japanese. Here also were many houses that gave no clue as to how a fulfilled life might be lived in the present and therefore, while a great deal more coherent with their location than their brethren near Nagasaki, were no less incoherent with their era.

But on the road west from Amsterdam, on the way to Haarlem and the coast, I came across a new quarter of the village of Vijfhuizen, which triumphantly corrected all the errors of which the Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village had been so guilty, for its houses had not only grown up in the appropriate country, they had also beautifully adapted themselves to the century in which they were built.

From a distance, the village looked traditional. The roofs were pitched, and the houses spaced out as on a typical suburban grid. Only on nearing the site did one start to notice particularly contemporary touches: the profiles of the buildings were sharply edged, as though suggesting a touch of irony or self-consciousness about their primordial shapes. The roofs, instead of being tiled, were made of ribbed-steel plating, while the walls, rather than being made of brick, were a mixture of steel panels and identically grooved wood. In this combination of traditional form and modern materials, one sensed the unfolding of a mutually respectful conversation between past and present.

Reconciling the old and new on a Swiss mountain:

Peter Zumthor, Gugalun House, Versam, 1994

The houses knew how to accommodate themselves to the realities of the modern Netherlands while remaining quietly aware of their lineage. They looked like reinventions of the archetypal Dutch home that had succeeded in succumbing neither to nostalgia nor to amnesia.

Coherence in place and in time:

S333 Architects, New Quarter, Vijfhuizen, 2004

Self-knowledge

1.

I once spent a summer in a small hotel in the second arrondissement in Paris, a stone’s throw away from the chilly seriousness of the old Bibliothèque Nationale, where I repaired every morning in a vain attempt to research a book I hoped to write (but never did). It was a lively part of town, and when I was bored with my work, which was most of the time, I would often sit in a café adjacent to my hotel named, as if out of a tourist guide, Chez Antoine. Antoine was dead, but his brother-in-law, Bertrand, had taken over the café and ran it with unusual conviviality and charisma. Everyone, it seemed, dropped by Chez Antoine at some point in the day. Elegant women would have coffee and a cigarette at the counter in the morning. Policemen lunched there, students whiled away the afternoons on the covered terrace, and by evening there’d be a mixture of scholars, politicians, prostitutes, divorcees and tourists, flirting, arguing, having dinner, smoking and playing pinball. As a result, although I was alone in Paris, and went for days hardly speaking to anyone, I felt none of the alienation with which I was familiar in other cities – in Los Angeles, for example, where I had once lived for a few weeks in a block between freeways. That summer, like many people before and since, I imagined no greater happiness than to be able to live in Paris for ever, pursuing a routine of going to the library, ambling the streets and watching the world from a corner table at Chez Antoine.

2.

I was therefore surprised to find out, some years later, while looking through an illustrated book on urban planning, that the very area in which I had stayed, including my hotel, the café, the local laundry, the newspaper shop, even the National Library, had all fallen within a zone which one of the most intelligent and influential architects of the twentieth century had wanted systematically to dynamite and replace with a great park punctuated at intervals with eighteen sixty-storey cruciform towers stretching up to the lower slopes of Montmartre.

The future of a great city:

Le Corbusier, Plan ‘Voisin’ for Paris, 1922

The plan seemed so obviously demented that it intrigued me. I discovered photos of Le Corbusier leaning over his model, explaining it to a line of local councillors and businessmen. He had no tail or horns. He appeared intelligent and humane. Only after properly understanding how a rational person might come up with an idea to destroy half of central Paris, only after sympathising with the aspirations behind the plan and respecting its logic, did it seem fair to begin to mock, or indeed feel superior to, this remarkable conception of the future of a city.

3.

Le Corbusier had drawn up his Parisian scheme at a moment of unequalled urban crisis. Across the developing world, cities were exploding in size. In 1800 the French capital was home to 647,000 people. By 1910 three million were squeezed within its inadequate confines. Much of France’s peasant class had within a few years decided that it would collectively put down its scythes in order to head for the greater opportunities of the city – unleashing an environmental and social catastrophe in the process.

Under the eaves of apartment buildings, several families typically shared a single room. In 1900, in the poorer districts of Paris, one toilet generally served seventy residents. A cold-water tap was a luxury. Factories and workshops were sited in the middle of residential areas, emitting smoke and deadly effluents. Children played in courtyards awash with raw sewage. Cholera and tuberculosis were a constant threat. Streets were choked by traffic day and night. Evening papers reported a steady stream of accidents involving severed limbs. Following a collision with an omnibus, a horse was impaled on a lamp-post on the Avenue de l’Opéra. There was not much that was picturesque about the early-twentieth-century city.

4.

Le Corbusier, for one, was horrified by such conditions. ‘All cities have fallen into a state of anarchy,’ he remarked. ‘The world is sick.’ Given the scale of the crisis, drastic measures were in order, and the architect was in no mood to feel sentimental about their side effects. Historic Paris was, after all, just a byword for tubercular Paris.

His manifesto, contained in two books, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (1925) and The Radiant City (1933), called for a dramatic break from the past: ‘The existing centres must come down. To save itself every great city must rebuild its centre.’ In order to alleviate overcrowding, the ancient low-rise buildings would have to be replaced by a new kind of structure only recently made possible by advances in reinforced concrete technology: the skyscraper. ‘2,700 people will use one front door,’ marvelled Le Corbusier, who went on to imagine ever taller towers, some housing as many as 40,000 people. When he visited New York for the first time, he came away disappointed by the scale of the buildings. ‘Your skyscrapers are too small,’ he told a surprised journalist from the Herald Tribune.

By building upwards, two problems would be resolved at a stroke: overcrowding and urban sprawl. With room enough for everyone in towers, there would be no need for cities to spread outwards and devour the countryside in the process. ‘We must eliminate the suburbs,’ recommended Le Corbusier, whose objection was as much based on his hatred of what he took to be the narrow mental outlook of suburbanites as on the aesthetics of their picket-fenced villas. In the new kind of city, the pleasures of the town would be available to all. Despite a population density of 1,000 per hectare, everyone would be comfortably housed. Even the concierge would have his own study, added Le Corbusier.

From Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning 1925

A skyscraper for 40,000 people:

From Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1925

There would be ample green space as well, as up to 50 per cent of urban land would be devoted to parks – for, as the architect put it, ‘the sports ground must be at the door of the house.’ What was more, the new city would not merely have parks; it would itself be a vast park, with large towers dotted among the trees. On the roofs of the apartment blocks, there would be games of tennis, and sunbathing on the shores of artificial beaches.

Simultaneously, Le Corbusier planned to abolish the city street: ‘Our streets no longer work. Streets are an obsolete notion. There ought not to be such things as streets; we have to create something that will replace them.’ He witheringly pointed out that the design of Paris’s street plan dated from the middle of the sixteenth century, when ‘the only wheeled traffic consisted of two vehicles, the Queen’s coach and that of the Princess Diane.’ He resented the fact that the legitimate demands of both cars and people were constantly and needlessly compromised, and he therefore recommended that the two henceforth be separated. In the new city, people would have footpaths all to themselves, winding through woods and forests (‘No pedestrian will ever meet an automobile, ever!’), while cars would enjoy massive and dedicated motorways, with smooth, curving interchanges, thus guaranteeing that no driver would ever have to slow down for the sake of a pedestrian.

From Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, 1933

Even more than Paris, New York was for Le Corbusier the epitome of an illogical city, because it had managed to graft skyscrapers, the buildings of the future, onto a tight street plan better suited to a medieval settlement. On his trip around the United States, he advised his increasingly bemused American hosts that Manhattan ought to be demolished to make way for a fresh and more ‘Cartesian’ attempt at urban design.

The division of cars and people was but one element in Le Corbusier’s plan for a thoroughgoing reorganisation of life in the new city. All functions would now be untangled. There would no longer be factories, for example, in the middle of residential areas, thus no more forging of iron while children were trying to sleep near by.

The new city would be an arena of green space, clean air, ample accommodation and flowers – and not just for the few but, as a caption in The Radiant City promised, ‘for all of us!!!’

5.

Ironically, what Le Corbusier’s dreams helped to generate were the dystopian housing estates that now ring historic Paris, the waste lands from which tourists avert their eyes in confused horror and disbelief on their way into the city. To take an overland train to the most violent and degraded of these places is to realise all that Le Corbusier forgot about architecture and, in a wider sense, about human nature.

For example, he forgot how tricky it is when just a few of one’s 2,699 neighbours decide to throw a party or buy a handgun. He forgot how drab reinforced concrete can seem under a grey sky. He forgot how awkward it is when someone lights a fire in the lift and home is on the forty-fourth floor. He forgot, too, that while there is much to hate about slums, one thing we don’t mind about them is their street plan. We appreciate buildings which form continuous lines around us and make us feel as safe in the open air as we do in a room. There is something enervating about a landscape neither predominantly free of buildings nor tightly compacted, but littered with towers distributed without respect for edges or lines, a landscape which denies us the true pleasures of both nature and urbanisation. And because such an environment is uncomfortable, there is always a greater risk that people will respond abusively to it, that they will come to the ragged patches of earth between their towers and urinate on tyres, burn cars, inject drugs – and express all the darkest sides of their nature against which the scenery can mount no protest.

In his haste to distinguish cars from pedestrians, Le Corbusier also lost sight of the curious codependence of these two apparently antithetical forces. He forgot that without pedestrians to slow them down, cars are apt to go too fast and kill their drivers, and that without the eyes of cars on them, pedestrians can feel vulnerable and isolated. We admire New York precisely because the traffic and crowds have been coerced into a difficult but fruitful alliance.

A city laid out on apparently rational grounds, where different specialised facilities (the houses, the shopping centre, the library) are separated from one another across a vast terrain connected by motorways, deprives its inhabitants of the pleasures of incidental discoveries and presupposes that we march from place to place with a sense of unflagging purpose. But whereas we may leave the house with the ostensible object of consulting a book in a library, we may nevertheless be delighted on the way by the sight of the fishmonger laying out his startled, bug-eyed catch on sheets of ice, by workmen hoisting patterned sofas into apartment blocks, by leaves opening their tender green palms to the spring sunshine, or by a girl with chestnut hair and glasses reading a book at the bus stop.

The addition of shops and offices adds a degree of excitement to otherwise inert, dormitory areas. Contact, even of the most casual kind, with commercial enterprises gives us a transfusion of an energy we are not always capable of producing ourselves. Waking up isolated and confused at three in the morning, we can look out of the window and draw solace from the blinking neon signs in a storefront across the road, advertising bottled beer or twenty-four-hour pizza and, in their peculiar way, evoking a comforting human presence through the paranoid early hours.

All of this, Le Corbusier forgot – as architects often will.

6.

Then again, omissions are to be expected given the difficulties of understanding our needs and converting this knowledge into the unambiguous language of the architectural plan. It is easy enough to recognise when a room is properly lit and a staircase easy to navigate, but so much harder to convert this intuitive sense of well-being into a logical understanding of the reasons for it. To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap.

No wonder so many buildings provide sad testimony to the arduousness of self-knowledge. No wonder there are so many rooms and cities where architects have failed to convert an unconscious grasp of their own needs into reliable instructions for satisfying the needs of others.

Our behaviour is riddled with eccentricities which frustrate casual attempts at prediction. Rather than sitting in the middle of a room on a soft armchair, we are capable of deciding that we feel more comfortable perched on a hard bench set against the walls. We may ignore the path built for us by a landscape architect in order to trace out our own shortcut – just as our children may find it more amusing to play around a car-park ventilation shaft than on a purpose-built playground.

Our designs go wrong because our feelings of contentment are woven from fine and unexpected filaments. It isn’t sufficient that our chairs comfortably support us; they should in addition afford us a sense that our backs are covered, as though we were at some level still warding off ancestral fears of attacks by a predator. When we approach front doors, we appreciate those that have a small threshold in front of them, a piece of railing, a canopy or a simple line of flowers or stones – features that help us to mark the transition between public and private space and appease the anxiety of entering or leaving a house.

We don’t generally experience chronic pain when the fine-grained features of design have been ignored; we are simply forced to work harder to overcome confusion and eddies of unease. Yet if someone were to ask us what was the matter, we might not know how to elaborate on the malign features of our environment. We might resort to mystical language, citing unlucky harmonies between the sofa and the carpet, inauspicious magnetisms emanating from the door or contrary energies flowing out of the window – such terms compensating for the difficulties we otherwise have in explaining our irritations. Although nothing in our feeling about places can honestly be said to defy reason, it is not hard to see why we might look to a religious superstructure to lend substance to our elusive discomforts.

However, these can in the end always be traced back to nothing more occult than a failure of empathy, to architects who forgot to pay homage to the quirks of the human mind, who allowed themselves to be seduced by a simplistic vision of who we might be, rather than attending to the labyrinthine reality of who we are.

7.

The failure of architects to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives. Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendency which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

In architecture, as in so much else, we cast around for explanations to our troubles and fix on platitudinous targets. We get angry when we should realise we are sad and tear down ancient streets when we ought instead to introduce proper sanitation and street lights. We learn the wrong lessons from our griefs while grasping in vain for the origins of contentment.

The places we call beautiful are, by contrast, the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans – a combination that enables them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we even had.