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The Architecture of Happiness_Alain de Botton

by Iamhere 2014. 9. 9.


The Architecture of Happiness

저자
De Botton, Alain 지음
출판사
Vintage Books | 2008-04-08 출간
카테고리
문학/만화
책소개
『여행의 기술』, 『불안』, 『동물원에 가기』로 유명한 ‘일상의...
가격비교 글쓴이 평점  



  프랭크 로이드 라이트의 Falling Water의 감동을 이어가기 위해 다시 집어든 알랭 드 보통의 행복의 건축학. 저자는 건축과 장식이 가벼운 것 혹은 쓸모 없는 것으로 치부되기도 하지만 우리가 살아가는 공간을 짓는다는 것은 결국 우리의 행복을 빚어내고 추구하는 가치를 투영하는 일이라고 썰을 풀어나간다 (무한 공감!!). 중간에 같은 얘기를 너무 반복해서 조금은 지루해지는 감이 있지만 좋은 건축의 특질을 짚어내는 부분은 꽤나 공감되고 재미있었다 (이러한 특질들은 건축물 뿐만 아니라 일상의 디자인과 패션에도 적용될 수 있을 듯?). 아래는 맘에 들었던 부분들을 발췌:


In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness.




A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.



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. 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 chracters, how we, too, might aspire to make something beautiful of our troubling opposites.



Elegance: 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.


It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames.