This notion, however, seems lost on much of academic writing. Open a book on literary theory and one is apt to run into complex ideas smeared by even more complex (and often purposefully obscure) sentences. It is as if to be privy to some of the better theoretical information, one must speak a different, far less elegant language.
Alain de Botton has built a career on taking complicated ideas and writing about them without making it boring or hard to understand. De Botton does not share the impulse to further complicate an already complex notion, and in fact de Botton is one of the great champions of the cause to make books about the humanities readable and less pretentious (“wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax,” he writes). De Botton leaves the school-masterish smirk alone, and instead strives to teach his readers some of the great lessons found in the humanities (in travel, in philosophy, in love, in reading) and how this knowledge can make them happier.
His latest effort, The Architecture of Happiness, follows suit. In essence, this book seeks to provide an explanation for what happens when we walk into a building and are overcome with a sense of peace, irritability or what have you. He examines how we as humans attempt to “mold the material world to aesthetic ends” and how architecture specifically is our attempt to “render vivid to us who really we might be.” In essence, The Architecture of Happiness is a brief overview of architecture as a whole for the interested novice. He renders the complex notions that drive how we put together our dwellings, but writes it in such a way that his points are clear and his evidence true. It hopes to turn our attention to what we might otherwise ignore and make us better, happier, for it. And to readers, his books often resonate in exactly that manner.
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