The Architecture of Happiness

Why do some buildings make us feel at home and others make us feel alienated? Why does a perfectly functional room sometimes feel wrong, and an impractical one feel right? Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness takes these questions seriously — and in answering them, constructs a philosophy of the relationship between physical space and psychological state, between the buildings we inhabit and the selves we aspire to become.

Drawing on architecture, philosophy, psychology, and the history of taste, de Botton traces the ways in which the built environment expresses, reinforces, and sometimes undermines the values of the people who create and inhabit it — arguing that beauty in architecture is not a luxury but a deep human need, and that the design of our physical world is therefore a profoundly moral question.

Beautifully written and generously illustrated, this is de Botton at his most original — a book that will permanently change how you look at every building you enter. Published by Penguin.