Feature: Lecture - Alain de Botton on Living Architecture - June 30,

Published: 24 June 2010
by DAN CARRIER

IT was a late night journey home from delivering a lecture in Bristol that turned philosopher and author Alain de Botton into a property developer and holiday home salesman.

While it may seem a strange departure for a man whose book titles include How Proust Can Change Your Life and Essays In Love, it is actually a straight-forward step – he hopes to improve the image of architectural Modernism and in so doing make our country a nicer place to live. 

The result is a new scheme, launched this week, that aims to take away the mystique around Modernism. It is also the topic for a lecture by the philosopher on Wednesday at Regent Park’s Royal College of Physicians.

It came about after Alain wrote a book on the philosophy of modern architecture, having become interested in the impact of the built environment on our lives. “I was critical of nostalgia and low expectations,” he says. “One night I had a dark moment of the soul. I realised that however pleasing it is to write a book about an issue one feels passionately about, the truth is – a few exceptions aside – books don’t change anything. If I cared so much about architecture, wri­ting was just a coward’s way out; the real challenge was to build.”

Living Architecture is a not-for-profit organisation that hands over the keys to houses designed by some of the world’s leading architects for people to rent as holiday homes. In turn, hopes Alain, this will change the way we look at Modernism.

“Judging from the success of interior design magazines and property shows, you might think that the UK was now as comfortable with good contemporary architecture as it is with non-native food or music,” says the writer.

“But scratch beneath the London-centric focus, and you discover that Britain remains a country deeply in love with the old and terrified of the new. Country hotels compete to tell us how ancient they are; holiday cottages vaunt that they were already in existence when Jane Austen was a girl. The draughty sash window shows no signs of retiring.”

He thinks this is partly because of the pace of change that con­sumed Britain in the 19th century.

“The rapid change industrialisation brought about gave the nation a powerful feeling of nostalgia,” he claims. “Witness the Romantic poets and their admiration of the rural past. It followed from this that the British favoured oldfashioned houses, be they mock Tudor or mock Georgian.”

And he says today, Modernism is hugely inaccessible.

“While there are examples of great modern buildings in Britain, they tend to be in places that one passes through – airports, museums, offices – and the few modern houses that exist are almost all in private hands and cannot be visited,” he says. “This skews discussions of architecture. When people declare that they hate modern buildings they are speaking not from experience of homes, but from a distaste of post-war tower blocks or bland air-conditioned offices.”

He adds that 100 years since Modernism as a movement changed the way Europeans built their towns and city’s, British designers have come of age. 

“While lots of unfair things have been laid at Modernism’s doors, it is undeniably true that the best architects are now designing better spaces than 30 years ago and that some of this is down to them hav­ing learnt the lessons of the worst of the post-war estates,” he says. 

Alain has helped choose the architects: they include world famous architects such as Swiss-based Peter Zumthor, who has created a “mini-monastery” in Devon, through to young hip designers whose work is not yet widely known: Scottish firm NORD have created what Alain calls a “stark, black box” in the shadow of the Dungeness power station in Kent. 

“The idea has been to avoid the obvious and to place houses in locations one hadn’t necessarily ever thought of holidaying in, and to design rooms different from those that people know from their own homes,” says Alain.

“The hope is that in a tiny way, the project will push up standards of taste and change what big property developers will decide is a commercial proposition.”

• Alain de Botton gives his lecture on Living Architecture on June 30, at The Royal College of Physicians,
11 St Andrews Place, Regent’s Park, NW1, 7.15-8.30pm