The Architecture of Happiness

Oxford, 1840
Similarly, Charles Cockerell was judged to have been almost disgracefully deceptive and wasteful in his design for the Ashmolean Museum and Taylorian Institute in Oxford. His crime had been to place massive Ionic columns, which could have supported four storeys’ worth of masonry, around the outside of the building, where they carried nothing heavier than pots and statues, while leaving the real weight of the structure to be borne by another set of columns concealed within the walls

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us

The Ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus is said to have demanded of a heart-broken friend whose house had burnt to the ground, ‘If you really understand what governs the universe, how can you yearn for bits of stone and pretty rock?’

Architecture can render vivid to us who we might ideally be:

We are sometimes eager to celebrate the influence of our surroundings.

Architecture can render vivid to us who we might ideally be

“A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”
—The New York Review of Books