We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being 'moved' by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
-- Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness --
Have a great Friday!
I have the de Botton's book!
ReplyDeleteI bought it tonight coming back from work - it was the last copy of that bookstore.
But, perhaps, first I should finish reading the book that I am currently reading...