Hospitality Design - October 2012 - 52

perspectives

interview

alain de botton
Photography courtesy of Living Architecture and by Charles Hosea and Vincent Starr

DESIGN FOR LIVING
The works of Switzerland-born, London-based writer and philosopher Alain de Botton span novels, literary criticism, and meditations on religion, travel, and work. It was Clodagh’s particular admiration for his 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness that prompted her to contact him for this interview.

1. The Balancing Barn, by Dutch firm MVRDV, cantilevers over a Suffolk landscape. 2. Sliding windows and a glass floor in the Balancing Barn’s playful living room. 3. A Balancing Barn bedroom outfitted with bespoke furniture.

Tell us about your newest venture, Living Architecture.

Judging from the success of interior design magazines, you might think the UK is now as comfortable with good contemporary architecture as it is with food or music. But scratch beneath the metropolitan, Londoncentric focus, and you quickly discover that Britain remains a country deeply in love with the old and terri ed of the new. A few years ago, I wrote a book about architecture critical of British nostalgia. It received a healthy amount of a ention, on the back of which I was invited to a stream of conferences about the future of architecture. But one night, returning from a conference in Bristol, I had a dark moment. I realized that however pleasing it is to write a book one feels passionately about, the truth is—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. On the back of a notepad was born a project which o cially launched two years ago: Living Architecture, a not-for-pro t organization that puts up houses around the UK designed by some of the world’s top architects, available to the public to rent. Our dream was to allow people to experience what it is like to live and sleep in a space designed by an outstanding architectural practice. While there are examples of great modern buildings in Britain, they tend to be in places that one passes through (airports, museums, o ces), and the few houses that exist are almost all in private hands.

When people declare that they hate modern buildings they are on the whole speaking not from experience of homes, but from a distaste of post-war tower blocks or bland airconditioned o ces. Living Architecture’s houses are deliberately varied. One of them [called the Balancing Barn] by Dutch rm MVRDV hangs precariously o the edge of a hill in Su olk. Another in Thorpeness [called the Dune House] by Norwegian architects JVA has four steel roofs, each of which houses a bedroom and bathroom. A third, [the Shingle House] by the young Sco ish practice, NORD, is a stark black box in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station. A fourth [called the Secular Retreat], by

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October 2012 hospitalitydesign.com

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