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On Ugliness and the Housing Crisis
People living in pleasant rural towns across the south of England, places like Chipping Norton and Ashford, are horrified by government aspirations to build thousands of new homes in the surrounding...
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Art as Therapy
There is widespread agreement that art is very important. But it can be remarkably hard to say quite why, or what it is for. Here at The Book of Life (and its associated arm, The School of Life) we...
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On How to Make an Attractive City
Cities are a big deal. We pretty much all have to live in them. We should try hard to get them right. So few cities are nice, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful; embarrassingly the...
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On Good and Bad Taste
When it comes to design and decoration, it feels extremely tricky and dangerous to accuse anyone of having ‘bad taste’ or to pride oneself on having good taste. The official story is that anything goes...
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Why Design Matters
A designed object is one whose makers worked long and hard to get it just right. Most of the world has sadly not been well-designed. But good design does matter. Far from being a luxury or an add-on,...
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Andrea Palladio
In Europe and the US, the average person spends 84% of their life indoors: that is, inside architecture. Much of the rest of the time we are around buildings, even if we’re not paying them a great deal...
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Why You Should Never Say: ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder’
When there are grave disagreements about what’s good and bad in architecture… or art… there’s often someone around who very quickly closes the discussion down by saying: “Beauty lies in the eye of the...
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Why We Need to Create a Home
One of the most meaningful activities we are ever engaged in is the creation of a home. Over a number of years, typically with a lot of thought and considerable dedication, we assemble furniture,...
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Art for Art’s Sake
In answer to the question of what art might be for, the established reply is to point out rather scornfully that it isn’t for anything. Art is – as a famous saying goes – for art’s sake. The expression...
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Against Obscurity
We might expect that humans would display a powerful reflex taste for simple over obscure explanations. Yet in many areas of intellectual and psychological life, we observe a stranger, more unexpected...
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Oscar Niemeyer
One of the most depressing aspects of travel is finding that the world often looks the same in many different places. The towers of downtown Tokyo are indistinguishable from those of Frankfurt or...
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Two World Views: Romantic and Classical
Romantic Romanticism is a movement of art and ideas that began in Europe in the mid eighteenth century and has now taken over the world. It is hard to go far on almost any issue without encountering a...
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Le Corbusier
If the idea of being a ‘modern’ person and leading a ‘modern’ life still has an exciting ring to it, it’s at least in part down to the influence of an extraordinary Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who in...
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The Secret of Beauty: Order and Complexity
This is an essay about beauty – and in particular about what makes something beautiful. We want to give you the answer right away: BEAUTY = ORDER and COMPLEXITY In other words, a thing is beautiful...
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The Importance of Architecture
In an odd but quietly very important way, works of architecture ‘speak’ to us. Some buildings, streets and even whole cities seem to speak of chaos, aggression or military pride; others seem to be...
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Why is the Modern World So Ugly?
One of the great generalisations we can make about the modern world is that it is, to an extraordinary degree, an ugly world. If we were to show an ancestor from 250 years ago around our cities and...
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Agnes Martin
If there were to be a patron artist of melancholy, it might be the American abstract painter Agnes Martin. Over a long life (1912-2004), she produced hundreds of canvases, most of them 1.8 by 1.8...
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Katsushika Hokusai
There are two ways of looking at Mount Fuji. As a geological phenomenon, it is classified as an active basalt composite stratovolcano, 3,700 metres high, 10,000 years old in its most most recent form,...
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Buildings That Give Hope – and Buildings That Condemn Us
A strange and rarely remarked upon feature of buildings is that they talk. They don’t necessarily speak very loudly, it can sometimes just be a whisper, but if you go up to them and look at them...
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Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
Born in 1606, Rembrandt became a hugely successful painter when he was still only in his twenties. He earned a fortune and lived a wildly extravagant life. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with...
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