A reader sent us this excerpt from Alain de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness and we thought it was interesting in light of the building boom in New York City and the rise to prominence of the star architect in our culture in general:

Though we tend to believe, in architecture as in literature, that an important work should be complicated, many appealing buildings are surprisingly simple, even repetitive in their design. The beguiling terraced houses of Bloomsbury or the apartment buildings of central Paris are assembled according to an unvarying and singularly basic pattern once laid down in forceful municipal codes. Over generations, these codes prevented architects from using their imaginations; they hand-cuffed them to a narrow palette of acceptable materials and forms, and, like the institution of marriage, restricted choice in the name of delivering the satisfactions of restraint.

That building codes have disappeared in many cities, and the modest ordered but satisfying edifices along with them, can be traced back to a perverse dogma which overtook the architectural profession in the Romantic period: a faith in a necessary connection between architectural greatness and originality. Over the nineteenth century, architects came to be rewarded according to the uniqueness of their work, so that constructing a new house or office in a familiar form grew no less contemptible than plagiarizing a novel or poem.

The emphasis on individual genius had the unintended effect of tearing apart the carefully woven fabric of cities. ‘A day never passes without out hearing our architects called upon to be original and to invent a new style,’ observed John Ruskin in 1849, bewildered by the sudden loss of visual harmony.

Few architects have listened. A commission for a house or an office remains an opportunity to reconsider from first principals the design of a window frame or front door. But an architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor…The architects who benefits us most may be those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominately unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have to confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.

Do you agree with this? Are there any recent buildings in Brooklyn that you think Monsieur de Botton would like? Any architects you can think of that would do well to heed Botton’s advice?