Charleston Festival - Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton is convinced that the British are inarticulate when it comes to talking about what they like and don’t like about architecture. As a knock-on from this, he argues, most developments in this country over the last hundred years and more have been hideous. “We need to raise our game,” he says, down the phone, from his terraced house in Hammersmith. “We need to increase our vocabulary so we can talk about what we like and don’t like.” He uses the way we have become more aware of food in the last 20 years as analogy. “People can now talk about food in a way they couldn’t before,” he says. “We used to be told to be grateful we had food on our plate. Now we are able to talk about how there has been too much fat and salt in our food, and we are changing that.”

He is aware, of course, that ideas of architectural beauty are subjective. “But we can come to a consensus about what is attractive and what isn’t. We choose to go on a holiday to Amsterdam and not, say, to Frankfurt, because we agree, broadly speaking, that we like the look of one city more than the other. To continue the food analogy, not everyone agrees what constitutes a good meal, but there are broad areas of agreement. We can all tell, for example, if a meal is overcooked. In the same way we can agree that a window isn’t doing what a window should be doing. If we don’t articulate this sort of thought we are offering a gift to property developers who will go on to put up any old thing.”