"What modern man wants," announced the master architect Le Corbusier in a fit of 1920s asceticism, "is a monk's cell, well lit and heated." Our 80-year love affair with uplighting and uncluttered live/work spaces has failed, however, to tidy up our moral act. When, in The Anatomy Lesson, Philip Roth describes his narrator's austere Manhattan apartment as the "pad of a well-heeled monk", the joke is that Nathan Zuckerman's life is anything but monastic. Supposedly disabled by back pain, he has been cavorting on his orthopaedic floor mat with no fewer than four separate women. Clean lines are no guarantee of clean living.
Alain de Botton, guardian of our moral values and purveyor of high-class self-help, doesn't quite agree. The Architecture of Happiness is a "beguiling tour" of architectural history in which de Botton considers how buildings should make us happy - and good - by enshrining "all that we might ideally be". As an object (or, rather, objet) the book is discreetly tasteful enough to satisfy even Le Corbusier. The paper is heavy and satin-smooth, there are full-page illustrations at every turn, the text swims luxuriantly in white space. But it is just as deceptive as Zuckerman's apartment. Between the silky matte covers, The Architecture of Happiness is as confused and crammed with kitschy knick-knacks as any Victorian parlour.
Some of this disorder is imposed on de Botton by his material. An inquiry into the nature of architectural beauty and its moral implications from the Parthenon to Poundbury is a tough brief to fulfil, and too often finds de Botton mired in historical solecism. He suggests, for instance, that only "in whitewashed galleries housing collections of 20th-century abstract sculpture" can we understand "how exactly three-dimensional masses can assume and convey meaning" - as though no one had considered that sculpture or architecture could have aesthetic value before Henry Moore came along.
Mangling some of the facts is one thing, but de Botton's cruelty to English prose is less forgivable. In his rarefied world, trains don't cross bridges; they "proceed to execute a manoeuvre without so much as pausing to confer with higher authorities". Cows don't stand in fields; they "feast on luminously green grass and occasionally glance up at the passing carriages with sad, almost wise brown eyes".
This is the nub of de Botton's peculiar genius. Great thoughts, expressed in suitably elevated language, can strike him at any moment - on seeing a cow, a train or a carton of French fries in Westminster McDonald's. On the M4, he falls into a potentially life-threatening reverie, musing that "in homage to Vitruvius, we might pass the time on car journeys aligning the pillars of motorway bridges to appropriate bipedal counterparts". On a second reading, this grand statement turns out to mean only that he pretends the bridges are a series of women, which include, for no discernable reason, "a punctilious, nervous accountant with an authoritarian air".
The Architecture of Happiness is rather like a rubbery Starbucks cappuccino: it is 65 per cent shattering banality presented in a froth of Latinate polysyllables. Once you factor in the (pretty, but largely redundant) illustrations and all that tasteful white space, the philosopher-prince is left with little room in which to be sensible. Over 280 pages, the effect is one of rubbernecking at a literary car-crash. De Botton's periodic losses of mental traction - he describes the Sage Gateshead as "a warmer hedgehog-related creature" - are as guiltily mesmerising as his tone of solemn wonder, which effortlessly negotiates hurdles ("its harmony with our own prized internal song"; "like a smile breaking over a child's face") that weaker-stomached writers might baulk at.
None of this would matter so much were de Botton not selling the promise of taste. The Architecture of Happiness is being advertised on the Tube with a poster of flying-duck plaques - middle-class shorthand for "naff" - asking: "Is this your idea of good taste?" Like his last book, Status Anxiety, it is sneakily predicated upon snobbery: his readers' desire to be better not than they are, but than their neighbours are. De Botton disingenuously scotches this criticism by explaining that, although we may "occasionally and guiltily experience the desire to create a house as a wish to vaunt ourselves in front of others", we only really care about our homes as a vehicle for expressing our higher moral selves. If he's serious - or, probably, even if he isn't - it is clear that this is a man who has never spent a Saturday afternoon in Foxtons.
De Botton is in constant recoil from low-down-and-dirty economic and social realities - that most people, for instance, can't afford the "sunlit [room] set with honey-coloured limestone tiles" in which, according to him, perfect happiness resides. His own taste, as this suggests, is relentlessly Country Living: a faux-rural Farrow & Ball confection of high ceilings, large sash windows and "playful" fruit-and-flowers stencilling. He is also a floorboard fetishist, rhapsodising repeatedly over "a run of old floorboards", "rough, unvarnished wooden planks, of the sort one might see in a hayloft" and "unpretentious raw wooden floor boards" (he can't decide whether it should be one word or two) which will, he promises, foster "a modest, tender-hearted kind of happiness".
The heritage materials, the traditional stylings, the reactionary distaste for "villas in the wealthy suburbs of Riyadh" - this all sounds strangely familiar. The genius loci of The Architecture of Happiness is Prince Charles, a fact that emerges in a misty-eyed denouement, "The Promise of a Field", which argues that new buildings should be worthy of the undeveloped ground they replace. Surprisingly, we learn that not only all right-thinking people, but all right-thinking birds and mammals, share his taste in architecture:
There must have been burrows for foxes and nests for robins, these succumbed to the saw and the shovel with only passing sorrow from their previous denizens, for what was planned in their place was expected to provide more than adequate compensation.
Warmed by this chorus of imagined creaturely approval, de Botton is keen to repay the compliment. His closing call to arms is to build nice-looking houses because "we owe it to the worms and the trees". It's like being trapped on a giant coffee table crammed with crystal squirrel ornaments. If this is happiness, I'll take the flying ducks any time.
