Brain Food #832: The desires that go in design

On homes and beauty

Thoughts of the day

Though the act of making a home extends beyond human nature, with animals making nests, burrows, or other structures that can provide safety and a place to raise their young, it is only our kind that has the need also to make one’s habitat beautiful and personal.

If a house already has what we need from it to act as shelter, walls and a roof to keep us safe, heating to keep us warm, a bathroom and running water for our sanitary needs, and a kitchen to cook our meals, why do humans invest so much time, money and energy in turning spaces into something they find attractive, or somewhere they can safely preserve pieces of themselves?

In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton writes about what attracts us to specific aesthetics, suggesting that what we are drawn to is what we may lack and crave, not in terms of material goods, but in terms of inner qualities and virtues:

“We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.”

This is also reflected in the art of various periods. It is why the Ancient Greeks, he claims, were not very preoccupied with turning nature into art; because their lives were already filled and surrounded by it.

And so homemaking, like artmaking, becomes an act of beautification, an examination and expression of not just what we like, but also what we lack.

Paying attention to what you like can lead you to where you need your life to be, a form of aligning one’s virtues and aspirations to one’s being. In the words of Stendhal, “There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.” In some ways, we put our desires into our designs. Our own version of beauty can reveal much more about ourselves than just our taste.

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Photo of Georgia O'Keeffe’s home and studio in Abiquiu, New Mexico. “When I got to New Mexico, that was mine,” she said. Like her paintings, her desire was perhaps to let the landscape remain in the spotlight, to own a piece of it. A pared-down home can let our gaze focus on what is truly important.

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