"Beauty is the Promise of Happiness" and the Hexagonal House

It's an extremely rare luxury for me to be able to read a book cover-to-cover, more or less in one go. It's not just the luxury of finding the time to do nothing else but read, but also the luxury of finding the book that doesn't lose my attention span before the first 100 pages. I got to do just that over last week's Labour Day holiday. The book was Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness. It's a really easy read with a whole lot of photographs. AdB's books all deal with one central theme -- what makes us happy and how we often delude ourselves into thinking that happiness might lie in a weeklong yoga retreat with Cyndi Lee in Ubud or zipping down PCH in the latest Ferrari.

Stendhal's "Beauty is the promise of happiness" quote struck a chord. The quote begs the question: what is beauty? AdB's answer is, of course, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That which we find beautiful is what we find to hold most promise for our happiness or fulfillment. So that got me thinking about my obsession with building a hexagonal house and what that means for my quest for happiness.

livingroom
Originally uploaded by kebbiekow.

When I was about 13 years old, living in Arizona, a bike ride away from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, I was lying on the floor one day trying to sketch out a workable, liveable solution for a hexagon-shaped house (my aunt, who had been trained as an architect and was visiting at the time, took one glance at my drawing and told me that it was a silly design and that nobody would ever design a house like that). Even though I visited AD and his family at Taliesin West often, I hadn't yet heard about or seen images of FLW's Hanna House. But like FLW, I was driven by boredom with all the cookie-cutter rectangular houses I saw around me. There must be a more interesting shape to live in. So for me, happiness = absence of boredom, which I guess visually translates into anything other than a square or rectangle (coincidentally, my office building is probably the only building in town with hexagonal windows). The most recent incarnation of my obsession with the hexagonal house has been Snowflake (snowflakes, of course, are hexagonal and their beauty lie in the fact that each is unique), an idea for a luxury onsen ski ryokan in some snowy wilderness with access to powdery slopes. BL did a wonderful job designing a floor plan based on my very specific brief of wanting an exploding or radiating hexagon. I think Jean Hanna sums up best what I find beautiful in a hexagon. She once remarked about Hanna House: "To live here, is to live imaginatively".