For anyone that has seen the movie (500) Days of Summer, this title may ring a bell as the book that Tom Hansen gave to Summer Finn as a present for her housewarming party. However, it is also a book by Alain de Botton on the syllabus for EA 20: Nature, Culture and Society that I just recently completed. If you haven’t read this book, I’m going to be frank and say it was quite pretentious, not that anything else could be expected from the French, but definitely a worthwhile read. The main reason for this is that there is an incredible amount of work that goes into creating buildings, and a lot of the time the innovations and intentions of these buildings go fairly unnoticed. This is especially important at a place like the Claremont Colleges, a campus brimming with wonderful architecture, and I guarantee this book will make you realize some things that you never would’ve noticed otherwise.
Take a look at Pomona’s academic facilities, for example. Starting with the least creative and most work-oriented hard sciences, the linear banality, dull color schemes, and windowless basements of Millikan, Seaver North and Seaver South clearly align with the type of fact- and memorization-based learning that occurs in these buildings. From the classrooms and auditoriums filled with desks facing the front, a focus on lecture-based learning style is evident. Moving to the softer sciences, Carnegie, Hahn, and Lincoln-Edmunds are noticeably less dismal, with warmer color tones, carpeted, winding hallways, and no dungeon-esque basement classrooms. More seminar-style classrooms are sprinkled in, with tables promoting conversation among peers. The most creative of the academic pursuits at Pomona, English, art, and the languages, can either be found in the beautiful Stanley Academic Quad, featuring a fountain, lush green grass, and plenty of foliage, or in Lebus Court, a building with a devoted internal courtyard and an elegant statue. The fewest lecture-based classrooms are found in these humanities buildings, as these subjects rely much more on discourse between the students than droning from the professor.
Subtleties like these are things that I had never noticed before, and things that reading The Architecture of Happiness would help you spot. So if you ever wondered why classes like O-Chem and Cell Bio are so deathly, why the sciences can’t have an outdoor classroom like Pearsons does, and why English majors seem so much happier than my fellow Neuroscience and Chemistry majors, take a quick look at this book.