Epictetus, an Ancient Greek Stoic philosopher, is believed to have asked a bereaved friend whose house had been burned down, ‘If you actually comprehend what regulates the cosmos, how can you wish for fragments of stone and gorgeous rock?’ (It is uncertain how long the friendship continued.) According to legend, after hearing God’s voice, Christian hermit Alexandra sold her house, shut herself in a tomb, and never looked at the outside world again. Her fellow hermit Paul of Scete slept on a blanket on the door of a windowless mud hut and recited 300 prayers every day, only succumbing when he heard of another holy man who had managed 700 and slept in a coffin.
Austerity has been a historical constant. In the spring of 1137, the Cistercian monk St Bernard of Clairvaux traveled all the way around Lake Geneva without even realizing it was there. Similarly, after four years in his monastery, St Bernard was unable to report whether the dining hall had a vaulted ceiling or the number of windows in his church’s sanctuary. On a visit to the Charterhouse of Dauphiné, St Bernard astonished his hosts by arriving on a magniϧcent white horse, diametrically opposed to the ascetic values he professed. He explained that he borrowed the animal from a wealthy uncle and simply failed to register its appearance on a four-day journey across France.
Despite efforts to reject visual experiences, there has always been a strong desire to shape the material environment for aesthetic purposes. Carving flowers into roof beams and embroidering creatures on tablecloths have been physically demanding tasks. They gave up their weekends to cover ugly cables beneath ledges. They have carefully considered ideal kitchen work surfaces. They fantasized about living in unaffordably lavish houses depicted in magazines and then felt sad, as one feels when passing a beautiful stranger in a crowded street. We appear to be torn between a want to suppress our senses and numb ourselves to our surroundings and an opposing impulse to recognize the extent to which our identities are inextricably linked to, and will vary in tandem with, our locales.
An unappealing room can exacerbate any lingering doubts about life’s incompleteness, whereas a sun-lit one with honey-colored limestone tiles can bolster whatever is most optimistic inside us. Belief in the significance of architecture is founded on the belief that we are, for better or worse, different persons in different places, and that architecture’s purpose is to render alive to us who we may ideally be. We occasionally want to acknowledge the impact of our surroundings.
The living room of a house in the Czech Republic exemplifies how walls, chairs, and floors can create an environment that allows our greatest qualities to shine. We acknowledge with thankfulness the power that a single room possesses. However, there are certain drawbacks to being architecturally sensitive. If one room can change how we feel, if the color of the walls or the shape of a door can influence our pleasure, what will happen in the majority of the locations we are obliged to look at and inhabit? What can we expect in a house with prison-like windows, damaged carpet tiles, and plastic curtains?
To avoid the potential of lifelong agony, we can be driven to close our eyes to most of what is around us, for we are never far from damp stains and cracked ceilings, shattered cities and rusting dockyards. We cannot be completely mindful of our surroundings if we lack the ability to change them for the better. Stoic philosophers and St Bernard around Lake Geneva may argue that it doesn’t matter what buildings look like, what’s on the ceiling, or how the wall is treated. This detachment stems from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to all of beauty’s many absences