Reading Owen Hatherley‘s enjoyable and timely polemic Militant Modernism, I came across this critique of the work of Alain de Botton:
Perhaps the most irksome of Ikea Modernism’s products was Channel 4’s The Perfect Home, presented by Alain de Botton, promoting his The Architecture of Happiness. Perambulating about the place with an expression of casual intellectuality and immense self-satisfaction, he encapsulates all that is malign in British intellectual life. De Botton personifies the faux-naïve stance of the televisual idiot-expert, who ventriloquises thinkers from Proust to Boethius to Le Corbusier, emphasising how they can enhance (but certainly never truly change, or question the purpose of) the lives of the administrative classes of terminal capital.
