Final Thought
THE CANADIAN CENTRE FOR ARCHITECTURE MARKS ITS 40TH ANNIVERSARY WITH AN EXTENSIVE INVESTIGATION OF WELL-BEING
The pursuit of happiness (via design)
What does happiness look like to you? How would you design a space to support it? What materials would you use? The picture might be clear when we’re talking about an intimate space like a home, where personal preferences and creature comforts such as soft surfaces, a warm fire and accommodations for pets, family and friends spring to mind. But the images start to blur once we venture into shared spaces such as schools, shopping centres, public parks and city streets.
“Trying to understand happiness is, of course, an impossible task,” says Francesco Garutti, curator of Our Happy Life, the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s summer-long exhibition. Happiness and well-being, Garutti explains, are part of an emerging agenda in architecture – one that has been under increasing investigation over the past decade. Positing it as the defining issue of the era, the CCA has made the subject worthy of marking the Montreal institution’s 40th anniversary year.
The show features (and riffs on) a wealth of documents – from Gallup’s World Happiness Report and the Stiglitz Report to numerous national studies that have collected and analyzed personal data to measure the physical and emotional health of populations – with the idea that we will ultimately take these measurements and apply them to the design of our built environments.
The health of buildings is already being quantified, not only according to environmental impact (through such certifications as LEED), but also with more human-centric programs, including the WELL Building Standard. But if it truly is impossible to define happiness, how effectively can any amount of data help us design it? That’s just one of the many questions Our Happy Life will generate: In fact, an entire gallery will be dedicated to questions – over 450 of them. Garutti promises, however, that the show will also provide answers. “A lot of these stories are basically grabbing clues about our future,” he says. “It’s a matter of, in the upcoming years, understanding how the role of the architect could be reimagined. My goal is for an architect (or any viewer) to walk away seeing that there is this new set of values – and a market attached to that – and wonder, ‘How can I react?’”
Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism runs from May 8 to October 13 at the CCA in Montreal. cca.qc.ca
Five spaces that make Azure happy, clockwise from top left: Casa La Quinta by Alfonso de la Concha Rojas and PPAA Pérez Palacios Arquitectos Asociados (photo by Rafael Gamo) / Mount Royal Heritage Site by Civiliti (photo by Adrien Williams) / Hotel in Oia, Greece by Kapsimalis Architects (photo by Giorgos Sfakianakis) / Happy Place by O.M. Shumelda (photo by Rossandhelen) / Model of Happy installation by Studio Cadena.