Fear seems to have lain
at heart of their discretion
end of a belief
Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
If Modernist architects privately designed with beauty in mind, why did they justify their work principally in technological terms?
Fear seems to have lain at the heart of their discretion.
The end of a belief in a universal standard of beauty had created a climate in which no one style could be immune from criticism.
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According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”
What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.
I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.
Neat trick in writing a book.
If I knew how to do that, I would.