How The Happiness Industry Has Hijacked Virtually Every Facet Of Contemporary Life

The Architecture of Happiness was a trite book published in the mid-2000s and mercifully forgotten. Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism, a new exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, isn’t nearly as snappily titled, but as an enterprise, it is far more probing and curious. Curated by Francesco Garutti, the show explores how, after the 2008 financial crash, the “happiness industry”—comprising government initiatives, economic indices, and city rankings— hijacked virtually every facet of contemporary life.

Metropolis’s Samuel Medina spoke to Garutti about happiness as a social project, the “cold intimacy” of Instagram, and architecture’s new spaces of meaning.

- Samuel Medina

SAMUEL MEDINA: A curator once told me that he had read every popular book about happiness there is. He said that it helps him do his job—communicating with the public—better. What sparked your interest in the subject?

FRANCESCO GARUTTI: You can go as far back as Greek philosophy [laughs]. I had a chat with the artist Simon Fujiwara— I was very intrigued by his The Happy Museum (2016) at the Berlin Biennale. The discussion was coming from his artistic practice; we were not talking about architecture at all. But afterward I was just bumping into this word—the idea—everywhere and in every context. I began finding “happiness” in literature and in journalism, for example, these city rankings and Gallup polls. What is happiness? It is a set of values. It is a political agenda. I thought to myself, “Let’s pose to architects some questions of happiness.”

SM: Happiness has become a metric—“a set of values,” as you say—with transnational currency. It now enjoys the imprimatur of political science and sociological research. When did that happen?