AP Photo/Hiroko Masuike Able to reap buildings in a single bound. Author Alain de Botton sees personality in architecture.

He's staying in a grand Manhattan landmark filled with buzzing bellhops, wine red rugs and imposing windows overlooking Central Park. But to de Botton, a man who says bad wallpaper can turn a good mood sour, the hotel is whispering lies.

"It doesn't admit its shortcomings," he said, standing outside it. "It should say, 'Look, I'm a crummy hotel and I haven't been refurbished for 15 years.' Instead, everything in there is meant to suggest that it's important."

"If you're lame or impotent and you go on a date, it's best to admit it upfront rather that try and hide your dragging leg. You don't want the truth to just slip out incrementally."

De Botton has made an industry of translating intimidating subjects like Proust, philosophy and social anxiety into high-brow self-help books. In his latest, he turns his eye toward architecture to explain how well-designed buildings can make you happy, and how ugly buildings can squash your spirit.

De Botton sees buildings as characters with as much personality as the people swirling beneath them — a Manhattan skyscraper looming over a bland public plaza is "an accountant who embarrassingly takes off his tie at the school disco," while a bridge pillar is "a sedentary and cheerful woman."

Like a lover or a dear friend, the magic of good architecture, de Botton argues, is that it can elevate us from the dreary to the exultant.

"Most of us feel dull or heavy or conformist or frightened most of the time," de Botton said. "Yet coming home from a party at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night, we might feel alive and wonderful. Good architecture can always convey that exuberance and brightness. It's what we aspire to, but we can't live up to all the time. That's why people like to live in beautiful cities. Good architecture will help them feel something."

De Botton isn't an architect, but he doesn't think the certified are the only ones allowed to critique buildings. Architecture should be part of the cultural conversation — we all have to live with these buildings — and words like "stupid" should be embraced.

"An ugly building is like a bad novel, except we're stuck with it for 300 years," he said. "Everyone understands a writer can get it wrong, but they don't understand that architects can as well. They develop a quasi-religious view of buildings which stops us from using words like 'stupid,' because they think they're not very respectful of godlike creations."

Architecture is supposed to articulate a culture's aspirations and to make its ideals concrete, he argues. A building should tell us who we are, and who we want to be. Ugly architecture does the opposite.

"Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design," he writes.

While strolling through midtown Manhattan, he found plenty of examples to make his point.

At the corner of Central Park, the Trump International Hotel & Tower stands sentry. To de Botton, it's a grave disappointment.

"For a building that should be gloriously vulgar, it's so boring," he said. "It doesn't even have the courage of its vulgar aspirations. It's as if the vulgarity has been shrunk by a bad attack of conscience and morals." He pointed to nearby towers of glass. "They should have said, 'We are capitalists, we revel in money. We're vulgar, but we love life.' Instead, this is the age of bureaucracy: money without joy. It has all the romance of a stapler."

He walked to a souvenir stand, where a vendor hawked postcards of New York icons like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler building.

"These are spiritualizing the American way of life, they're dignifying it," he said, tapping the Empire State Building's famous antenna. "This says, 'We know you like TV and radio so we'll build a television mast, but we'll make it look like an offering to the goddess Athena. They look at the function as a starting point."

To understand a culture, de Botton says, look to its buildings.

"At the end of the day, buildings reflect the people who put them up."

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Sam Dolnick is an asap reporter in New York.

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