In a 1968 campaign speech at the University of Kansas, Robert F. Kennedy observed that Gross National Product ?measures everything?  except that which makes life worthwhile.? The feeling that economic metrics fail to capture the totality of lived experience has taken an odd, if predictable, twist in the past decade. The 2008 financial crisis brought the seeming complacency of the 1990s and early 2000s?the so-called ?end of history??to a crashing halt. A new ideology of happiness has taken hold in geopolitical discourse, with the United Nations, national governments, and major journalistic organizations publishing increasingly precise rankings of global well-being.
Such efforts to quantify an essentially subjective part of human existence hover between a humanist desire to recognize the panoply of non-economic factors underlying the quest for human decency, and late capitalism?s drive to reify even the most essential of human emotions. In Hawaii, houses built in the shadow of an active volcano point to the increasing risks that are being taken to realize the American dream of home ownership. Photo by CCA Montréal
Now on display at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism explores the spatial and sociological ramifications of this phenomenon. Curated by Francesco Garutti, Our Happy Life continues the institution?s recent series of thematic exhibitions challenging the unspoken assumptions...