Our Happy Life

Happiness is everywhere. It is printed on the carton of your daily dose of healthy juice and on the cover of finance magazines predicting the future of our economy. Happiness is inevitable and evasive. It’s volatile, ambiguous, and more relevant than ever.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a proliferation of lists of well-being indicators, happy indexes, and city rankings commissioned by governments and private institutions. As happiness began to be tracked at the dawn of one the most dramatic crashes of our recent era, late-capitalist societies started searching for new ways, between ethics and rhetoric, to measure quality of life. Concurrently, maps of our online behaviours, self-tracking devices, and political polls began to focus on emotional well-being to evaluate the space we inhabit. 

Today, happiness is no longer a sentiment, but a new science as well as a pervasive industry. It is a complex ecology composed of protocols, research centres, media entities, academic courses, consulting firms, and data collection companies.

In response, the CCA launches Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism, an investigation of the reform of well-being in light of the recent studies in behavioural economics. It inspects the ideology of happiness and its contradictions; it examines the political formation of a rhetorical agenda we cannot escape; it questions how it is directly and indirectly influencing the design of our built environment.

At once an exhibition, an editorial project, and a public event series, Our Happy Life analyzes the built environment by dissecting the political, economic, and emotional conditions that generate space today. Architecture, city, and landscape emerge as simple fragments of reality, as contested surfaces caught between the intangible guidelines of happiness indexes, the mechanics of the neo-liberal economy, the new marketplace of emotions and the relentless ideology of positivity.

How do we design our cities now, when our most intimate experiences are incessantly tracked and our feelings are increasingly the base of a new, immaterial mode of production? In a world where the tools we use to analyze the built environment no longer have anything to do with space, but with moods, material surfaces, intimate statuses, and ratings, what exactly is the role of the architect?

The happiness agenda is generic and conformist. To analyze a new system of values and specific indicators—a redefined idea of the “self,” the interior comfort as a simple superficial camouflage, a notion of environment that degenerates in an obsessively simplistic ideology—we at the CCA suggest to study the transformation of space from a new angle.     

 

Our Happy Life is an exhibition curated by Francesco Garutti, the CCA’s curator, contemporary architecture.  Visual identity and design: OK-RM (London) / Exhibition display: Bernard Dubois (Brussels). May 8, 2019–October 13, 2019

Our Happy Life is a book, a narrative atlas of urban accidents, unstable financial atmospheres, and legal anomalies, interrupted by critical readings, stories, and conversations with Will Davies, Daniel and Simon Fujiwara, Francesco Garutti, Ingo Niermann, Deane Simpson, and Mirko Zardini. Edited by Francesco Garutti, designed by Laurenz Brunner and Geoff Han, and co-published by the CCA and Sternberg Press. The book is accompanied by Will Happiness Find Us? an ongoing online editorial project accessible on the CCA’s website featuring texts and other content by various contributors to expand specific narratives from the exhibition. 

Our Happy Life is open to the public, beginning on May 7 with a curator’s talk and public reception at 6:30pm, at the CCA in Montreal. In tandem with the exhibition, a lecture series titled, What do we do if they want to be happy? will integrate and expand on questions raised by the project to leading architects, and discuss how they and their work might react to the shared happiness agenda. Subscribe to the CCA newsletter for updates.