A Book Review By Kirkus
Read the book review of Supersizing Bliss by Kirkus Reviews.
Kirkus is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus. Kirkus Reviews confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature.
“Witte encourages readers to find fulfillment in custom-designed homes in this architectural manifesto.
The author, an architect, mounts a wide-ranging critique of mass-produced American tract housing on many grounds—unsustainability, carbon footprint, the legacy of discriminatory redlining—but emphasizes its aesthetic and spiritual barrenness. A house, he asserts, should instead be “a piece of livable art” and “a stage that will perpetuate the wonders of your own and only being,” one that’s wildly creative—perhaps “burrowed into the earthen depths of a hill or flying high on stilts”—and dazzling enough to raise “goose bumps” (to procure such a home, he advises readers to hire an architectural firm and focus on the rapturous experiences the house will support rather than on the high price). Witte explores many aspects of housing and architecture, from construction costs to the feel of brick to the play of natural light through windows, including disquisitions on—and photos of—his own home designs. The houses he showcases are very modernist, with a rectilinearity softened by natural elements that feels like a mashup of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright; they include the Gerendák Residence, which has sent visitors into fits of joyful weeping, and his own self-designed residence, which features nifty innovations like hollowed-out stairway steps for stowing shoes. The author’s paeans to the house as the smithy of the soul can sound overdone (“approach your design team asking for a built environment that allows you to be happier, more fulfilled, tickled by sensual riches, provided with more emotional depth, and enriched by a heightened sense of self”), but when he writes about specific buildings his vivid prose ably evokes the psychological impact of material structures (“The entry of the Pantheon famously tightens as you enter from the passages and small piazzas of the Eternal City, only to release you into a vast, open, round-domed space that ultimately culminates in a small oculus at its apex. A bird would fly right through”). The result is an absorbing brief for great architecture as a human necessity.
A sometimes-grandiose but often captivating argument for the house as the framework for a vibrant life.” Kirkus Reviews