Architects would rank second on the scale of vocational despair, behind world-peace campaigners and most of the film industry. The three groups struggle to assert their vision against competing opinions, all of which will lose to the rival with the most money.

Even-tempered Alain de Botton knew better than to step into the vipers' nest of architectural taste. The Englishman didn't become the bookworm's self-help guru for living well, the connoisseur of stopping to smell the philosophical roses, by getting into a war of words about the right way to build a doorway.

In How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy, he argued that, rather than fretting about finding the time to read the great thinkers, we should just get on with it. The act of reading them will show us how to make space in our lives, take our time and discard pointless pursuits. The Art of Travel reasoned that, although seeing the world was fine, one of the beauties of leaving our bubble is returning home and looking at familiar buildings and streets we haven't noticed for years. Status Anxiety suggested that we stop seeing ourselves through others' eyes.

The Architecture of Happiness asks not what we might do for great buildings, but what a great building might do for us. De Botton is attracted to Japan's appreciation of the beauty in irregularity, rather than symmetry, and its love of the simple over the ornate. He never tells architects how to do their jobs. Nor does he offer radical new theories. But he gently reminds them what the man in the street might be looking for, and, as always, his lyrical writing crystallises ideas that we, the not so well-read, really should have found ourselves. 'The failure of architects to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives,' he writes. 'Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as design.'

Too many architectural styles throughout history were fashions, determined by what we haven't got. Groovy urbanites are attracted to severe, minimalist designs because they feel guilty about their pampered, insulated lives. Poorer people or those living in harsher environments crave ornate, extravagant comforts.

When de Botton can no longer skirt the issue of whether there might be a right way to build, he goes in unarmed and tries to ease the conflicts of taste. Rather than telling anyone they're wrong, he looks for the virtues of architecture throughout history that we can all agree on: order, balance and coherence. But against his mild manners, this is where, at last, Alain de Placid starts to show his teeth, and where the lessons for Hong Kong emerge.

He reveals his frustration at ill-conceived towers near his home, Japanese developments that mimic Europe, and countries that slavishly recycle their own traditional styles.

He never shies from the fact that architecture is enmeshed in politics and business. But that should never mean that ideas have to be surrendered. Architects need 'to grow into artists of the committee meeting' by developing the skills of Charles Holden and Frank Pick, who 'managed to persuade a British government instinctively opposed to serious architecture to make way for several masterpieces of station design' on London's tube.

At the very least, says de Botton, 'we owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced'.