Alain de Botton: British architecture is rooted in the past and terrified of the new. A few years ago, I wrote The Architecture of Happiness, a book about architecture critical of our nostalgia and low expectations. It got a healthy amount of attention, on the back of which I was invited to a stream of conferences about the future of architecture. But one night, returning from one such conference in Bristol, I had a dark moment of the soul. I realised that, however pleasing it is to write a book about an issue one feels passionately about, the truth is that - a few exceptions aside - books don't change anything. I realised that if I cared so much about architecture, writing was just a coward's way out; the real challenge was to build. Living Architecture's houses are deliberately varied. One of them, by the Dutch firm MVRDV, hangs precariously off the edge of a hill in Suffolk. Another, by the young Scottish practice NORD, is a stark black box in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station. The idea behind the various properties has been to avoid the obvious and to place houses in locations one hadn't necessarily ever thought of holidaying in and to design rooms different from those that people know from their own homes. The organisation has an educational mission at its core, a wish to teach as well as to soothe and relax; that there are REN toiletries in the bathrooms is just a way of sweetening the pill of learning. For a writer, it was undeniably something of a challenge to have to become a practical sort of person. Behind every house lies a seemingly endless procession of meetings with donors, local authorities, architects, waste-disposal experts and cutlery manufacturers. The house rental business demands a keen attention to detail: you won't get far without an in-depth knowledge of mattress protectors and the best dog policy (yes, but not in the bedrooms). Yet there's fun in the minutiae. Whatever the pleasures of designing your own home, it's perhaps even more satisfying imagining someone else's holiday needs; to design their bedside library, welcome basket and closet. I wouldn't have driven this project forward if I didn't believe that architecture changes our characters. We are simply not the same people in whatever room we are in. For too long in Britain, our buildings have suggested that the past is the only worthy realm, that we have to dress in the clothes of yesteryear and that technology is bad and the future terrifying. Living Architecture's houses propose a new vision of the United Kingdom as a country that is reconciled to technology, that is no longer painfully in thrall to the past; a country that is democratic, tolerant, playful and optimistic. The salvation of British housing lies in raising standards of taste. If one considers how rapidly and overwhelmingly this has been achieved in cooking, there is much to be optimistic about. Consumers have learnt to ask probing questions about salt or fat levels which it wouldn't have occurred to a previous generation to raise. With the right guidance, a similar sensitivity could rapidly be fashioned to the worst features of domestic buildings. My hope is that a holiday in a Living Architecture house will, in a modest but determined way, help to change the debate about what sort of houses we want to live in.