Sometimes, of course, things are genuinely ahead of their time. In “The Architecture of Happiness,” Alain de Botton reprints a 1927 advertisement for Mercedes-Benz that depicts a woman, wearing gloves and a cloche (that iconic headwear of the twenties), one foot astride the running board. The woman and the car are posed in front of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Double House, built for the Weissenhof housing project in Stuttgart. The photo reads like a children’s game: Which of these things is not like the others? The car and the woman are Jazz Age relics; the house looks like it could be have been built in Malibu last week. The irony is that the advertisement wants to depict all three as the quintessence of “modern,” but only the house, so stylistically out in front, kept on being “modern.”