On Adam's house in Paradise;: The idea of the primitive hut in architectural history (The Museum of Modern Art papers on architecture) [Unknown Binding]

Joseph Rykwert (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0870705121 | ISBN-13: 978-0870705120 | Publication Date: 1972

On Adam's House in Paradise "takes off backward through history hunting for Adam's house, the original image. En route, with wry wit and charm, Rykwert singes every generation of architectural theoreticians back to Vitruvius, but he manages to illuminate their efforts and their immolations."—Charles Moore, Progressive Architecture

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joseph Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Unknown Binding: 224 pages
• Publisher: Museum of Modern Art; distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn (1972)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870705121
• ISBN-13: 978-0870705120
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #293,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A paleopsychological excavation: toward the roots of dwelling, August 28, 2006

By 

J. V. Lewis (secure undisclosed location) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Paperback)

This strange and engaging book is an excavation of an old and cherished idea: that the original, Adamic conditions of human dwelling-in-the-world can be glimpsed in some basic form of primitive hut. Joseph Rykwert guides us backwards through the history of this idea, from Le Corbusier and Gropius, through Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc, then through the thickets of Classicism [Laugier, Perrault, Blondel, etc.] and finally back to the atavistic architecture of archaic Greece and Egypt. Such a search for firstness is of course not a search for a building per se. It is a search for an archetype, or, more crucially, for a central feature of the human condition. Of course, every age in this survey stamps the idea with its own theoretical anxieties, so the idea, in its wild trajectory, has accreted a fascinating record of Western ideas about dwelling.

One particularly startling example of the development of this idea of the first human house is the difference between the ancient and the modern ideas about architectural ornament. As Rykwert renders it, the ancient temples replicated in stone the forms of earlier wooden structures that had become sanctified and meaningful through sacrificial rite and through ritual/liturgical association. So the origins of the neo-classical details that so decorously decorate the White House, for example, have their origins in ritual slaughter and rites of propitiation, investiture, and oath-making. In stark contrast to this brutal and significant immediacy is the modern tendency to think of ornament in purely aesthetic terms, [hence the modernist project to rid us of it, no doubt, because it has lost its meaning and become an encumberance].

A fascinating historical study.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Classic, January 30, 2007

By 

Elie G. Haddad (Beirut, Lebanon) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Paperback)

This is vintage Rykwert. A work of great erudition which is also quite accessible to the architecture student, On Adam's House traces back the idea of the primitive hut throughout history, and shows to what extent architecture always carried 'meaning' and significance in human culture. This book is another one of the major works, first published in 1972, to have effectively influenced the course of architecture in the 70's and beyond.