Customer Reviews

The Culture of Building

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4 star:		(1)
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For years, I have been waiting for an honest discussion about the interface between development, design, construction and history. The Culture of Building helps to answer some of those nagging questions of why the built world of America looks the way that it does. Davis skillfully compares the evolution and habits of several building cultures to help illuminate our own. It is an important book for my education as an architect.

An excellent introduction to why we build the way we do. Davis explains the role of conflicting forces and institutions in shaping the buildings we build. He recommends improvements which our culture and architects needs to make in order to build healthy communities.

This book is absolutely vital, should be a 101 sort of book for every person involved in construction, and certainly part of every architecture school curriculum. As an architect, I am consistently bombarded with images of flash amazing buildings and projects, but as a person, I see the world is composed of perhaps 2%, if that, of such things. The great depth and breadth of architecture is forged in a manner that has very little to do with Detail or Dwell or Architectural Record (or Architizer these days). This book fills in that 98% and why things are as they are, why great built environments come from a shared base of knowledge and a healthy 'culture of building', rather than particularly potent designers noted in magazines and art history texts that we tend to fixate upon in the same way that celebrity dominates most fields of human endeavor. (Wow, such a run-on sentence, good thing I am not an author!) Highly recommended, one of my favorite books concerning my profession.