Customer Reviews

The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, Volume 1: Monumental Occasions: Reflections on the Eventfulness of ... (Religions of the World (Harvard))

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This excellent book provides a careful and scholarly account of architecture, ancient and modern, drawing on the hitherto under-deployed insights of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer on the theme of interpretation. The book fits within a series titled Religions of the World, to which it is no doubt an outstanding contribution. But I wish to alert potential readers to the applicability of the text to architecture in general: how we experience and interpret architecture, even outside of sacred contexts. The book makes ample reference to contemporary architecture, and contemporary theorists and critics, from Venturi to Tschumi, and provides a wealth of commonsense, but rarely celebrated, insights and their consequences.