The Culture of Building (Hardcover)

by Howard Davis (Author) "At its root, a building culture may be characterized by fundamental human relationships and social habits, and not all building cultures require large and formal..." (more)
Key Phrases: contemporary building culture, building production process, midland prairies, New York, United States, Metropolitan Club (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I find this book to be wonderful and refreshing. It describes, for the first time, a new point of view in which the overall system and process of construction of the buildings in the world--all of them together--is viewed as a single system: and that system is analyzed for its capacity to create a living world, or not, in different traditional and modern societies. The depth of the examples, the beautiful detail that describes individual instances of building process from culture after culture, and the analytical insight in the hundreds of examples, make this book a landmark. The Culture of Building, if taken as I think it must be taken, heralds a new era in our thinking about architecture."--Christopher Alexander
"With this insightful work, Howard Davis brings a refreshing breeze to ventilate our stuffy attics of architectural thought. He draws our attention away from the tired, singular icons of architectural history and directs it toward the omnipresent urban fabric that shapes our everyday experience. Through his words and photographs, we learn to recognize (and hopefully to replicate) the qualities of a built environment that is healthy for our minds and souls as well as our bodies."--Edward Allen, author of How Buildings Work: The Natural Order of Architecture
"In this innovatory and challeging work, Howard Davis explores the relationships between the institutions and operations of building design and construction in practical and human terms. Drawing upon a remarkably broad frame of reference, Davis cites examples from his own studies in Japan, India, North Africa, and elsewhere, in addition to focused examination of the building culture of the past and present in Europe and the United States. This unprecedented book should be essential reading, not merely for architects and students of architecture, but for all who are seriously engaged in the production of buildings now, and in the future."--Paul Oliver, Director, Centre for Vernacular Architecture, Oxford Brookes University


Product Description
All buildings are ultimately the products of building cultures--complex systems of people, relationships, rules, and habits in which design and building are anchored. In this book of thirteen chapter-essays, Davis uses historical, contemporary and cross-cultural examples to describe the structure of such cultures and how they are reflected in the form of buildings and cities. His aim is to show that special insights about the improvement of the contemporary built world come from looking at the building culture as a whole, not merely the individual acts of architects and city planners. The book is illustrated with over 260 historic and contemporary photographs, drawings and prints.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; illustrated edition edition (January 6, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195112946
• ISBN-13: 978-0195112948
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,089,790 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Building Culture, January 24, 2000

By	Renner (California) - See all my reviews

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why We Build What We Do?, November 2, 2001

By	Halyna Tataryn "tataryna" (Calgary, AB Canada) - See all my reviews

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A perceptive analysis, November 21, 2006

By	Evan Bender (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is conceptually in the same iconoclastic camp as the work of Christopher Alexander and a very few others; fitting, as they worked together a couple decades back. Davis, however, is better able to cloth these revolutionary ideas in conventional terminology that doesn't make you squirm (not to denigrate Alexander, his work is genius, but the language he uses can veer into hippy-dippy and new-agey). And I mean revolutionary when I say it. The book is not intended as a manifesto, exactly, but it lays out the sources of our contemporary built environment, tracing their evolution through the past several centuries. He perceptively describes the various interacting institutional and cultural forces that control the modern building industry. He is also not afraid of passing qualitative judgement. If you feel that the built environment of the past 50 years has become something dehumanizing and unhealthy, this book will help you understand the cultural and institutional changes that have driven this. And in this way it IS a manifesto: once you understand a problem a certain way, you can start to infer solutions and act towards realizing them.