Architecture and Ritual explores how the varied rituals of everyday life are framed and defined in space by the buildings which we inhabit. It penetrates beyond traditional assumptions about architectural style, aesthetics and utility to deal with something more implicit: how buildings shape and reflect our experience in ways of which we remain unconscious.Whether designed to house a grand ceremony or provide shelter for a daily meal, all buildings coordinate and consolidate social relations by giving orientation and focus to the spatial practices of those who use them. Peter Blundell Jones investigates these connections between the social and the spatial, providing critical insights into the capacity for architecture to structure human ritual, from the grand and formal to the mundane. This is achieved through deep readings of individual pieces of architecture, each with a detailed description of its particular social setting and use. The case studies are drawn from throughout architectural history and from around the globe, each enabling a distinct theoretical theme to emerge, and showing how social conventions vary with time and place, as well as what they have in common. Case studies range from the Nuremberg Rally to the Centre Pompidou, and from the Palace of Westminster to Dogon dwellings in Africa and a Modernist hospital.In considering how all architecture has to mesh with the habits, beliefs, rituals and expectations of the society that created it, the book presents deep implications for our understanding of architectural history and theory. It also highlights the importance for architects of understanding how buildings frame social space before they prescribe new architectural designs of their own. The book ends with a recent example of user participation, showing how contemporary user interest and commitment to a building can be as strong as ever.

Product Description: A contemporary of Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, Gunnar Asplund pursued a unique architecture that displayed a blend of classical tradition, vernacular architecture and Modernism. ove all, he achieved a sensitive understanding of the relationship between architecture and its surrounding landscape, and it is such contributions that have made him recognized as Sweden's leading architect of the twentieth century...read more

Product Description: Bringing together leading international practitioners and theorists in the field, ranging from the 1960s pioneers of participation to some of the major contemporary figures in the field, Architecture and Participation opens up the social and political aspects of our built environment, and the way that the eventual users may shape it...read more

Product Description: Peter Blundell Jones details the inadequacy of the first histories of the Modern Movement by revealing the existence of suppressed alternative traditions within the movement and shows their great diversity through the use of case studies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Hans Scharoun (1893-1972) was the most significant German architectural Modernist of the 1920s and an important exponent of organic architecture. Scharoun first achieved international recognition with his controversial house for the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung in 1927...read more