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Product Description: This book is about a new and different way of approaching and studying the history of the built environment and the use of historical precedents in design. However, although what I am proposing is new for what is currently called architectural history, both my approach and even my conclusions are not that new in other fields, as I discovered when I attempted to find supporting evidence...read more

The Meaning of the Built Environment is a lively illustrated study of the meanings of everyday buildings for their users. Professor Rapoport uses examples and vignettes, drawn from many cultures and historical eras as well as contemporary America, to explicate a new framework for understanding how the built environment comes to have meaning, both for individual people and whole societies. `...this book fills a significant gap: it introduces the notion of environmental meaning so clearly that no reader will doubt the basic premise that the environmment holds meaning as part of a cultural system of symbols, and influences our actions and our determinations of social order.' -- Design Book Review, Fall 1984

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An historical approach to the broad variety of primitive and peasant dwellings and the forces that affect them