The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach

by Amos Rapoport

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

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Zirvita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amos Rapoport brought into the study of architecture the rejection of purely formal studies, going instead into the realm of non-verbal patterns of communication. It surpasses deterministic views that favour differences in built spaces of particular groups as the result of space and environmental constraints, or scholarly views that see space as a purely specific cultural product.
The aim is to find how the built environment is ladden with and is able to transmit the non-verbal meaning present in every society/group/culture. Besides, space is seen as an independent variable during the process of creation of that meaning, exerting considerable influence on how humans behave around it.

[Sarah Al-Mutlaq · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looks Wooooow