House Form and Culture

This book ties together many ideas from the fields of anthropology and architecture. Rapoport methodically builds an argument for his hypothesis that "The different forms taken by dwellings are a complex phenomenon for which no single explanation will suffice." He supports his arguments with hundreds of examples drawn from the literature, as in the style of a review article. I was struck by parallelism between Rapoport's evidence that houses can vary tremendously, even given similar environmental or cultural factors, and the old structural linguistics adage that languages can vary in innumerable ways. Some of Rapoport's terminology is now outdated (e.g. "primitive societies,"), but these terms were standard at the time when the book was written so he shouldn't be singled out for using them. The ideas presented in the book are well worth studying and the book includes numerous reference citations for further investigation. --By Erika Mitchell, Published on Amazon.com