Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010342679 | NA2543.S6 B58 2016 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
On Order
Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Peter Blundell Jones was Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield from 1994 until his death in 2016. He previously held teaching positions at the University of Cambridge and at London South Bank University, and was a prominent architectural writer, critic and historian.
Reviews 1
Choice Review
Winston Churchill famously said, "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." This commonly understood principle is a departure point for this book, which looks beyond architecture's function and aesthetics. The late Blundell Jones (professor of architecture, Univ. of Sheffield, UK, until his death in 2016) argues there are many other ways--invisible to users--that architecture shapes experience. He illustrates his thesis with 13 case studies from around the world and from different historical time periods. One such case is the Nuremberg rally grounds (discussed in chapter 5), which the Nazis shaped as an increasingly vast symbolic space that facilitated the party's unification of universal power with eternity. It was not the monumental architecture alone that made the space powerful. Trains brought thousands to event, and loudspeakers projected Hitler's voice to large audiences. Radio and, more important, film merged images of the architectural spectacle with motion and sound. These media communicated rallies to passive audiences, a system that, Blundell Jones writes, "suited the methods of the dictatorship and eased its progress." Steeped in the theory of architecture and ritual, this book concludes that social order is inherent in all human-made environments, from individual buildings to structures honoring traditions of group cultures. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals. --Paula Ann Mohr, independent scholar
