ABSTRACT
In this collection of essays, Theorizing Built Form and Culture: The Legacy of Amos Rapoport – a felicitation volume to celebrate the significance of Professor Amos Rapoport's lifelong scholarship – scholars from around the world discuss the analytical relevance, expansion, and continuing application of these contributions in developing an advanced understanding of mutual relationships between people and built environments across cultures.
Professor Amos Rapoport has espoused an intellectual and theoretical legacy on environmental design scholarship that explains how cultural factors play a significant role in the ways people create and use environments as well as the way environments, in turn, influence people’s behavior. This volume presents a hitherto-not-seen, unique, and singular work that simultaneously articulates a cohesive framework of Rapoport’s architectural theories and demonstrates how that theoretical approach be used in architectural inquiry, education, and practice across environmental scales, types, and cultural contexts. It also acknowledges, for the very first time, how this theoretical legacy has pioneered the decolonizing of the Eurocentric approaches to architectural inquiry and has thus privileged an inclusive, cross-cultural perspective that laid the groundwork to understand and analyze non-Western design traditions. The book thus reflects a wide range of cross-cultural and cross-contextual range to which Professor Rapoport’s theories apply, a general notion of theoretical validity he always advocated for in his own writings.
The volume is a paramount source for scholars and students of architecture who are interested in understanding how culture mediates the creation, use, and preservation of the built environment.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|52 pages
Home and work environments
chapter 3|11 pages
Toward an understanding of environmental evaluations in urban residential areas
chapter 4|10 pages
Integrating Amos Rapoport's ‘systems of settings and activities’ and Anthony Giddens's ‘structuration theory’
part II|90 pages
Cultural landscapes
chapter 7|10 pages
Amos in Arabia
chapter 8|15 pages
Culture, race, and marginalization
chapter 9|11 pages
Systems of settings and activities
chapter 11|11 pages
Theoretical inspirations of Amos Rapoport
part III|50 pages
Environmental well-being
chapter 15|10 pages
People–nature interactions within activity settings
chapter 16|10 pages
Aging in place
part IV|57 pages
Design theory, pedagogy, and practice