ABSTRACT
Amos Rapoport (1969), architect and anthropologist, has suggested in his writing that a feature of the human mind is to order the world by organizing and naming space. In the words of one of his followers, A. D. King (1980, p. 27):
Built environments encode or give expression to a particular set of cultural rules and also influence both social and cognitive environments. How people build not only results from but also influences how people think.
Rapoport and others have argued that buildings (their size, location, and form) are the result not only of factors such as climate or topography, but are shaped by ‘a society's ideas, its forms of economic and social organization, its distribution of resources and authority, its activities and the beliefs and values which prevail at any one period of time’ (King 1980, p. 1). In fact, sociocultural criteria may be a great deal more important than factors such as climate and technology in affecting built form. It is essential to remember that even the simplest buildings ‘are institutions, basic cultural phenomena’ (Rapoport 1980, p. 285). As a system of nonverbal communication, the built environment must be decoded by those who use or observe it. In the course of time, as society changes, so does its built environment; new building forms may appear, and existing buildings may be used for new purposes. But the changes reflect a larger pattern emerging in society as a whole.