ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a satisfactory way of understanding the relationships between people and their environments. Building is a process that is continually going on, for as long as people dwell in an environment. The chapter considers how the shift from a building perspective to a dwelling perspective bears upon the concept and meaning of architecture. Having spelled out the essence of the building perspective, it compares the forms of the beaver’s lodge and the human house, that the first is tied, as it were, to the nature of the beaver itself, whereas the second is both historically and regionally variable. The chapter examines how, by adopting a dwelling perspective – that is, by taking the animal-in-its-environment rather than the self-contained individual as the point of departure – it is possible to dissolve the orthodox dichotomies between evolution and history, and between biology and culture.
