Reading Architecture and Culture. Researching Buildings, Spaces and Documents

Introducing the notion of appreciating buildings as cultural artefacts, this book presents insightful readings by eminent writers which show the power of this approach. Architecture embodies the ideologies involved in its inhabitation, construction, procurement and design. It displays the thinking of the individuals involved, their relationships and their involvement in the cultures in which they lived and worked. In this way, buildings and their details are cultural artefacts that can be read for the insights they contain. This distinctive position in architectural research allows that buildings have multiple authors -- that everyone who engages with them, everyone who alters them, has the capacity to be a designer. It also implies that insights offered by contemporary buildings are as potent as those to be found in historical structures. Reading architecture in this way can help architects to appreciate the contexts in which they operate when they design. This book introduces, outlines and elaborates on this and opens-up powerful insights for historians, critics and students.