Architecture and ritual : how buildings shape society.
Peter Blundell Jones /
- London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
- xvii, 371 p.
Architecture and Ritual explores how the rituals of life--from the grand and formal to the mundane and everyday--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. This is achieved through deep readings of individual pieces of architecture, each with a detailed description of its particular social setting and use. From the Paris Opera to modernist hospitals, and from seventeenth-century Chinese yamen to Sioux lamentation ceremonies, each case study enables a distinct theme to emerge, showing how social conventions relate to spatial practice.