All buildings are ultimately the products of building cultures--complex systems of people, relationships, rules, and habits in which design and building are anchored. In this book of thirteen chapter-essays, Davis uses historical, contemporary and cross-cultural examples to describe the structure of such cultures and how they are reflected in the form of buildings and cities. His aim is to show that special insights about the improvement of the contemporary built world come from looking at the building culture as a whole, not merely the individual acts of architects and city planners. The book is illustrated with over 260 historic and contemporary photographs, drawings and prints.

Review

"I find this book to be wonderful and refreshing. It describes, for the first time, a new point of view in which the overall system and process of construction of the buildings in the world--all of them together--is viewed as a single system: and that system is analyzed for its capacity to create a living world, or not, in different traditional and modern societies. The depth of the examples, the beautiful detail that describes individual instances of building process from culture after culture, and the analytical insight in the hundreds of examples, make this book a landmark. The Culture of Building, if taken as I think it must be taken, heralds a new era in our thinking about architecture."--Christopher Alexander

"With this insightful work, Howard Davis brings a refreshing breeze to ventilate our stuffy attics of architectural thought. He draws our attention away from the tired, singular icons of architectural history and directs it toward the omnipresent urban fabric that shapes our everyday experience. Through his words and photographs, we learn to recognize (and hopefully to replicate) the qualities of a built environment that is healthy for our minds and souls as well as our bodies."--Edward Allen, author of How Buildings Work: The Natural Order of Architecture

"In this innovatory and challeging work, Howard Davis explores the relationships between the institutions and operations of building design and construction in practical and human terms. Drawing upon a remarkably broad frame of reference, Davis cites examples from his own studies in Japan, India, North Africa, and elsewhere, in addition to focused examination of the building culture of the past and present in Europe and the United States. This unprecedented book should be essential reading, not merely for architects and students of architecture, but for all who are seriously engaged in the production of buildings now, and in the future."--Paul Oliver, Director, Centre for Vernacular Architecture, Oxford Brookes University