"A valuable contribution."--Paul Goldberger, New York Times
"Nearly every page of the book is wittily illustrated with cartoons,
drawings, and photographs. If the coming generation or architects--and
their clients--pay attention to it, America may someday be a much more
agreeable place."--John Fischer, Harpers
As teachers of architectural design, Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore have
attempted to introduce architecture from the standpoint of how buildings
are experienced, how the affect individuals and communities emotionally
and provide us with a sense of joy, identity, and place. In giving
priority to these issues and in questioning the professional reliance on
abstract two-dimensional drawings, they often find themselves in
conflict with a general and undebated assumption that architecture is a
highly specialized system with a set of prescribed technical goals,
rather than a sensual social art historically derived from experiences
and memories of the human body. This book, an outgrowth of their joint
teaching efforts, places the human body at the center of our
understanding of architectural form.
Body, Memory, and Architecture traces the significance of the body
from its place as the divine organizing principle in the earliest built
forms to its near elimination from architectural thought in this
century. The authors draw on contemporary models of spatial perception
as well as on body-image theory in arguing for a return of the body to
its proper place in the architectural equation.
