The Built Environment and Spatial Form

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe current fascination with what people term postmodern architecture has focused attention to the design of buildings in which we live and work, but the appeal is not limited to examples from our own familiar surroundings. During the last several decades anthropologists have been increasingly joined by others in taking a more careful look at the built environments of nonliterate societies, and especially the shelters they construct and occupy. The questions posed are broad: Why are there differences in built forms? What is the nature of these differences and what kinds of social and cultural factors might be responsible for the variation? Design practitioners, including architects, land scape architects, and planners, have become involved in debating these questions, as have behavioral and social scientists concerned with human interactions with the environment. At the same time, recent social theory has begun to focus anew on spatial as well as temporal dimensions of human behavior. These developments suggest that attention to the topic of this review is timely. Our purposes in reviewing the relevant literature include defining the major areas of research in the field in terms of issues and 453 0084-6570/90/ 1015-0453$02.00 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1990.19:453-505. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by University of Chicago Libraries on 09/17/13. For personal use only. Quick links to online content Further ANNUAL REVIEWS 454 LAWRENCE & LOW theoretical approach, critically evaluating some of the major contributions, and suggesting directions for future research.Anthropological concern with the built environment is at least as old as the first formalization of theories of cultural evolution during the 19th century. Although material remains of earlier cultural constructions, and shelters housing living cultures, were taken as evidence of evolutionary status, the underlying question about the exact nature of the relationships between society and culture and the built environment persisted. Such relationships are interactive, in that people both create, and find their behavior influenced by, the built environment. A variety of formulations have been used to con ceptualize this relationship: accommodation, adaptation, expression, repre sentation and, most recently, production and reproduction. Each of these conceptualizations represents a different theoretical perspective; each implies a different set of questions and distinct (although at times overlapping) sets of data corresponding to aspects of the built environment and human behavior.The built environment is an abstract concept employed here and in some of the literature to describe the products of human building activity. It refers in the broadest sense to any physical alteration of the natural environment, from hearths to cities, through construction by humans. Generally speaking, it includes built fo rms, which are defined as building types (such as dwellings, temples, or meeting houses) created by humans to shelter, define, and protect activity....

What can GIS + 3D mean for landscape archaeology?

“…Early social theorists such as Morgan, Durkheim, and Mauss posited evolutionary and functional theories to explain the roles of bounded spaces and built forms (i.e., built environment) in social life (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963;Morgan, 1965). In reaction to these theories, symbolic approaches such as structuralism emerged that understood architecture and space as reflecting cultural rules (Lawrence and Low, 1990;Lévi-Strauss, 1963). Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1979Giddens ( , 1984, posited practice-oriented perspectives to insert human agency into the production and reproduction of social meaning and relations; however, such approaches continue to treat spaces as neutral backdrops for social practice (A.…”

Built Form and Culture: Italian Transnational Houses in Australia

“…Lawrence and Low point out that while a few scholars have placed emphasis on the built form as being mainly determined by the social groups' culture as a way of life, others have argued that built form is principally influenced by design and construction technology, which are then adapted by native builders accordingly to availability of materials and climatic conditions [17]. This view is contrasted by Rapoport and Oliver.…”

“…Rapoport and Oliver's [17,18] argument is based on the evidence shown by history that form of buildings cannot be explained simply by reference biological needs, availability of materials and technology, and climatic conditions. They stress that materials and construction techniques cannot determine or provide fully an explanation of the nature and diversity of the form to be built: they can only facilitate and make possible certain decisions about the form.…”

Attention, ritual glitches, and attentional pull: the president and the queen

“…For instance, as we have learned from ethnoarchaeologists and environmental anthropologists (Lawrence and Low 1990), the built environment is culturally organized to deploy and focus attention in particular ways. After years of schooling, almost nobody notices the ways that chairs and desks are positioned to direct the attention of students and instructors in particular ways.…”