AMOS RAPOPORT

Done by: Mary, Shraddha, Sachin, Nanditha, Safa

The study of people relating and reacting their environments is the central focus
of the book, The Meaning of The Built Environment, by Amos Rapaport. To
study the ways people react to their environments
Rapopart suggests many methods including observation, interviews and
questionaries' ,analyzing historical ,cross cultural examples and tracing patterns,
regularities and consistencies in human social behavior. These methods show:
1) How people see the environment
2) How they feel about the environment
3) The aspects that they like or dislike about the environment which area to be
a self evident.

The book uses symbolic interactionist theory in attempting to explain how

people understand the nature of the meanings in the environment.
He feels that “people react to environments globally and affectively responses
Amos Rapoport is an architect and one of the founders of Environment-Behavior Studies
(EBS).
• He is the author of over 200 academic publications in this field, including books that
have been translated into foreign languages, including French, Spanish, German,
Persian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
• He has held honorable and visiting positions in many universities around the globe, is
professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
• His work has focused mainly on the role of cultural variables, cross-cultural studies, and
theory development and synthesis.
• His influential book House Form and Culture explores how culture, human behavior,
and the environment affect house form.

AMOS EXPLAINING HIS DESIGN IN A SEMINAR

BOOKS
1969 - House Form and Culture
1976 - The Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built Environment. A
Cross-Cultural Perspective.
1977 - Human Aspects of Urban Form: Towards a Man-Environment
Approach to Urban Form and Design
1982 - The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication
Approach
1990 - History and Precedent in Environmental Design
2003 - Culture, Architecture, and Design
 House Form and Culture:
• He begins the book by stating that the study of house and form is multi-disciplinary and
involves fields of architecture, culture, geography, history, city planning,
anthropology, ethnography, cross-cultural studies, and behavioral sciences.
• In the first chapter, he segregates buildings as ‘important’ like monuments or
‘unimportant’ like houses and streets.
• He then goes on to define a building as ‘primitive’, ‘vernacular’ or ‘traditional’.
• The second chapter discusses in detail the influence of climate, materials and
technology available.
• It also takes into consideration the aspects of economics, religion, site and defence.
• The third chapter focuses on establishing a relationship between the factors: house,
form, and culture. A house is seen in the light of choice of site, relation to its
settlement, and socio-cultural forces while ensuring that basic needs are met. Climate
is discussed as a major modifying factor in the fourth chapter.
• Various instances, from extreme hot to cold environments, are given for a better
understanding of the climatic variables. This is followed by suitable responses to the
same suggested by the author.
• Rapoport explains that how a house is built depends on the way of life, shared group
values and ideal environmental conditions in the fifth chapter.
The main focus lies on the process of construction, the choice of materials and
technology involved.
Having discussed in-depth primitive and vernacular buildings, in the last chapter,
Rapoport talks about the decreasing popularity of the same due to industrialization and
the specialization of modern life.
He concludes by discussing the scenario in the light of developing countries and the
changes in our own culture.
KEY TAKEAWAYS :

A primitive building is one that anyone can build based on their requirements and the
problems that are to be dealt with. Vernacular is an extension to primitive, describing how a
building is designed and built.
It talks about models and adjustments with more individual variability than primitive. A
traditional model is a result of the collaboration between people over generations and
between the designer and the user of the building. However, a loss of tradition has been
observed in recent times owing to the difference in opinion of the designers and users.
Vernacular architecture does not involve specialized people for building houses. However,
the layman manages to build not only a shelter through basic knowledge and problem-
solving skills.
While introducing this concept to the reader, Rapoport builds upon the same through
various examples and believes that the key to modern design lies in the successful solutions
from vernacular architecture.
The very first factor in the discussion is climate.
He quotes the example of the Seminole House
of Florida which is built on supports to protect
it from moisture, insects and animals and the Seminole House of Florida
absence of walls is for ventilation. Stilt houses
are prominent even today in flood plains such
as in North East India along the Brahmaputra.
In dry areas like Rajasthan, there are
courtyards and jaalis for enhanced ventilation.
The material used for construction in the case
of vernacular architecture was the one locally
available and suited the climate.
In tropical and subtropical areas, brick masonry
is common, and in temperate zones, glass
buildings are popular. Choice of the site largely
depends on socio-cultural values which
explains why the Meo in South East Asia pick
hills for their houses, while men with similar
economies pick plains, with greater
employment opportunities and preferably an
urban locality. In Cameroon, houses were
constructed depending on the type of family. It
is relevant in the form of the family structure
today- nuclear or joint, accordingly, the
number of bedrooms required.