Theorizing Built Form and Culture: The Legacy of Amos Rapoport

In this collection of essays, Theorizing Built Form and Culture: The Legacy of Amos Rapoport - a felicitation volume to celebrate the significance of Professor Amos Rapoport’s lifelong scholarship - scholars from around the world discuss the analytical relevance, expansion, and continuing application of these contributions in developing an advanced understanding of mutual relationships between people and built environments across cultures.

Professor Amos Rapoport has espoused an intellectual and theoretical legacy on environmental design scholarship that explains how cultural factors play a significant role in the ways people create and use environments as well as the way environments, in turn, influence people’s behavior. This volume presents a hitherto-not-seen, unique, and singular work that simultaneously articulates a cohesive framework of Rapoport’s architectural theories and demonstrates how that theoretical approach be used in architectural inquiry, education, and practice across environmental scales, types, and cultural contexts. It also acknowledges, for the very first time, how this theoretical legacy has pioneered the decolonizing of the Eurocentric approaches to architectural inquiry and has thus privileged an inclusive, cross-cultural perspective that laid the groundwork to understand and analyze non-Western design traditions. The book thus reflects a wide range of cross-cultural and cross-contextual range to which Professor Rapoport’s theories apply, a general notion of theoretical validity he always advocated for in his own writings.

The volume is a paramount source for scholars and students of architecture who are interested in understanding how culture mediates the creation, use, and preservation of the built environment.

Kapila D. Silva is Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas, USA. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA from where he received his doctorate and at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka from where he received professional architectural education. He is the lead editor of four volumes on cultural heritage management in the Asia-Pacific region (all published by Routledge) and co-author of The Ṭämpiṭavihāras of Sri Lanka: Elevated Image-houses in Buddhist Architecture (Anthem Press, 2021).

Nisha A. Fernando is Director and Associate Professor of Interior Architecture at the University of Kansas. Prior to joining KU, she was Professor of Interior Architecture at University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, USA, where she taught since 2001. She received her PhD in Environment-Behavior Studies from the School of Architecture & Urban Planning at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in Architecture from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Her broad scope of research includes culture-space relationships and her most current research includes sensory aspects of spatial experiences and design pedagogy.