Encounters with Architecture: Insights from a Hundred Places

The hundred places of this book were visited over several decades, and played an important role in Davis’s career. Insights come from everyday places and famous landmarks: some beautiful, some the product of fine craftsmanship, some active places of gathering or commerce, some quiet places of contemplation. All stayed in the author’s memory, helping build the framework of his understandings of what is important to people in architecture and cities.

Organized chronologically, the book begins with the author’s encounters with buildings and places as a child in New York, and leads to his most recent architectural experiences as a seasoned professor, scholar and traveler. Each encounter is explained on two or three pages, that bring out the reasons for its significance and the lessons learned from it. Readers are encouraged to look for themselves and see how the places they encounter in their everyday lives and travels can enrich their own understandings about the built world that surrounds them.

Illustrated with beautiful photographs, drawings and diagrams, the book will interest people outside architecture who are fascinated by buildings and cities, as well as teachers, practitioners and students of architecture and cities

Howard Davis is Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Oregon, where he teaches design studios at introductory graduate and advanced levels, and courses on issues of culture and place in buildings and cities. His research is in vernacular architecture, hybrid urban buildings, and the relationships between buildings, neighborhoods and daily economic life. He is the author of three books: The Culture of Building; Living Over the Store: Architecture and Local Urban Life; and Working Cities: Architecture, Place and Production. He is the co-author, with Christopher Alexander and others, of The Production of Houses, about an innovative low-cost housing project in Mexico; and the editor of Early and Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alexander: Thinking, Building, Writing. Howard Davis is a Distinguished Professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and a winner of the Herman Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Oregon. His travels have taken him to over fifty countries on six continents, and are the basis for the writing and photography in this book.