The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach

The Meaning of the Built Environment is a lively illustrated study of the meanings of everyday buildings for their users. Professor Rapoport uses examples and vignettes, drawn from many cultures and historical eras as well as contemporary America, to explicate a new framework for understanding how the built environment comes to have meaning, both for individual people and whole societies.

`...this book fills a significant gap: it introduces the notion of environmental meaning so clearly that no reader will doubt the basic premise that the environmment holds meaning as part of a cultural system of symbols, and influences our actions and our determinations of social order.′ -- Design Book Review, Fall 1984

`Rapoport does a thorough job indeed. He presents a most useful text with, in his usual way, a splendid wealth of Rapoport examples.′ -- Town Planning Review, Vol 5 No 4, 1984

"Rapoport is concerned with the meanings which buildings, their contents, and their inhabitants convey, and the conclusions which can be drawn therefrom for procedures of architectural design to satisfy the people who will ultimately live in these buildings. . . . A challenging book on a subject that has had insufficient attention in the past."a"Man and Environment"
"Fills a significant gap: it introduces the notion of environmental meaning so clearly that no reader will doubt the basic premise that the environment holds meaning as part of a cultural system of symbols, and influences our actions and our determinations of social order."a"Design Book Review"
"This is the second edition of a book first published in 1982. . . . Enthusiastic and inquiring as the reader is brought into the writer's thought processes."a"Progress in Human Geography" (England)
"It has merits not to be found in any other book in this much-discussed and little understood subject, to wit: it is short, it is simple, and it is useful. It is even, in parts, entertaining....a book which will help architects to do their job better." a"Architecture Australia"