Architecture and Culture
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2025
Pages: 238
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$89.25 USD
This textbook explores how forces beyond design—including money, politics, and the environment—shape our buildings. It investigates how architecture both reflects and influences the cultures that create it, examining how people have built and lived in spaces over time. By understanding the successes and failures of buildings from around the world, the book advocates for creating inclusive, equitable, and climate-responsive architecture.
Chapter 1: Behind the Facade
Chapter 2: When Shutters Would Shut
Chapter 3: Equity by Design
Chapter 4: The Sacred and the Sublime
Chapter 5: Cloisters to Quads
Chapter 6: Home Truths
Chapter 7: Built on Cotton
Chapter 8: Building Fast, Building Slow
Chapter 9: Hostile Territories
Chapter 10: Stone, Steel, and Sky
Chapter 11: Something Borrowed
Chapter 12: Cottage to Cubicle
Chapter 13: Blank Canvas
Chapter 14: Good Neighbors
Chapter 15: Porticos to Pilotis
Chapter 16: Agoras, Arcades, and Amazon
Chapter 17: Come Fly with Me
Chapter 18: Everything, Everywhere
Chapter 19: Mortality and Monuments
Chapter 20: With the Click of a Mouse
Chapter 21: Spectacular, Spectacular
Chapter 22: Fresh Air
Chapter 23: It's Not Easy Being Green
Chapter 24: On Even Ground
Chapter 25: Dreaming of No-Where
Chapter 26: Building Better
Amrita Raja, AIA is an architect, critic, and educator, currently teaching at Virginia Tech. Her academic research explores equity and justice in the built environment. Recent work includes Say Their Names!, a proposed space for reflection, conversation, and protest shortlisted as a finalist in Virginia Tech’s Call for Public Art, and The Counter-Canon Project, an archive of under-represented voices in architectural history. Her writings on the built environment have appeared in publications including The Architect’s Newspaper, Dwell, Metropolis, and The Washington Post. Amrita's professional experience spans the globe, with projects in the US, Europe, UK, and the Middle East, traversing scales from private residences to masterplans. She is the former president of the AIA United Kingdom, and has served on the AIA International Region Board and the AIA National Members’ Voice Taskforce.
Greg Tew is a designer and educator with international recognition and awards for his work as an architect, interior designer, and industrial designer. Throughout his career, Greg has attempted to create memorable designs from a pragmatic focus on problem solving. That strategy has led to publication of his work in leading design and news publications around the world including: Detail, Architectural Review, l’architecture d’aujourd’ hui, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Los Angeles Times, ARCHITECT, Ottagono, Metropolitan Home, Architecture, Interior Design, Interiors, and Gourmet, as well as the books XS: Big Ideas, Small Buildings and PreFab: Adaptable, Modular, Dismountable, Light, Mobile Architecture.
As an academic, Greg has taught architecture and interior design and has won numerous awards including the Virginia Tech Sporn Award for Teaching Introductory Courses—that prestigious award is the only university-level teaching award where the winner is nominated by students and selected by a committee of students. Greg was also inducted as a member of the Virginia Tech Academy of Teaching Excellence.
His primary focus in teaching during the past 10 years has been the ongoing development of Design Appreciation, a course focused on the grand challenge of our time—imagining a way of living that is unquestionably better than the life we live today and that is also sustainable.