House Form and Culture, (Foundations of Cultural Geography Series by Prentice Hall)

Amos Rapoport

"It is, therefore, important to see the house not only in relation to the basic dichotomy of settlement types as settings for life and their variants along the total space-use scale, but also as part of the specific system to which it belongs. It needs to be viewed in relation to the town, its monumental parts, nondomestic areas, and social meeting places, and the way they and the urban spaces are used-.."

"In the new townships the grid destroys both the intimate scale and the link with the land. The new visual elements no longer express the relation of the individual to the group and of the group ato the land as the larger living realm does in the tradicional pattern. The new pattern makes the individual feel insignificant. Group unity is destroyed, and there is no clear relation of man to his surroundings through elements of increasing spatial scale and demarcation of domains in harmony with the land around."

" The Pawnee earth lodge, for example, is regarded as typical of man's abode on earth, where the floor is the plain, the wall the distant horizon, the dome the arching sky, and the central opening the zenith, the dwelling of the invisible power"

"This distinction between types may be due partly to written or unwritten laws which limit the behavior patterns in the different domains-public or provate- by prohibitng some and allowing others. This is expression of world view and other attides and is one way in which a culture is linked to the way people use space."

"the relation of man to landscape...in terms of the I-Thou and I-It relation...

1. Religious and cosmological. The environment is regarded as dominant, and man is less than nature.

2. Symbiotic. Here man and nature are in a state of balance, and man regards himself as recponsible to God for nature and the earth and as a steward and custodian of nautre.

3. Exploitative. Man is the completer and modifier of nature, then creator , and finally destroyer of the environment.

In the first two forms nature and the landscape are a Thou, the relation is personal, and nature is to be worked with, while in the third nature is an It to be worked on, exploited , used."