Review by Choice Review
Knowles is one of the most distinguished professors of architecture in this country. He is now retired, emeritus status, from the University of Southern California. He has been an unregenerate modernist and ecologist for his entire career, and this book distills a lifetime of teaching in the field. The book falls into a category of publication called design manuals or guides to design, teaching readers how to design housing and using little line drawings, short pithy paragraphs, simple mass diagrams, and tiny black-and-white photographs. The book gives the flavor of what it must have been like to learn from Knowles in one of his design studios. As such, this book will appeal to beginning design students of all stripes, from high school to graduate school. The "ritual" of the title refers to the agendas of daily life that begin with the passages of the sun and the moon through the sky and end with the distillation of fresh-ground coffee for morning breakfast. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through graduate students; two-year technical program students. P. Kaufman Boston Architectural Center
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
