Using examples ranging from farmhouses to hospitals to Cedric Price's Fun Palace, Peter Blundell Jones shows how the use of buildings is intimately tied to their social meaning. This carefully researched and well-argued book thereby helps re-cast architectural theory, bringing together separate frameworks-function, aesthetics and cultural value-into a single discourse.

Professor Howard Davis, Faculty for Architecture at the University of Oregon, USA

For those working in urban studies, Architecture and Ritual provides an important perspective on
how human societies at any scale (family, tribe, city, nation) form and are formed by their built
environments. It would be especially helpful for anyone working to understand people's ways of life in
the metropolitical context and how these ways are, to a significant degree, influenced by their
architecture.

Journal of Urban Affairs

In a major contribution to the study of the anthropology of building, Peter Blundell Jones explores architecture's role as a setting for communal rituals, balancing familiar and less familiar examples from a range of cultures to provide many insights into the shared origins of different expressions in the buildings of both modern and traditional societies.

Dr Eamonn Canniffe, Principal Lecturer at the Manchester School of Architecture, UK