Both architecture and anthropology emerged as autonomous theoretical disciplines in the 18th-century enlightenment. Throughout the 19th century, the fields shared a common icon-the primitive hut-and a common concern with both routine needs and ceremonial behaviours. Both could lay strong claims to a special knowledge of the everyday. And yet, in the 20th century, notwithstanding genre classics such as Bernard Rudofsky's Architecture without Architects or Paul Oliver's Shelter, and various attempts to make architecture anthropocentric (such as Corbusier's Modulor), disciplinary exchanges between architecture and anthropology were often disappointingly slight. This book attempts to locate the various points of departure that might be taken in a contemporary discussion between architecture and anthropology. The results are radical: post-colonial theory is here counterpoised to 19th-century theories of primitivism, archaeology is set against dentistry, fieldwork is juxtaposed against indigenous critique, and climate science is applied to questions of shelter. This publication will be of interest to both architects and anthropologists. The chapters in this book were originally published within two special issues of Architectural Theory Review.

Both architecture and anthropology emerged as autonomous theoretical disciplines in the 18th-century enlightenment. Throughout the 19th century, the fields shared a common icon-the primitive hut-and a common concern with both routine needs and ceremonial behaviours. Both could lay strong claims to a special knowledge of the everyday. And yet, in the 20th century, notwithstanding genre classics such as Bernard Rudofsky's Architecture without Architects or Paul Oliver's Shelter, and various attempts to make architecture anthropocentric (such as Corbusier's Modulor), disciplinary exchanges between architecture and anthropology were often disappointingly slight. This book attempts to locate the various points of departure that might be taken in a contemporary discussion between architecture and anthropology. The results are radical: post-colonial theory is here counterpoised to 19th-century theories of primitivism, archaeology is set against dentistry, fieldwork is juxtaposed against indigenous critique, and climate science is applied to questions of shelter. This publication will be of interest to both architects and anthropologists. The chapters in this book were originally published within two special issues of Architectural Theory Review.

240cm is the standard distance between floor and ceiling in residential buildings: the height of the void we inhabit. In its precision, and its emptiness, the number reflects contemporary interior architecture's condition. In a series of essays, House Tour explores an interior that is both familiar and seemingly uninhabited, critically celebrating a peculiar genre of representation, the architectural photography of an unfurnished interior. The authors - including anthropologists, architecture theorists and art historians - consider the ubiquitous contemporary apartment from an eye-level view, foregrounding the appearance and material presence of the architectural shell. They start out from photographs of unfurnished interiors found on the websites of leading Swiss architecture firms. They have a blank, labyrinthine appearance, with walls intersecting at oblique angles and exits seemingly leading nowhere, and show featureless rooms with seamless transitions between surfaces. House Tour offers answers to the quest for a new language that adequately describes this architecture.