| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages. By Neil Harris. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. x, 198 pp. $40.00, isbn 0-300-07045-4.)

Building Lives is derived from a series of lectures Neil Harris delivered at Columbia University in which he explored a new approach to the study of architecture—analyzing the rituals and rites of passage that mark the life cycles of buildings. The study is based on the idea that both buildings and rituals have traditionally served as a means for organizing and comprehending the physical world. 1

Although filled with historical information about individual buildings, Harris's analysis falls somewhere between architectural history and anthropology. It is the study of the lives of structures rather than of social groups. The amply illustrated book is divided into sections that parallel three stages in human life and their attendant rites of passage: birth/initiation, childhood/coming of age, and finally death/burial/sainthood. Various building milestones—groundbreaking, anniversaries, and demolition—are paralleled to significant moments in human life and the rites that have arisen to mark them—birthdays, coming of age, and funerals. 2

Harris examines the tensions between replacement and preservation of buildings. Continuing the paradigm of human experience, he parallels the aging building to the aging person—demolition of buildings as death versus renovation and adaptive reuse as surgery and rehabilitation. The canonization of historic buildings results in their being enshrined as relics—museums that serve to reinforce the civil religion. . . .

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