and Viollet-le-Duc, then through the thickets of Classicism [Laugier, Perrault, Blondel, etc.] and finally back to the atavistic architecture of archaic Greece and Egypt. Such a search for firstness is of course not a search for a building per se. It is a search for an archetype, or, more crucially, for a central feature of the human condition. Of course, every age in this survey stamps the idea with its own theoretical anxieties, so the idea, in its wild trajectory, has accreted a fascinating record of Western ideas about dwelling. One particularly startling example of the development of this idea of the first human house is the difference between the ancient and the modern ideas about architectural ornament. As Rykwert renders it, the ancient temples replicated in stone the forms of earlier wooden structures that had become sanctified and meaningful through sacrificial rite and through ritual/liturgical association. So the origins of the neo-classical details that so decorously decorate the White House, for example, have their origins in ritual slaughter and rites of propitiation, investiture, and oath-making. In stark contrast to this brutal and significant immediacy is the modern tendency to think of ornament in purely aesthetic terms, [hence the modernist project to rid us of it, no doubt, because it has lost its meaning and become an encumberance]. A fascinating historical study. 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful 4.0 out of 5 stars A Classic Jan 30 2007 By Elie G. Haddad - Published on Amazon.com Format: