She also shows flashes of attitude here and there. The author occasionally inserts a few personal comments, mentioning, for instance, that in her home, a spare bedroom serves the function of the attic (now missing in many newer homes). She asks us to consider exteriors: What do they tell us about the building and its intents? What do they tell us about what we’ll experience inside? (Consider: a school that looks like a factory, a museum that resembles a palace, a retirement community that looks like a resort.) Lurie also takes us inside to help us see more clearly what’s before us: an office with cubicles, an elementary schoolroom with rows of desks bolted to the floor, a church that looks like a Gothic cathedral or like a theater complex. She devotes sections to such types of buildings as private homes, religious structures, museums, schools, “houses of confinement” (prisons, hospitals, asylums, nursing homes), hotels and restaurants, stores and offices. In the tradition of her earlier work ( The Language of Clothes, 1981), Lurie’s new volume proceeds both thematically and chronologically (within chapters). A noted novelist ( Truth and Consequences, 2006, etc.) returns with a generally genial but sometimes-slicing analysis of our buildings and their interior spaces.
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