In this book, Rudofsky displays his genius for seeing and explaining the meaning of vernacular architecture – the dwellings, fortifications, tombs, monuments, and countless other adaptations that constitute the global legacy of untutored men both ordinary and extraordinary: the “prodigious builders.”

The author’s discussions range from China’s floating villages to the cultural significance of doors and windows in various parts of the world; from a Polish salt mine so vast as to be a self-contained community complete with churches, restaurants, and a narrow-gauge railway, to the African Dogon’s “Big House,” whose parts collectively symbolize a man procreating; from the ingenious pretechnological alternatives to air-conditioning, to giant observation kites. In each case Rudofsky brings to his subject a singular blend of erudition, wit, and insight that makes the exotic seem logical and the commonplace bizarre.

In his extensive travels over the better part of a century, the author has found universal evidence of man’s irrepressible impulse to reveal, through what he builds, his multifaceted nature – and of modern society’s equally compulsive tendency to subvert it.

Rudofsky’s cogent arguments are amply documented with over 100 of his unparalleled photographs, in addition to many more rare engravings and other illustrations. The total effect is to expand far beyond dictionary definitions our concepts of both architecture and the human spirit.