Download or read book Architecture and the After-life written by Howard Colvin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pyramids and the Taj Mahal are witness to the extravagant architectural tributes that, throughout human history, the great and the wealthy have paid to their dead. In this book, a well-known architectural historian provides a history of funerary architecture in western Europe from the earliest megalithic tombs of prehistory to the establishment of public cemeteries in the nineteenth century. With sensitivity and wit, Howard Colvin traces the ways in which these structures represent changing ideas about the after-life as well as changes in architectural style.