This remarkable book explores the origins of architectural beauty in the dynamics of sexual desire. It is a daring departure from the conventional genres of architectural writing and a completely original reflection on the erotics of architecture. Pérez-Gómez retells the love story of the famous Renaissance novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms. The original work, long a cult book among architects and regarded as one of the most enigmatic books ever published, takes place in a forest. In the retelling, the forest has been replaced by the high tech and pop environment of appliances and airports. Both versions exist somewhere in the borderland between fiction, theory, and pornography. The text is paralleled by a running sequence of photographic collages merging the body and the machine. The original hero of Hypnerotomachia, Poliphilo, is lost in a dark forest searching for his lover Polia, for harmony and order in a vast maze of ruined antiquities - caverns, pyramids, theaters, and temples that are described with an almost fanatic erudition and unbridled lust. This modern version of the tale imaginatively frames our own dark forest in terms of the technology that has become our "nature." The hero finds himself in the most inhospitable and uncontrollable of spaces, the space of contemporary travel: in an airport and in flight. His voyage does not take him to real buildings, but rather to a jungle of deconstructivist forms - metal grids, plastic domes, computer hardware, blueprints, construction sites, and paintings where the erotic roots of architectural meaning are disclosed and the limitations of a world subjugated by doctrine and tradition are revealed. The sites visited range from the Carceri of Piranesi and the works of Ledoux, Boullée, and Lequeu to recent theoretical and architectural projects by Hejduk, Rossi, Libeskind, and Eisenman. Alberto Pérez-Gómez is the Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture at McGill University. He has published two volumes of poetry and three books on architecture, the most recent of which, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, received the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Award.

Polyphilo, Or, the Dark Forest Revisited: An Erotic Epiphany of Architecture

Literature & Fiction

Pérez-Gómez, Alberto

World Literature

Mit Pr

The relationship between the architectural representation and its intended product—a building—has undergone a profound transformation over the centuries. Before the age of modern technology, the systematically predictive role of architectural drawing so taken for granted today was less dominant in the evolution from architectural idea to built work. The age of computer-aided design has brought with it a stricter standard of fidelity. However, contemporary architecture need not simply accept the inevitability of a technological imperative. This book demonstrates that representation is never a neutral tool or mere picture of a future building. Writing from inside the discipline of architecture, rather than from the more common extrapolations from the history of painting and philosophy, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier focus on the implications of the tool of perspective (and the hegemony of vision) for architectural representation. Their primary thesis is that tools of representation have a direct influence on the conceptual development of projects and generation of forms, and that there are alternatives to the reductive working methods of most contemporary practice.  The book examines textual evidence across a broad historical period, concentrating on the relationship between drawing and architectural space in the period from the seventh to the twentieth century. To understand and evaluate the place of vision in the Western architectural tradition, the book includes a general introduction to optics in antiquity and the Middle Ages and addresses the question of the evolution of linear perspective. This is not, however, a general history of perspective. The book discusses such issues as optical correction and the nature of architectural drawing in selected treatises, revealing the complexity and potential contradiction inherent in any linear history of representation. The authors' ultimate aim is to probe the possibilities of the constructed world—that is, architecture—as a poetic translation, rather than prosaic transcription, of its representations.

Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge

Arts & Photography

Pelletier, Louise

Architecture

How architecture can move beyond the contemporary enthusiasms for the technically sustainable and the formally dazzling to enhance our human values and capacities.
Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected―attuned―to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, Pérez-Gómez explains, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding.
Our physical places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, Pérez-Gómez argues that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. To be fully self-aware, we need an external environment replete with meanings and emotions.
Pérez-Gómez views architecture through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the key German concept of Stimmung―attunement―and its roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance or proportion. He considers the primacy of place over space; the linguistic aspect of architecture―the voices of architecture and the voice of the architect; architecture as a multisensory (not pictorial) experience, with Piranesi, Ledoux, and Hejduk as examples of metaphorical modeling; and how Stimmung might be put to work today to realize the contemporary possibilities of attunement.

Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (Mit Press)

MIT Press]

Contents Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation - Alberto Pérez-Gómez - The Measure of Expression: Physiognomy and Character in the Nouvelle Méthode of Jean-Jacques Lequeu - Jean-François Bédard - Michelangelo: The Image of the Human Body, Artifice, and Architecture - Helmut Klassen - Architecture as Site of Reception - Part I: Cuisine, Frontality, and the Infra-thin - Donald Kunze - Fictional Cities - Graham Livesey - Instrumentality and the Organic Assistance of Looms - Indra Kagis McEwen - Space and Image in Andrey Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia": Notes on a Phenomenology of Architecture in Cinema - Juhani Pallasmaa - The Momentary Modern Magic of the Panorama - Stephen Parcell - The Building of a Horizon - Louise Pelletier - Anaesthetic Induction: An Excursion into the World of Visual Indifference - Natalija Subotincic. The essays in this collection explore architectural form and content in the hope of finding new and better alternatives to traditionally accepted practices.

Chora 1: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 1)

Parcell, Stephen

McGill-Queen's University Press

Chora, Vol. 1: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture

Univ of Toronto Pr

Karsten Harries provides a new and long-overdue reading of Martin Heidegger's well-known essay "Building Dwelling Thinking." Donald Kunze and Stephen Parcell consider possibilities of meaningful architectural space for a visual culture, continuing themes they addressed in Chora 1. Further reflections on the spaces of literature, cinema, and architecture include an interview with French writer and film maker Alain Robbe-Grillet and articles by Dagmar Motycka Weston on the surrealist city, Tracey Eve Winton on the museum as a paradigmatic modern building, and Terrance Galvin on spiritual space in the works of Jean Cocteau. Jean-Pierre Chupin and Bram Ratner explore historical themes in their essays on French Renaissance architect Philibert de l'Orme and the Jewish myth of the Golem. Gregory Caicco addresses ethical questions in his essay on the Greek agora and the death of Socrates, as does Lily Chi in her meditation on the critical issue of use in architectural works. A concern with architectural representation and generative strategies for the making of architecture is present throughout, especially in the essay by Joanna Merwood on the provocative House by British artist Rachel Whiteread.

Chora 2: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 2) (CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture)

Chora 2: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 2)

Chora 3: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 3)

The thirteen essays in this collection include historical subjects as well as speculative theoretical "projects" that blur conventional boundaries between history and fiction. Ricardo Castro provides an original reading of the Kogi culture in Colombia; Maria Karvouni explores philological and architectonic connections between the Greek demas (the political individual) and domus (the house); Mark Rozahegy speculates on relationships between architecture and memory; Myriam Blais discusses technical inventions by sixteenth-century French architect Philibert de l'Orme; Alberto Pérez-Gómez examines the late sixteenth-century reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Juan Bautista Villalpando; Janine Debanné offers a new perspective on Guarino Guarini's Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin; Katja Grillner examines the early seventeenth-century writings of Salomon de Caus and his built work in Heidelberg; David Winterton reflects on Charles-François Viel's "Letters"; Franca Trubiano looks at Jean-Jacques Lequeu's controversial Civil Architecture; Henrik Reeh considers the work of Sigfried Kracauer, a disciple of Walter Benjamin; Irena ðantovská Murray reflects on work by artist Jana Sterbak; artist Ellen Zweig presents a textual project that demonstrates the charged poetic space created by film makers such as Antonioni and Hitchcock; and Swedish writer and architect Sören Thurell asks a riddle about architecture and its mimetic origins. The essays in this volume demonstrate a reconciliatory architecture that respects cultural differences, acknowledges the globalization of technological culture, and points to a referent other than itself.

Chora IV continues a tradition of excellence in open, interdisciplinary research into architecture.

Chora 4: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 4)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pérez-Gómez, Alberto

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Polyphilo, Or, the Dark Forest Revisited: An Erotic Epiphany of Architecture

Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge

Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (Mit Press)

Chora 1: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 1)

Chora, Vol. 1: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture

Chora 2: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 2) (CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture)

Chora 2: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 2)

Chora 3: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 3)

Chora 3: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 3)

Chora 4: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Volume 4)