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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 utmo...
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.
Between the late Renaissance and the early nineteenth century, the ancient arts of architecture were being profoundly transformed by the scientific revolution. This important book, which won the 1984 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, traces the process by which the mystical and numerological grounds for the use of number and geometry in building gave way to the more functional and technical ones that prevail in architectural theory and practice today. Throughout, it relates the major architectural treatises of successive generations to the larger culture and the writings of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.Alberto Pérez-Gómez is Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottowa.
A vision of architecture that transcends concerns of form and function and finds the connections between the architect's wish to design a beautiful world and architecture's imperative to provide a better place for society. The forced polarity between form and function in considerations of architecture—opposing art to social interests, ethics to poetic expression—obscures the deep connections between ethical and poetical values in architectural tradition. Architecture has been, and must continue to be, writes Alberto Pérez-Gómez, built upon love. Modernity has rightly rejected past architectural excesses, but, Pérez-Gómez argues, the materialistic and technological alternatives it pro...
An enlightened discussion of all relevant aspects of architecture shows the necessity for revision of commonly held assumptions about the nature of architectural history, theory, representation, and ideation; the production of buildings in the postindustrial city; and professional ethics. These topics provide the basis for the fourteen interdisciplinary papers presented here. The introductory section includes an examination of the epistemological origins of technology in the early modern European context and two alternative visions of ethics and its potential relevance for architecture. The second part presents four perspectives on important questions about how we represent buildings and the...
"This book has its origins at the Minding Design symposium that took place at Taliesin West in November, 2012, an event sponsored by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture."
The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as informing renowned schools of architectural theory, notably those around Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Pérez-Gómez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people’s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific or technological systems. This book summarizes what Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has to offer specifically for architects. It locates architectural thinking in the context of his work, placing it in relation to themes such as space, movement, materiality and creativity, introduces key texts, helps decode difficult terms and provides quick reference for further reading.
Departing from the conventional genres of architectural writing, this book is a completely original reflection on the erotics of architecture. Perez-Gomez 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, takes place in a forest. In the retelling, the forest has been replaced by the high- tech environment of appliances and airports. Both versions exist somewhere in the borderland between fiction, theory, and pornography.
Perrault argues that rules of architecture be determined by reason, not by ancient precedent.
Volume I in the new series Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture explores fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture and examines the potential of architecture.