Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Professor, McGill University
"Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics"
Monday, October 18, 2010
5:30 P.M. - Lawrence J. Plym Auditorium
Temple Hoyne Buell Hall
Plym Professor Lecture Series
Alberto
Pérez-Gómez was born in Mexico City in 1949.
He obtained his undergraduate degree in architecture and
engineering in Mexico City, did postgraduate work at Cornell
University, and was awarded a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. by the
University of Essex in England.
He has taught at universities in Mexico City, Houston,
Syracuse, and Toronto, at the Architectural Association in
London, and was Director of the Carleton University School of
Architecture from 1983 to 1986.
He has lectured extensively in North America and Europe.
His numerous
articles have been published in the
Journal of Architectural Education,
AA Files,
Arquitecturas Bis,
Section A,
VIA, Architectural Design,
ARQ,
SKALA, A+U,
Perspecta, and many other
periodicals. His book
Architecture and the Crisis of
Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award
in 1984, a prize awarded every two years for the most significant work
of scholarship in the field.
In January 1987
Pérez-Gómez was appointed Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the
History of Architecture at McGill University, where he is currently
Director of Post-Professional (Master’s and Doctoral) Programs, and
chairs the History and Theory of Architecture division.
From March 1990 to June 1993, he was also the Director of the
Institut de recherche en histoire de l'architecture, a research
institute co-sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the
Université de Montréal and McGill University.
Dr. Pérez-Gómez is
the author of Polyphilo or The
Dark Forest Revisited (MIT Press, 1992), an erotic narrative/theory
of architecture that retells the love story of the famous fifteenth
century novel/treatise
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms, a text
that has become the source of numerous projects and exhibitions.
He is also co-editor of a now well-established series of books
entitled Chora: Intervals in the
Philosophy of Architecture McGill-Queen’s University Press), which
collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice
of architecture through its history and theories.
The fifth volume in this series is expected in early 2007.
A recent major
book co-authored with Louise Pelletier,
Architectural Representation and
the Perspective Hinge (MIT Press, 1997), traces the history and
theory of modern European architectural representation, with special
reference to the role of projection in architectural design.
Built upon
Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics
is the title of Pérez-Gómez’s most recent book (MIT Press, May 2006).
This work discusses points of convergence between ethics and poetics,
beauty and justice, in architectural history and practice. This is an
urgent task in view of our complex political environment characterized
by the failures of globalization, and by the prevailing obsession with
digital tools at the expense of serious thinking reflecting on the
inability of formalism and planning to engage the increasing
urbanization of our planet.
Plym
Auditorium