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As an architecture student who writes stories and as a creative writer who studies architecture, I was having difficulties explaining that novels accurately describe environmental experiences. My arguments always led to justifying novels as another inspirational formal tool for architects. Through the Architectural History and Theory program under the supervision of Prof. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, I learned to build my argument and find philosophical, literary, and architectural resources to develop it. Prof. Pérez-Gómez firmly believes in the importance of literature and poetry for having a just and meaningful architecture. Through the books he wrote and the historical architecture treatises that he studied over the years at the McGill Rare Books Library, Prof. Alberto Pérez-Gómez provided materials to support literature for architecture as a source of ethical imagination. He taught me that the priority is to think poetically, regardless of whether I am writing or building.

 

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In my decades in post-secondary education, I have not met a more inspirational professor than Alberto. Thinking back to when I attended his undergraduate courses at McGill University, or later taking part as a Masters student in these amazing seminars we held in the Rare Books Library room and the MacDonald Harrington building – wonderful days of presentations and discussions – I remember my time with Alberto and fellow students as rare moments that foregrounded collectively thinking around different readings as the most foundational task at hand. We plowed through sixteenth-century treatises or modern texts of philosophy with a sort of pure curiosity that was wonderfully at odds with the typical instrumentalization of what we do and what we learn. And as I keep running in the many “Gomytes” that are now in different practices and schools all over the world, I recognize this communicative passion that continues to animate all of us in our work to this day as but one part of the long-lasting impression that Alberto Pérez-Gómez is having on the architectural landscape.

 

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Coming from Palestine with a background in Architectural Engineering, I joined the Architectural History and Theory option at McGill University in 2012. I came into the school searching for a deeper meaning behind architecture and design. The readings we did in our history and theory seminars were eye-opening, but, moreover, it was the discussions that we had with Prof. Pérez-Gómez’ and the passion he had for what he taught that forever changed my perspective on architecture. My studies ended with a project that revolved around collecting words (which I then pickled in jars) and designing a space through narrative. I can only say that my experience in the History and Theory option has been one filled with fantastical encounters and serious research. I am honoured to have been part of this legacy, and I am thankful to Prof. Pérez-Gómez’ and the rest of my professors for the opportunity to be part of this story.

 

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I studied at McGill’s Architectural History and Theory option under Professor Alberto Pérez-Gómez from 1998-2005. My first encounter with Alberto’s scholarship began while reading his coauthored book, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, while I still lived in Shanghai. While studying in Cincinnati, I read the Chora series and sent him an inquiry regarding the Ph.D. program. He kindly wrote back with two enticements: the McGill libraries held wonderful architectural collections, and Montreal was a characteristic city for architectural studies. Studying with Alberto was an intense, challenging and enlightening process that always pushed me towards the unknown architectural truth. I have kept my original copies of his syllabi and share them as “the McGill reading list” with my students in Florida. In his courses, we extensively read the primary sources between history and philosophy of Vitruvius, Greek origins, medieval monasticism and art of memory, Renaissance humanism and hermeticism, Baroque fantasy, G.B. Vico’s philosophy of history, phenomenology (especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), hermeneutics (especially Ricoeur and Gadamer), critical meditations (especially Nietzsche, W. Benjamin and H. Arendt), surrealist dreams, modern and postmodern spaces of differences, desires and encounters, etc. His teaching and writings engage in the “intervals in the philosophy of architecture” to reconcile poetics and ethics in humanity. His hermeneutic study of architectural coincidences between history and phenomenology challenges Cartesian dualism on the philosophical issues of language, perception, experience, representation, imagination and poetic emotion. It maintains a great hope for meaningful architecture against the nihilism of instrumentalized modernity. His safeguard of architectural spiritus inspired my dissertation on a forgotten Jesuit garden at the Chinese Qing-dynasty imperial court. I had a wish that my dissertation defence took place in a Chinese garden. The dream came true in the summer of 2019 when Alberto and his former colleagues and students read Chinese gardens in situ for the published Chinese translation of his Built Upon Love, which timely reminded us that “as humans, our greatest gift is love, and we are invariably called to respond to it. Despite our suspicions, architecture has been and must continue to be built upon love.”

 

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I will forever remember my time with Alberto Pérez-Gómez in the Architectural History and Theory option at McGill University in the early 1990s. Within the pages of Vitruvius’s Ten Books and architectural treatises of the Renaissance and Baroque periods (among others), the parentheses of graduate studies in a person’s lifetime were, under Alberto’s watchful guidance, all the more memorable that their lines of reflection often carried us to forgotten books of a distant past. Yet Alberto had a remarkable way of bridging remote texts, drawings, and events in architectural history with our present moment and revealing their importance and impact, making them vivid and invigorating our engagement with contemporary theory and practice. Alberto has a gift for articulating ideas while mapping them on the backdrop of each author’s world of beliefs, senses of humour, assumptions, and broader contexts. He also knew which concepts to isolate and give our attention – from representation to phenomenological experience, time, and memory -- to build a more conscious approach to contemporary architecture. My cohort in the early nineties was small, and therefore focused and intimate as a result. Today, this chapter of my education resonates as a stolen moment before the busyness of life took over soon afterward. I truly enjoyed returning to the program as a guest for the yearly seminar on Guarino Guarino (my thesis topic) and glimpsing into Alberto’s inspiring world and this iconic scene: students hovered together around wonderful books in the Rare Books Room on the fourth floor of McLennan Library, deep in thought and discourse. It has been a privilege to remain in touch with Alberto through the years. I wish you, Alberto, much joy and fulfillment and continued creative production during your retirement.

 

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Thank you, Alberto. For your rigour and commitment to following your questions and observations rather than convention; for your generosity of spirit and care for your students; and for passing on to so many of us your conviction that by learning to read, listen, and speak with each other we can leave the world better than we found it.

 

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I feel privileged to have been part of the Architectural History and Theory option of the Master of Architecture Post-professional program at McGill University and having the opportunity to study with and next to outstanding scholars and academics. With tremendous gratitude, I thank Alberto Pérez-Gómez for generously sharing his knowledge and time, and, above all, for creating a safe place for the exchange of diverse ideas and arguments.

 

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It was first Alberto’s writings that triggered my journey from Istanbul to Montreal in 2005. Then, it was in his lectures, always enacted and crafted with rigor and care that these words came to life a second time. When I decided to work on an obscure book for my doctorate, the first thing I remember is Alberto’s encouragement to pursue my passion and openness to support the study of this overlooked subject. The diversity of topics, geographies, concepts, and periods covered in works completed under his supervision are testimonies to his selfless mentorship and boundless efforts for inclusivity in global architectural history and theory. He shared his poetic speech and writing, ethical stance and rigorous scholarship generously while allowing his students to grow and find their voices. And for that I feel most grateful and privileged.

 

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In a time of rising crises in social, political and environmental contexts; on the cusp of momentous technological breakthroughs that will radically change the realm of human affairs; at a time when capital and political power collude with ever greater efficacy to ‘smooth’ space, it is truly lamentable to lose the distinctive critical forum that is McGill’s graduate option in Architectural History and Theory.

No one can fill the shoes of Alberto Pérez-Gómez, of course--not the erudition certainly, but also not the passionate conviction and indefatigable hope. Hope, on the one hand, that “the effort to think one's own history can liberate thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.” Distinct from the hermeneutics of suspicion, however, this hope extends to the possibility of creating otherwise. Eruptions--wonder-full, resistant, or just plain unruly--against myopia, closure, consolidation...

It is a testament to the Master of Architecture Post-professional program in its History and Theory option that its three decades of students from all over the world are as distinct in our work and thinking as the diverse places in which we find ourselves today. But Alberto’s ‘activist’ hermeneutics inspires us all in the same way, as we strive to be not only good scholars, creators, professionals, and teachers--but also good protagonists.

 

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I will always remember the day I first read Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s work. It was a serendipitous encounter, and as I delved into Alberto's writing, I discovered a mentor who approached architecture in a way I had never imagined possible. For here was a scholar who, through deep and thoughtful engagement with a broad corpus of historical treatises and contemporary texts, teased out their most profound connections and, in so doing, unveiled a rich and ongoing humanist conversation about architectural thinking, theory and practice as critical sources for grounding understanding, meaning-making and ethical action in the present.

I joined the stimulating community of the Architectural History and Theory option to dwell longer and more fully in this conversation. Advancing from master’s to Ph.D. and throughout the precious years therein, I reveled in the ideas that Alberto brought to life through a stunning intellectual trajectory into which writers and architects entered and comingled, enlightened and enchanted, as they spoke to one another across time and space. For opening the doors to this world, I will forever be grateful to you, Alberto. Thank-you for so generously sharing the profound insights and originality of your thinking through your teaching and writing, and for igniting and nurturing a deep appreciation for techne, poiesis and the wonders of human imagination and creativity amidst an expansive community of architects and scholars all around the world. Know that your vision and commitment have deeply shaped my own teaching praxis, and how clearly, I hear your voice each time I say to my students: What we do and what we say matters. These matter deeply.

 

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Deep in a library some twenty years ago, I came across an early volume of Chora whose brilliant forays into architectural thinking and making were my first window onto the space of profound reflection, creativity and generosity opened by Alberto within the Architectural History and Theory program at McGill. Soon enough, I found myself in Montréal with the most inspiring people I had ever met from across the world, forging together a community of scholars and makers in between the Rare Books Library and the woodshop, the seminar and the studio, in words, images and artifacts. We discovered the vitality of history as a living inquiry, able to ground an architecture of action, imagination and compassion. In turn, we learned how theory could open up to both understanding and feeling, myth and reason, and illuminate the sense of purpose, beauty, and justice in human experience – how the political was poetic, and the aesthetic was ethical. We found our individual paths within a journey that took us from Plato’s Timaeus to Hejduk’s masques, guided throughout by Colonna’s Polyphilo. My own led from Nicholas of Cusa’s game of spheres to Palissy’s grottoes of redeemed earth, and on through the crystalline gate of Ledoux’s Saltworks to the ideal city of Chaux. Yet it was also intertwined deeply with those of my colleagues tracing Suger’s hierurgy of stone, walking and reading St. Petersburg, narrating the justness of the Paris Observatory, dancing the Lancaster-Hanover Masque, and recovering the resistant origins of Korean Modernism. We followed after our seniors, just as others followed us, adding our voices to a symposium that lasted for over thirty years. One by one, our theses written, and our lives changed, we spread out across the world again to begin new projects, and to carry the program forward in our own ways, in new modes and forums. My experience at McGill was profoundly transformative, and I am ever grateful to my colleagues, the faculty and staff for their generosity, insight and encouragement. But above all, I am most grateful to Alberto for so freely sharing his passion, wisdom, and capacity for wonder, not only with regard to architecture, but for all of life.

 

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My time at McGill was some of the most luxurious of my life. Granted, I lived in a tiny apartment with a kitchen that was, literally, a closet. My refrigerator was in my living/dining/everything else room and the entrance was directly into the bedroom. No, it was not my living arrangement that was lavish, it was the intellectual world I inhabited. The rhythm of two seminars a week and the treat of an Alberto lecture allowed for a routine that I have not enjoyed since. I did not know how rare the experience of having seminars in the rare books library, surrounded by rare books, and the ability to access them physically and not digitally, truly was. My first year was spent drunk on texts I rarely understood the first time around. Seminars were often over my head, but there was always the prospect of conversations over a burger at Milton café on Friday afternoons. I spent summers at the CCA, gorging on the books that McGill somehow did not have. It was as close to Arcadia as I have ever been. Thank you, Alberto, for clearing a space and making time to ask questions. Thank you, Martin, Louise, Lily, Marco, Paul, Einar, Julie, David, and all the rest for the conversations that followed.

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We learned the importance of care, love, and patience in our Métier. We understand the desire to build a home as a journey where we go through moments of joy and difficulty, always with the goal to achieve something good and beautiful. It is a process and an adventure that makes us grow a little bit more every time.

 

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I entered the Architectural History and Theory Post-professional program at McGill University in 1995 as a young architect searching for greater meaning in our discipline and our profession. I found purpose and passion in those lectures and seminars. Alberto’s mentorship convinced me to pursue a Ph.D. and become a historian, but his biggest influence is on my teaching. I strive to achieve the level of generosity he displays towards his students. His shadow is long, and so many of us have thrived in his shade.

 

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Alberto Pérez-Gómez provided me with a true home within the program that he had long dedicated himself to. He distinguished himself by being a captivating lecturer, an erudite scholar, and a generous mentor. My dissertation owed its creation to his impassioned, encouraging, and profound guidance. Alberto’s students, now working around the world, offer the promise that his work on the poetics of architecture will continue.

 

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Since the first time I sat in a history lecture by Prof. Alberto Pérez-Gómez as an undergraduate student, I felt that I had been offered an exacting glimpse into history of architecture, beyond mere dates and facts, a profound thread that connected the here and now to critical works through time. The History and Theory option’s contribution in informing one’s mode of thinking and practice is still resonant. The range of activities its graduates have undertaken over the years has demonstrated its critical role in informing one’s future actions. Beyond its individual offerings, the program has served as a collective motivator to make the theory and practice of architecture meaningful beyond the limits of time and space.

 

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Speak, speak 

O, Unspeakable you 

Speak the language you know 

Speak the shade 

Speak the crepuscule 

When the stylite’s shadow reaches the horizon 

  Bridging earth and sky 

Speak the crepuscule 

And remember noon 

  The equinoxes’ mid-day 

When your shadow is lost for a time 

  A temporal moment 

  Where only the wind on your burned skin  Calls your body to the clouds 

Speak, Speak 

O, Unspeakable you 

  Speak of morning’s dew 

    Evanescent 

Listen to the well’s stones 

  Their echo tempered by the mousses 

Listen to its underground water 

  You in the sky 

  Find back in your memory 

  The inescapable time when 

  You stopped breathing 

  Your eyes raptured by the water cathedral 

      So light, so mute 

     So calm, so ready to go   And you 

Speak, O Unspeakable you 

  Speak the silence of the prayer 

  Glare at the sun and find in yourself the echoes of others 

  Them, You 

  All indulging in drunkenness 

  Them, You 

  Ready to forget, to leave, to go again 

Speak, Mute 

Speak the vagueness of the shade Speak the memory of water Speak, and let go 

Speak, Speak 

Just speak the shade 

  And remember Amon 

  His handles regulates Ceres’ harvest 

  His silence, like Moses’ lameness   His look, staring at your stomach 

    Amon, Asclepius’ guest 

    Amon, the Fourth 

    The shade after the tree 

    The shade 

Speak, Speak 

O, Unspeakable you Speak the language you know 

Speak the Shade… 

 

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Being an artist and professor before coming to McGill in 2010, I can speak to the transformative impact the Architectural History and Theory option has had on my teaching and research endeavors. Most astounding is how these lessons are continuously rediscovered years later, where the past takes on new significance in relation to present experience and action. In particular, Dr. Pérez-Gómez’ teaching and writing deeply informed my research into the architectural significance of Anselm Kiefer’s art practice, showing the reciprocity between materials and ideas, where the act of making itself gives rise to reflective thoughts about our world and its history. First introduced to Dr. Pérez-Gómez by my professors, who were among the first generation of his students at McGill, it is a real privilege to be part of a collective of teachers and architects, friends and colleagues, who have had such influence on architecture worldwide. Like the ever-changing manifestation of architecture, it is precisely because vestiges of other times, people and their interests were woven into the poetic images we received, that lessons from Alberto’s teaching will always permit a returning to the places we live, the tasks we perform, our tools and language, as sources for the continual renewal of meaningful architecture.

 

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The world is a mystery through which we wander. The ways we see it, draw it, and make the map of that world are entangled in each other. When I came to McGill’s History & Theory option, I was looking for a way to invite into my work an understanding of how the knot of history and culture, contemporary events and calamities, matter to architecture. My professional background, life experience, and studies in design as it relates to social science had offered valuable forms of knowledge, but not this. I found it in the Architectural History and Theory option of the Master of Architecture Post-professional program at McGill University. For this I have to thank the tremendous breadth of knowledge, and the embrace of architectural poetics as a subject of scholarship, of Alberto Pérez-Gómez; the key contributions of Martin Bressani, Ricardo Castro, and Louise Pelletier; and my own classmates, who were a rich source of insight, camaraderie, and pleasure. I learned from each of these. Every year since leaving the program I have continued to discover how that my experience in it prepared me to explore architecture, its image, and their constitution in culture and technics. I have also found myself to be a member of an international community with similar concerns, and I am still in frequent correspondence with graduates of McGill’s Architectural History and Theory option. All of this feeds my work. I am a better architect now, a better writer, a better artist and, I hope, a better explorer than I was before I began my studies.