Architecture's Appeal: How Theory Informs Architectural Praxis
Edited by Marc J Neveu, Negin Djavaherian and Robert Kirkbride
Abingdon, Oxon UK: Routledge, 2015.
Intended as a scholarly 65th anniversary birthday gift for Prof. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture's Appeal is a thought-provoking book envisioned to inspire further scholarly inquiries and act as a springboard for discussions in the wider disciplinary field as well as graduate seminars in architectural theory and history. Edited by three distinguished graduates of the Doctoral Program, the volume builds on the architectural tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics as developed by Dalibor Veseley and Joseph Rykwert and carried on by David Leatherbarrow, Peter Carl and Alberto Pérez-Gómez.
In this collection, former students, lecturers, and thinkers that have engaged McGill's Architectural History and Theory program in some capacity, including Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow, Juhani Pallasmaa, Karsten Harries, Steven Holl, Indra Kagis McEwen, David Theodore, Paul Emmons, and Louise Pelletier, offer new insights on questions regarding the role of the architect today and the part of history and theory in contemporary digitally-driven architectural praxis.
![monochromatic images of arms being strangled with knot to stop circulation.](https://www.mcgill.ca/architecture/files/architecture/image_for_architectures_appeal.jpeg)
Contents:
Acknowledgements.
Introduction by Marc Neveu and Negin Djavaherian
Part 1: Invoking the Gods
1. The Reading Chamber by Robert Kirkbride
2. The Tower of Babel and Jacob's Pillar: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Death of Architecture by Karsten Harries
3. Reading What is Written Between the Lines: The Esoteric Dimension of Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-Morrow by Paul Emmons
4.On Virtue and Thomas Jefferson by Indra Kagis McEwen
Interlude A: The Architect's Fall by Santiago de Orduña
Part 2: Worldmaking
5. Made in Usage: Architecture in Furetière’s Dictionnaire Universel by Caroline Dionne
6. Beyond Expression by Lily Chi
7. On Water and Other Fluids: A Bloody Account of Urban Circulation by Louise Pelletier
8. Earth or World? Aerial Image and the Prosthetic Imagination by Lawrence Bird
Interlude B: The Door of Theory by Marco Frascari
Part 3: Flesh/Eros
9. Tough Love: A Study of the Architecture of Pezo von Ellrichshausen by David Leatherbarrow
10. Flesh of Stone: Buildings, Statues, Entangled Bodies by Tracey Eve Winton
11. Genius as Eros by Lian Chikako Chang
12. The Tactile Legacy of Alvar Aalto and its Relevance to Contemporary Practice by Kenneth Frampton
Interlude C: Sigmund Freud or the Dark Forest Room Revisited by Natalija Subotincic
Part 4: Fusion of Horizons
13. Voices of Tranquility: Silence in Art and Architecture by Juhani Pallasmaa
14. An Architectural Creation Myth Borrowed from the Phenomenology of Music by Stephen Parcell
15. Modus Operandi of an Architectus Doli: Architectural Cunning in the Comic Plays of Plautus by Lisa Landrum
16. Towards an Ecology of the Palladian Villa by Graham Livesey
Interlude D: Transformative Power of Architecture by Steven Holl
Part 5: After the Crisis
17. Juan O'Gorman and the Genesis and Overcoming of Functionalism in Mexican Modern Architecture by Juan Manuel Heredia
18. Architecture or Acceleration: Position as Opposition by Anne Bordeleau
19. Building Upon Love in an Age of Innovation by Peter Olshavsky
20. Content and Craft: What do we do when we do the History of Architecture?
by David Theodore
Interlude E: Two Poems 2000-2011 by Ricardo Castro
List of Figures.
List of Contributors.