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 65^th 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. 

Plate showing the effect of ligatures on blood flow from William Harvey, De Motus Cordis et Sanguinis (1628).

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.