Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Questions of representation: the poetic origin of architecture

Since the Renaissance, descriptive geometry has become a generative architectural idea and a systematic representation of production. CAD’s precision is the apotheosis of this trajectory.

Architecture as Embodied Knowledge

To declare that there is rampant confusion with regards to the disciplinary bounds and specificity of architecture is perhaps stating the obvious. This lack of clarity, however, is often ignored by architects and critics when trying to articulate in language, for themselves and the public, the problems of our profession. False assumptions, usually taken for granted, result in much superficial criticism and irrelevant debate.

Architecture as Verb and the Ethics of Making

Advocates of computer generated processes in architecture, all based on algorithmic languages, usually claim that these applications allow designers to bypass the questions of cultural specificity and ground design in scientific or natural principles, finally “closing the distance” between theory and practice. This is the right concern, but built upon wrong assumptions. The artistic imagination can be indeed dangerous and abused. Respect for the other and political correctness, however, are not assured by instrumental processes. Our imaginative faculty allows us to identify with the other, entailing a real, yet opaque connection between words and deeds. Two examples, the theories of Luca Pacioli and Le Corbusier, illustrate this relationship. My aim is to draw a map of the vicissitudes of architecture as verb during the modernization of Europe, issuing not from a simplistic Platonic application, but from a realization of the affinity of architecture with Aristotle’s middle sciences.