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Built upon Love adds yet another footnote to Plato, more specifically to the Symposium. But what a footnote it is! Informed by an extraordinary understanding of both the history of building and the history of ideas, it reminds us that, to the extent that architecture allows itself to be ruled by the material and political realities of our technological world, it loses sight of the bittersweet love that alone can ground both the ethics and the poetics of architecture. --Karsten Harries, Professor of Philosophy, Yale University In Built upon Love, Perez-Gomez traces the mythological and historical role of eros and philia in the making and experiencing of architecture. He shows convincingly and poetically that architecture arises not from utility and reason, practicality and technique, but from the desire to sensualize and poeticize the human condition. His erudite narrative helps us understand the essence of architectural pleasure and its origins in the longing for beauty. This book is an important antidote to today's over-intellectualized theories of architecture, alienated from life, and to the formalist and self-centered architecture of our time. --Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, former Professor of Architecture, Helsinki University of Technology, and author of The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses Alberto Perez-Gomez is one of that rare and endangered species--the Renaissance intellectual who can draw deeply from the wells of ancient wisdom while critically engaging with the modern humanist sciences. This book is testimony to a brilliant imagination in action, treading a daring tightrope between the competing demands of ethics and poetics. --Richard Kearney, Charles Seelig Professor in Philosophy, Boston College, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin In this book, as in Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Perez-Gomez rewrites the history of architecture. His aim is not to replace reason with desire; instead, it is to show the insufficiency of the former and the unacknowledged importance of the latter for the making of good architecture. While showing the links between desire, friendship, and responsibility in human affairs, he unveils the ways architecture builds culture by giving material and spatial definition to those relationships. His learning is deep, his writing is passionate, and his message is profoundly humane. --David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania

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Alberto Perez Gomez directs the History and Theory of Architecture Program at McGill University, where he is Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture. He is the author of Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (both published by the MIT Press), and other books.

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