An Alliterative Lexicon of Architectural Memories, by Alberto Pérez-Gómez

A lexicon of selected architectural terms, supplemented by examples drawn from the author’s memories, this compendious compendium offers new and exciting ways to engage with architecture, enriching the reader’s experience of the built environment. Entries include traditional and modern architectural terminology, rendered with an intriguing, rhythmic play of alliteration and a display of philological origins, often enriched with sub-entries of first-person narratives, based on an auto-ethnographic practice with a post-secular framework. While organized in a standard alphabetical order, the contents reflect the author’s life experience, his early years in Mexico, his travels and sojourns in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Australia, and his life in Canada as an academic teaching the history of Western architectural theory and philosophy: a life with its inherent limitations and subjectivities, yielding definitions that are both particular and universal.

Savored best when you are settled in a comfortable seat, the confections (etym.: works of fine craftsmanship) contained between this book’s covers must not be consumed hastily, for rushed reading will reduce the resonant reverberations that its improbable conjunctions were designed to initiate. Alphabetically ordered headings, familiar and not, serve as thresholds to enjoyably excessive elaborations, rooms and passages that are archaic in their origins, baroque in their abundance, and surrealist in their surplus of sense. One’s imagination is ignited and recollections revived by the combined voices of a playfully serious author and the ancient and modern discipline of architecture. 

— David Leatherbarrow, Emeritus Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania

Reader, be warned: once you open this “Lexicon” it is hard to put it down. Jumping from word (or should I say “world”?) to word in a hypnotic, sometimes erotic, and surprising expedition has certainly put me in the same unparalleled state of consciousness as reading Borges’s bewildering tales, trying to penetrate M.C. Escher’s esoteric drawings, or listening to my mother reading the One Thousand One Nights 55 years ago! However short or long we remain under this book’s sweet and otherworldly spell, we come back to ourselves filled with experiences, discernments, questions, emotions, and desires that expand not only our insights into architecture, but also our existential path!

— Julio Bermudez, Ph.D., ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture, Co-founder and President, The Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum

An immense undertaking, this lexicon offers an insight in the wealth of architectural language as well as an intimate encounter with the impressive theoretical and experiential knowledge of a passionate scholar in architecture. Simultaneously serious and playful, Pérez-Gómez celebrates architecture, memory, and the very words we use to talk and write about this fascinating world of buildings.

— Prof. dr. ir. Klaske Havik, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Pérez-Gómez’s architectural lexicon is a remarkable exaltation of memory and imagination, structured through the limpid form of the architectural dictionary. Insinuating, as all lexicons will, diverse and playful itineraries of reading, the reader finds that its entries accumulate to produce a fragmentary and richly poetic memoir of experience. Here, in the hands of one of our most significant architectural scholars, the dictionary gives its form to the recollection of a life lived in and through architecture – a recollection that is at the same time a passionate account of architecture’s setting of the places of life.

— Professor Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh

Pérez-Gómez disrupts the apparent objectivity of dictionaries to reveal the engagingly complex histories of things architectural and the personal memories they evoke.  Thoroughly cross-referenced, these volumes invite hypertextual reading and tasting; a delightful author-guided alphabetical travelogue cruising across entries while circumambulating the globe.

— Dr. Paul Emmons, Patrick and Nancy Lathrop Professor of Architecture, Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, Virginia Tech

Meandering through this mesmerizing collection of words and memories, your relationship with architecture will be forever changed. From the most ancient megaliths to contemporary buildings, Eastern and Western, everything you thought was dead and boring comes alive. Architecture becomes luscious, ludic and voluptuous, simple elements reveal their deepest sense and all betrays our spiritual reality. Existential meanings, never dogmatic: the copula of death and love.

— Frances C. Lonna, author and retired aviator, Cold Lake, Alberta

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