Louise Pelletier

What if the house you are about to enter was built with the confessed purpose of seducing you, of creating various sensations destined to touch your soul and make you reflect on who you are? Could architecture have such power? This was the assumption of generations of architects at the beginning of modernity. Exploring the role of theatre and fiction in defining character in architecture, Louise Pelletier examines how architecture developed to express political and social intent. Applying this to the modern day, Pelletier considers how architects can learn from these eighteenth century attitudes in order to restore architecture's communicative dimension. Through an in-depth and interdisciplinary analysis of the beginning of modernity, Louise Pelletier encourages today's architects to consider the political and linguistic implications of their tools. Combining theory, historical studies and research, Architecture in Words will provoke thought and enrich the work of any architect.

Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture

Architecture in Words

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

An enlightened discussion of all relevant aspects of architecture shows the necessity for revision of commonly held assumptions about the nature of architectural history, theory, representation, and ideation; the production of buildings in the postindustrial city; and professional ethics. These topics provide the basis for the fourteen interdisciplinary papers presented here. The introductory section includes an examination of the epistemological origins of technology in the early modern European context and two alternative visions of ethics and its potential relevance for architecture. The second part presents four perspectives on important questions about how we represent buildings and the ethical values involved in that representation. "Ethics and Poetics in the Context of Technological Production" considers the role of philosophical ethics (i.e., a rational structure of categories in architectural practice) and the possibility, and desirability, of incorporating ethical reflections into the generation of architectural form. "The Architectural Uses of History and Narrative in a Technocratic World" explores alternatives for articulating an ethical attitude in forms of discourse other than philosophy and science. These papers were originally presented at the bilingual symposium "Architecture, Ethics, and Technology" held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in 1991.

Louise Pelletier

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