Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Some Concealed Possibilities
Seminar with Alberto Pérez-Gómez on the topic ‘Some Concealed Possibilities’, as part of a series of talks on The Human Face of Architecture; hosted by Eric Parry Architects on 5 November 2025.
José de Paiva 00:00:07
Alberto Pérez-Gómez – Keynote presentation 00:02:45
Eric Parry 00:51:05
Jon Blair 00:54:20
Tony Travers 01:00:25
Eric Parry 01:04:43
Peter Murray 01:06:21
Matthew Barac 01:09:13
Carolyn Steel 01:13:15
Drawing from neurophenomenology and enactive cognitive theory, the theoretical framework of my book Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 2016), and a few entries from my more recent Alliterative Lexicon of Architectural Memories (RightAngle, 2024), I will offer a meditation on how architecture and the city may better operate as a communicative setting for societies; their beauty and meaning appearing in in relation to their affordance of psycho-somatic health and self-understanding. The seminar will argue that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. Our physical places are of utmost importance for our wellbeing. Architecture is seen through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the key German concept of Stimmung–attunement–with roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance (or proportion), and its modern reliance on the linguistic nature of the human imagination.
Alberto Pérez-Gómez is a Mexican-born Canadian citizen. He studied architecture in Mexico City, where he also briefly practiced. He did postgraduate work at Cornell University and was awarded an M.A. and a Ph.D. by the University of Essex in England. He has taught at universities in Mexico, Houston, Syracuse, Toronto, and at London’s Architectural Association. In 1983 he became Director of Carleton University’s School of Architecture in Ottawa, Canada. He has lectured extensively around the world and is the author of numerous articles published in major periodicals and books. In January 1987 he was appointed Bronfman Professor of Architectural History at McGill University, where he founded the History and Theory Master’s and Doctoral Programs. He became Emeritus Professor in January 2021, the same year he was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada. His book Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983) won the Hitchcock Award in 1984. Later books include Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (1992), Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (co-authored with Louise Pelletier, 1997), Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (2006) and Attunement (2016), where examines connections between phenomenology, recent enactive cognitive science and emerging language, seeking attunement in architecture and the urban environment and examining the issue of architecture as atmosphere. In 2016 he also published Timely Meditations, a collection of essays in two volumes. His latest work of research-creation, a comprehensive Alliterative Lexicon of Architectural Memories, was published in 2024 by RightAngle International. In addition, Pérez-Gómez was co-editor of the seven-volume series Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture published by McGill-Queens University Press.
