Alberto Perez Gomez, Intervals in the philosophy of architecture Chora 1

Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture explores fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture and examines the potential of architecture. The essays in this collection explore architectural form and content in the hope of finding new and better alternatives to traditionally accepted practices. It collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture through its history and theories.

As we near the end of the millennium , the time have come for us to attempt to differentiate between architecture and building in terms other than those of eighteenth – century aesthetics- to reach beyond the exhausted philosophical distinction between the good and the beautiful and to articulate the specific status of architecture as embodying wisdom while remaining in the context of a thoroughly utilitarian ,constructed world – our technological world.

CHORA (the Greek word for "space"), is devoted to exploring the potential of architecture beyond conventional aesthetic and technological reductions. In a world where unabated scientism and irrelevant nihilism are prevalent, where the supposed alternatives to the rationalist and functionalist building practices of modernity are often no more than empty formalism and extrapolation of deconstructivist positions into architecture, CHORA offers a forum for pondering other possibilities.

Architecture is at a crossroads. If its role as a stage for the perpetuation of human culture as not recognized and redefined, its demise will be inevitable. The work of the architect, a work of imagination, cannot be simply a dominating gaze, a solipsistic play of mirrors, or a manifestation of the will to power. It may yet be something different, something that must be explored and that may, as a reconciliatory action, point to a referent other than itself. In a world where the media establish new paradigms of communication approaching the ephemeral nature of embodied perception and the primary orality of language, architecture may indeed be able to carry intersubjective values, convey meaning through metaphor, and embody a cultural order beyond tyranny or anarchy.

CHORA offers a space to meditate on the possibility of such an architecture, capable of both respecting cultural differences and acknowledging the globalization of technological culture. Interdisciplinary by definition, and reflecting a veriety of cultural concerns, its essays operate from within the discipline of architecture. Generated by personal questions of pressing concern for architecture and our culture, these radical explorations of form and content suggest alternatives for a more significant practice. While the main philosophical framework for CHORA stems from phenomenology and hermeneutic ontology, the architectural pursuits in this collection could be placed generally in the broad context of European philosophy, which demands a fundamental redefinition of thought and action, and a substantial rethinking of traditionally accepted values.

The book examines textual evidence across a broad historical period, concentrating on the relationship between drawing and architectural space in the period from the seventh century to the twentieth century. The book discusses such issues as optical correction and the nature of architectural drawing in selected treatises, revealing the complexity and potential contradiction inherent in any linear history of representation. The authors' ultimate aim is to probe the possibilities of the constructed world—that is, architecture—as a poetic translation, rather than prosaic transcription, of its representations.