Alberto Pérez-Gómez | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, b 24 December 1949 in Mexico City, Mexico. He obtained an undergraduate degree in architecture and engineering in Mexico City, did postgraduate work at Cornell University, and was awarded a Master of Arts (1975) and a PhD (1979) by the University of Essex in England.

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, b 24 December 1949 in Mexico City, Mexico. He obtained an undergraduate degree in architecture and engineering in Mexico City, did postgraduate work at Cornell University, and was awarded a Master of Arts (1975) and a PhD (1979) by the University of Essex in England. He has lectured and taught extensively in North America and Europe.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez has held positions at universities in Mexico City, Houston, Syracuse and Toronto, at the Architectural Association in London, and was the director of the Carleton University school of architecture in Ottawa from 1983 to 1986. In 1987 Pérez-Gómez was appointed Saidye Rosner Bronfman professor of the history of architecture at McGill University, where he is currently director of post-professional (masters and doctoral) programs and chairs the history and theory of architecture division. From 1990 to 1993 he was also the director of the Institut de recherche en histoire de l'architecture, a research institute co-sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the University of Montréal and McGill University.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez is the author of Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983), which was the recipient of the prestigious 1984 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for scholarship in architectural theory. This publication, translated into several languages, consolidated Dr. Pérez-Gómez's international reputation as a provocative and influential architectural historian and theoretician who draws from phenomenology, hermeneutics and surrealism.

Other publications include Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (1992), a narrative of architecture that retells the love story of the 15th-century novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late 20th-century terms. The text Claude Perrault's Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients (1993) was the winner of the 1994 AIA International Architecture Book Award. A book co-authored with Louise Pelletier, entitled Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (1997), traces the history and theory of modern European architectural representation.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez is also co-editor of a series of books entitled CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, which collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture through its history and theories. His numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, AA Files, Arquitecturas Bis, VIA, Architectural Design, ARQ, SKALA, A+U, Perspecta, and many other periodicals.

The impact of Dr. Pérez-Gómez's work has been felt by many architecture students in Canada and elsewhere. He is an internationally recognized figure in architectural history and theory.