Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing After Ethics and Aesthetics

This title presents a vision of architecture that transcends concerns of form and function and finds the connections between the architect’s wish to design a beautiful world and architecture’s imperative to provide a better place for society.The forced polarity between form and function in considerations of architecture - opposing art to social interests, ethics to poetic expression - obscures the deep connections between ethical and poetical values in architectural tradition. Architecture, writes Alberto Perez-Gomez, has been, and must continue to be, built upon love. Modernity has rightly rejected past architectural excesses, but, Perez-Gomez argues, the materialistic and technological alternatives it proposes do not answer satisfactorily the complex desire that defines humanity.True architecture is concerned with far more than fashionable form, affordable homes, and sustainable development; it responds to a desire for an eloquent place to dwell - one that lovingly provides a sense of order resonant with our dreams. In Built upon Love , Perez-Gomez uncovers the relationship between love and architecture in order to find the points of contact between poetics and ethics - between the architect’s wish to design a beautiful world and architecture’s imperative to provide a better place for society.