Alberto Pérez-Gómez, our Symposium Keynoter, was born in Mexico City in 1949 and became a Canadian Citizen and a Quebec resident in 1987. He obtained his undergraduate degree in architecture and engineering in Mexico City, did postgraduate work at Cornell University, and was awarded a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. by the University of Essex in England. He has taught at universities in Mexico City, Houston, Syracuse, and Toronto, at the Architectural Association in London, and was Director of the Carleton University School of Architecture from 1983 to 1986. He has lectured extensively in North America and Europe.

His numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, AA Files, Arquitecturas Bis, Section A, VIA, Architectural Design, ARQ, SKALA, A+U, Perspecta, and many other periodicals. His first book in English, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press 1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1984, a prize awarded every two years for the most significant work of scholarship in the field.

In January 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 (Master’s and Doctoral) Programs, and chairs the History and Theory of Architecture division. From March 1990 to June 1993, he was also the Founding Director of the Institut de recherche en histoire de l'architecture, a research institute which he instigated, co-sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Université de Montréal and McGill University. Students of Dr. Pérez-Gómez now teach most Canadian architecture programs, and in many North American and European Universities.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez is the author of Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (MIT Press 1992), an erotic narrative/theory of architecture that retells the love story of the famous fifteenth century novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms, a text that has become the source of numerous projects and exhibitions. He is also co-editor of a now well-established series of books entitled CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (McGill-Queen’s University Press), which collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture through its history and theories. A recent major book co-authored with Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (MIT Press 1997), traces the history and theory of modern European architectural representation, with special reference to the role of projection in architectural design. At present, Dr. Pérez-Gómez is engaged in a project to redefine the nature of architectural education by revisiting its historical sources during the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century, an urgent task after the failure of globalization, which has become a stark reality after September 11, 2001. Link to Paper Abstract; Link to Homepage

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