APRIL 2007 » book review

Where Is the Love?

Built upon Love
by Alberto Pérez-Gómez
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006
264 pp., cloth, no illus., $27.95
ISBN 0-262-16238-5

Reviewed by David Mayernik

The tendency to avoid the word eros [in the New Testament], together with the new vision of love expressed through the word agape, clearly point to something new and distinct about the Christian understanding of love. In the critique of Christianity which began with the Enlightenment and grew progressively more radical, this new element was seen as something thoroughly negative. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice. —Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical "Deus Caritas Est," 2005

Love and lovely are certainly linked in our minds: As Edmund Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France, "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." And it is telling that Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez's book Built upon Love both came out around the same time. These two perceptive people have simultaneously hit upon a crucial issue for our time and culture: Where, after all, is the love?

It is certainly little in evidence in our contemporary built landscape, and arguably has been missing for some time. Pérez-Gómez's book is therefore timely, and it is provocatively written, even seductive; whether it is ultimately convincing by itself is another matter. This book is not a how-to of making loveable buildings; it is instead a poetic argument for recovering love as a generative architectural force, and there is perhaps just as much of that missing in contemporary traditional architecture as there is in Modernism.

Pérez-Gómez has an enigmatic writing style with an occasional opacity that can seem deliberately difficult if not obfuscating: "[Architecture] allowed for authentic participation through an erotic encounter with cathartic potential for a sense of orientation." The underlying trajectory of Pérez-Gómez's argument is similarly opaque. It is not a history per se, although it relies heavily on his sense of historical process. He rarely cites specific building examples, relying more often on other writers' and philosophers' words; indeed, it is more a history of theories of architecture than a history of building.

Like many polemicists he does not clearly distinguish between what he wants architecture to be and what it actually was or is. While each chapter is organized chronologically, his specific propositions for the contemporary world that terminate each chapter are loosely organized and aphoristic, struggling to describe a new kind of architecture without being prescriptive. There are no illustrations – a deliberate avoidance of the specific in favor of principles. But one gathers that the architecture of which he speaks is of the sublime, heroic kind, neither the stuff of the urban fabric nor the deferentially contextual monuments of Rome. "This book will attempt to show," he says, "how the appropriate engagement of desire by articulating ethical and political positions in the form of seductive projects is the fundamental responsibility of architecture."

Pérez-Gómez, like his intellectual ally Joseph Rykwert, is fascinated by historical moments of rupture (especially the 18th century and the Enlightenment). These ruptures are real enough, but history is also characterized by continuity and long, slow transformations. In a polemical book like this there is no time for those. While he rightly laments the unraveling of the historical thread with the Enlightenment, he is less prepared to be explicitly critical of the resulting Modernism, much less completely abandon it. Rather, he sees a modern architecture of fragmentary signs as the only legitimate poetic option available to us today.

He does return again and again to a set of historical moments that are, for him, representative of what he means – Greek architecture, especially of the theater, the Renaissance and its most enigmatic book, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and the Baroque. Building on the critiques of his seminal Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Pérez-Gómez lays the blame for love/eros' departure at the feet of Cartesian rationalism and Newtonian science. But Pérez-Gómez's blind spot historically is the short shrift he gives the Middle Ages: For him its overt religiosity (just what the pre-Raphaelites loved) makes it immune from eros' effects (and presumably modern relevance). And yet there is no denying that some of the most humane, ennobling, and loveable built environments are the towns, cities, and cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

His lack of sympathy for the Medieval approach to love (does he not know the troubadours and the "Roman de la Rose"?) also colors his view of the Renaissance, which he sees only in a pagan light. Indeed, Pérez-Gómez's project suffers from a series of historical caricatures, reducing complex cultural phenomena like the Renaissance to clichés of paganism and esotericism.

Eros does return in the Renaissance as a complex force in art: As Cupid joined with Psyche (the soul) on Raphael's ceiling fresco in the Villa Farnesina, he is the father of Pleasure – a Virtue for the likes of Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson (who wrote the masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue). While puritanical minds may eschew it (and this explains something of the modern landscape), Pleasure allied with Virtue is made manifest in the noble, civil, and often ravishingly beautiful cities and gardens of pre-modern eras.

Pérez-Gómez's argument is focused mostly on eros of all the forms of love, but he also seems to use the word "erotic" loosely to mean anything he endorses. Like St. Paul, he believes that no work of architecture, no matter how "good," has ultimate merit if it doesn't have love. Again, as eros love for him means desire, and in the tension of unfulfilled desire (longing) he finds the greatest poetry. Strikingly, Pérez-Gómez makes no mention of that most famous representation of the cult of deified Rome, the emperor Hadrian's back-to-back temples of Venus and Rome: two temples that are a palindrome, Amor-Roma. Perhaps the author's emphasis on Greek culture and terminology left little room for Rome and this explicit linking of the goddess of love (in her Latin incarnation) and the goddess of place, but Hadrian's building speaks volumes about the interdependence of the mother of Eros/Cupid and amor patria, ritualized at the temple by the emperor's linking it to the city's wedding rituals and procreation.

Despite his expressed affection for Marcel Duchamp, Frederick Kiesler, Daniel Libeskind and Steven Holl, Pérez-Gómez's desire to reform Modernism does offer something to Classical architects; perhaps the reason we are not getting major public commissions today is that those doing the commissioning may unwittingly desire an architecture that says something, and the perception is that Classical architecture has nothing new to say (apart from the fact that it is). Built upon Love posits a recovery of an architecture of meaningful poetic signs (albeit fragmentary) and of discourse – and the value of that transcends issues of style.

Built upon Love's lack of illustrations may serve Pérez-Gómez's ends (suggesting, tantalizingly, an architecture yet to be that embraces the love of previous centuries and yet somehow is not "historicist"); it certainly allows the reader to project onto his argument whichever buildings he or she thinks embody eros or agape. But the danger is that his seductive argument can be facilely co-opted by Modernist architects with no real interest or ability in making an architecture built upon love (and may not even know what it looks like). Alberto Pérez-Gómez's text by itself may be an insufficient cause of fully reclaiming a culture built upon love, and yet it may also be a necessary one. TB

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