The thirteen essays in this collection include historical subjects as well as speculative theoretical "projects" that blur conventional boundaries between history and fiction. Ricardo Castro provides an original reading of the Kogi culture in Colombia; Maria Karvouni explores philological and architectonic connections between the Greek demas (the political individual) and domus (the house); Mark Rozahegy speculates on relationships between architecture and memory; Myriam Blais discusses technical inventions by sixteenth-century French architect Philibert de l'Orme; Alberto Pérez-Gómez examines the late sixteenth-century reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Juan Bautista Villalpando; Janine Debanné offers a new perspective on Guarino Guarini's Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin; Katja Grillner examines the early seventeenth-century writings of Salomon de Caus and his built work in Heidelberg; David Winterton reflects on Charles-François Viel's "Letters"; Franca Trubiano looks at Jean-Jacques Lequeu's controversial Civil Architecture; Henrik Reeh considers the work of Sigfried Kracauer, a disciple of Walter Benjamin; Irena ðantovská Murray reflects on work by artist Jana Sterbak; artist Ellen Zweig presents a textual project that demonstrates the charged poetic space created by film makers such as Antonioni and Hitchcock; and Swedish writer and architect Sören Thurell asks a riddle about architecture and its mimetic origins.

The essays in this volume demonstrate a reconciliatory architecture that respects cultural differences, acknowledges the globalization of technological culture, and points to a referent other than itself.

Alberto Pérez Gómez directs the History and Theory of Architecture Program at McGill University, where he is Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture. He is the author of Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (both published by the MIT Press), and other books.

Alberto Perez-Gomez's profile page

Stephen Parcell is co-editor of the Chora series and associate professor, Dalhousie University.

Stephen Parcell's profile page

"CHORA 3 is an unusually stimulating collection to which I will return over and over. This is an important volume to historians and theorists of architecture and anyone interested in issues of space, body, and architectural meaning. I strongly recommend it." Karsten Harries, Department of Philosophy, Yale University