An Alliterative Lexicon of Architectural Memories: Volume 2

A lexicon of selected architectural terms, supplemented by examples drawn from the author's memories, this compendious compendium offers new and exciting ways to engage with architecture, enriching the reader's experience of the built environment. Entries include traditional and modern architectural terminology, rendered with an intriguing, rhythmic play of alliteration and a display of philological origins, often enriched with sub-entries of first-person narratives, based on an auto-ethnographic practice with a post-secular framework. While organized in a standard alphabetical order, the contents reflect the author's life experience, his early years in Mexico, his travels and sojourns in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Australia, and his life in Canada as an academic teaching the history of Western architectural theory and philosophy: a life with its inherent limitations and subjectivities, yielding definitions that are both particular and universal. The entries in this compendium can be consulted or read for pleasure, and will be productive for architects in the design process, for academics interested in enriching pedagogical possibilities, and for anyone passionate about a fuller, intellectual and emotional understanding of our architectural heritage. Carefully cross-referenced, they weave wisdom and poetry, intimate anecdote and well-researched fact, serious philosophical insight and moments of comic relief, often offering observations on architecture as it negotiates human tragedy and desire, and valorizing all the spiritual dimensions of architecture in the contemporary context, suggesting decolonizing strategies by implicitly critiquing established instrumental positions and assumptions in architectural practice and the design of the built environment. The lexical definitions reveal hidden possibilities in architectural terminology, foregrounding the profound ethical responsibilities of a poetic architecture that is still possible in a broken world, living in the midst of endless crises; they confirm, somewhat mysteriously, the central existential and spiritual contributions of architecture to the everyday life of human beings, beyond any ideology or dogma.