Volume I in the new series Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture explores fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture and examines the potential of architecture.

Different concepts of the machine are pursued in essays on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Alfred Jarry's pataphysical machines, and cosmological and political orders in sixteenth-century utopias. Cross-cultural tensions are examined in essays on the Christian appropriation of Aztec symbolism, and on Jesuit perspectives in an imperial Chinese garden in Beijing. Architectural origins and education are revisited in essays on fire and language in Vitruvius, on storytelling by Spanish theorist Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, and on the role of history in the design of the Prato della Valle, a public square in Padua. Phenomenal experience is the focus of essays on light and stone in the Gothic church of Saint-Denis, and on bodily movement through the ancient Palace of Minos at Knossos in Crete. Tensions in architectural representation are investigated in essays on the influence of Villard de Honnecourt on drawings by William Burges in Victorian England, and on Stendhal's curious narrative drawings in his book Vie de Henry Brulard. Contemporary beliefs are scrutinized in an essay that uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the modern concept of sustainability.

Provocative views on why architecture matters offer vital information for developing a richer architecture.

Contributors to this volume strive to uncover architectural alternatives to simplistic models based on concepts of aesthetics, technology or sociology. Seventeen essays explore historical topics ranging from antiquity, with a study of the Roman Colosseum, through early Renaissance subjects such as the treatises of Luca Pacioli on architecture, through to the modern era and explorations on topics ranging from 17th-century Amsterdam to architectural insights that can be found in the works of the poet and mathematician Lewis Carroll. Authors examining contemporary issues seek to explicate the spatial poetics of architecture by invoking other artistic disciplines. Essays in this group include a discussion of the accomplishments of Gordon Matta-Clark, a reading of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, and an analysis of the implications of ethical/formal questions in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein for architecture.

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.

Chora IV continues a tradition of excellence in open, interdisciplinary research into architecture.

Karsten Harries provides a new and long-overdue reading of Martin Heidegger's well-known essay "Building Dwelling Thinking." Donald Kunze and Stephen Parcell consider possibilities of meaningful architectural space for a visual culture, continuing themes they addressed in Chora 1. Further reflections on the spaces of literature, cinema, and architecture include an interview with French writer and film maker Alain Robbe-Grillet and articles by Dagmar Motycka Weston on the surrealist city, Tracey Eve Winton on the museum as a paradigmatic modern building, and Terrance Galvin on spiritual space in the works of Jean Cocteau. Jean-Pierre Chupin and Bram Ratner explore historical themes in their essays on French Renaissance architect Philibert de l'Orme and the Jewish myth of the Golem. Gregory Caicco addresses ethical questions in his essay on the Greek agora and the death of Socrates, as does Lily Chi in her meditation on the critical issue of use in architectural works. A concern with architectural representation and generative strategies for the making of architecture is present throughout, especially in the essay by Joanna Merwood on the provocative House by British artist Rachel Whiteread.

Annotation. Contents Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation - Alberto Pérez-Gómez - The Measure of Expression: Physiognomy and Character in the Nouvelle Méthode of Jean-Jacques Lequeu - Jean-François Bédard - Michelangelo: The Image of the Human Body, Artifice, and Architecture - Helmut Klassen - Architecture as Site of Reception - Part I: Cuisine, Frontality, and the Infra-thin - Donald Kunze - Fictional Cities - Graham Livesey - Instrumentality and the Organic Assistance of Looms - Indra Kagis McEwen - Space and Image in Andrey Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia": Notes on a Phenomenology of Architecture in Cinema - Juhani Pallasmaa - The Momentary Modern Magic of the Panorama - Stephen Parcell - The Building of a Horizon - Louise Pelletier - Anaesthetic Induction: An Excursion into the World of Visual Indifference - Natalija Subotincic. The essays in this collection explore architectural form and content in the hope of finding new and better alternatives to traditionally accepted practices.

For over twenty years, the Chora series has received international acclaim for its excellence in interdisciplinary research on architecture. The seven volumes of Chora have challenged readers to consider alternatives to conventional aesthetic and technological concepts. The seventy-eight authors and eighty-seven scholarly essays in the series have investigated profound cultural roots of architecture and revealed rich possibilities for architecture and its related disciplines. Chora 7, the final volume in the series, includes fifteen essays on architectural topics from around the world (France, Greece, Iran, Italy, Korea, and the United States) and from diverse cultures (antiquity, Renaissance Italy, early modern France, and the past hundred years). Thematically, they bring original approaches to human experience, theatre, architectural creation, and historical origins. Readers will also gain insights into theoretical and practical work by architects and artists such as Leon Battista Alberti, Peter Brook, Douglas Darden, Filarete, Andy Goldsworthy, Anselm Kiefer, Frederick Kiesler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and Peter Zumthor. Contributors to Chora 7 include Anne Bordeleau (University of Waterloo), Diana Cheng (Montreal), Negin Djavaherian (Montreal), Paul Emmons (Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech), Paul Holmquist (McGill University), Ron Jelaco (McGill University), Yoonchun Jung (Kyoto University), Christos Kakalis (Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture), Lisa Landrum (University of Manitoba), Robert Nelson (Monash University), Marc J Neveu (Woodbury University), Alberto Pérez-Gómez (McGill University), Angeliki Sioli (Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education), Nikolaos-Ion Terzoglou (National Technical University of Athens), and Stephen Wischer (North Dakota State University).