Love’s labour’s lost: Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s Polyphilo

Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s Polyphilo, or The Dark Forest Revisited, An Erotic Epiphany (1994) is an imaginative re-telling of the famous architectural text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) by Francesco Colonna. Pérez-Gómez transfers the events of the original from a Renaissance dreamscape of forests, processions, and architectural set-pieces to the dissociated spaces of air travel from airports to experience of flight itself. In the original the temper of the narrative is directed at the manifold experiential qualities of architecture, metaphorically expressed by the protagonist, Poliphilo, pursuing his love, Polia, through a picaresque journey of discovery. In Pérez-Gómez’s modern version, the estranging effects of modernity have interposed themselves into the narrative and created a melancholic Weltanschauung centred on the alienating effects of technology. However, a form of redemption occurs through, as the title notes, ‘an erotic epiphany of architecture’. Pérez-Gómez’s intention in the text is to build a contemporary argument for an ‘ethics’ of architecture based on the sensory richness, the poiesis or ‘bringing forth’ as he characterises it, that comes from the attuned observer of architecture. His merging of aesthetics and ethics form a kind of categorical imperative for architecture – you must create what you love. However, in Pérez-Gómez’s telling it can be argued, the narrative for fulfilling this state becomes muddled in its abstraction. As an antidote to this, we can look to contemporary narratology and the developed understanding of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis that has been present from Classical times to the present, including the Renaissance of Colonna. How images illustrate and illuminate a text, and how the character arc of narratives generally fulfill a world-making function reveals another aspect of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilo, and of illustrated architectural texts in general: architectural ethics is a story illustrated and told.