On the homotopy types of Kaehler manifolds and the birational Kodaira problem

Abstract

We recently constructed examples of compact Kaeler manifolds which do not have the homotopy type of a projective complex manifold. They were however obtained by blowing-up certain complex tori, which are themselves deformation equivalent to complex projective manifolds. Thus it remained possible that in higher dimension, a birational version of Kodaira's theorem still holds. We construct however in this paper compact Kaehler manifolds, no birational model of which has the homotopy type of a projective manifold.