Walter Benjamin beautifully illustrates his uses of the thought image in a contained except from his ‘On the Concept of History’ – he writes:
Paul Klee. Angelus Novus. 1920. [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons | ‘A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’ (p.39). |
The use of writing architecturally is that architecture is about the creating and delineation of space and as such there is multiple scales, perspectives, renderings, surface details, ratios etc. within the development of architecture. Writing architecturally is a means by which to distill this complexity into a text. Architecture is a practice that mediates between strict rules and absolute chance and creativity and this is what is distilled into architectural writing. The architectural text is subject to the same creative processes at the building during the design process; the text is simultaneously static and dynamic, they operate in sets between spaces, texts, images and annotations, expectations, superstructures and conformity, between desire and reality. The architect writes with images that are held in motion by absence.
Benjamin, Walter, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 4, 1938-1940, Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 39.
Dorrian, Mark, 'Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor's Marsyas as a Silent Sound Work', Architectural Theory Review, No. XVII/1 (2012), pp. 93-104.
Grosz, Elizabeth, ‘Architecture from the Outside’ in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Spaces (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Excerpt, '1. Thinking', pp. 57-64.