Footprint 18: Constellation of Awakening: Benjamin and Architecture

Focusing on German cultural and architectural theorist Walter Benjamin's "constellation of awakening," TU Delft's Footprint 18 investigates Benjamin's conceptualization of "dialectical images," his use of montage, his refusal of notions of both progress and decline, and his effort to demonstrate how images belong not only to a particular time but attain legibility only at a particular time. Famously, according to Benjamin, image is what comes together in a flash to form a new "constellation." In his Arcades Project, he engaged architecture directly, especially the work of B.tticher, positing an architectural unconscious and the role of the optical as crucial for understanding commodification. Contributions by theorists Patrick Healy, Andrej Radman, Stefan Koller, Lutz Robbers, and Frances Hsu, architects Jolien Paeleman and Rodrigo Rieiro D.az, and Stephen Michael Witherford Fulbright Research Fellow Ross Lipton, writer and media consultant Sarah K. Stanley and cultural theorist St.phane Symons.