ABSTRACT
The way architecture participates in culture invites comparisons with the workings of metaphor as a linguistic trope. Paul Ricoeur talks about metaphor as “an emergence of meaning,” that is, a kind of innovation, albeit a situated one. Metaphor, he stresses, is a function of relationships, not of individual items — of sentences, rather than words in themselves. It is through the tension inherent in these relationships that language is “shattered and increased” as established meaning is expanded, ultimately increasing our sense of reality (Ricoeur 1974: 49–50, 71). This grounding in language and the real is essential, as the goal is an expansion of horizon and enrichment of the perceived world, not the invention of an alien new one. Metaphor mediates between the given and the possible, the perceived and the imagined. Inherent in metaphor is also a process of de-familiarisation, a disruption of the recognisable, in ways that reveal meaningful relationships with the world beyond the already established or expected. If memory is the keeper of the familiar, which becomes unsettled through the rupture of the strange, then imagination is its essential counterpart, which allows for the rift's creative overcoming and the leap into “the place of nascent meanings and categories” (ibid.: 67). The approach of this chapter follows the argument suggested by Ricoeur as a close reading of a particular architectural project along three horizons, to expand its description and interpretation.
