ABSTRACT
Why should an architectural practitioner or educator be interested in the work
of the German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin? After all, by the time of his
tragic death in 1940 Benjamin’s published work – primarily as a literary critic –
was known only to very restricted circles of European intellectuals. Unlike his
contemporary Martin Heidegger, he had produced no groundbreaking
philosophical study that resonated within academia and beyond. He had not
been active in the early days of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in the
1920s and had in fact even failed in the rather modest ambition of becoming a
university professor. Worse still, Benjamin devoted – many of his close friends at
the time would have said ‘wasted’ – the final decade-and-a-half of his life on a
project concerned with nineteenth-century Paris that set no material limits and
proposed no clear theoretical goals.
