The argument carried on in a sphere We need not allow ourselves to be abashed by any suggestion that the old metaphors are out of date and ought to be superseded. We have only to remember that they are, and always were, metaphors, and that they are still “living” metaphors so long as we use them to interpret direct experience. Metaphors only become dead when the metaphor is substituted for the experience, and the argument carried on in a sphere of abstraction without being at every point related to life. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker metaphor
Only in terms of other things No legislation could prevent the making of verbal pictures: God walks in the garden, He stretches out His arm, His voice shakes the cedars, His eyelids try the children of men. To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures. But continually, throughout the history of the Jewish-Christian Church, the voice of warning has been raised against the power of the picture-makers: “God is a spirit”, “without body, parts or passions”; He is pure being, “I AM THAT I AM”. The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker Metaphors We Live ByYou only understand something relative to something you already understand metaphoranalogy
A renaming of the already named A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language, A renaming of the already named. It's meant to expire in a sudden flash of light And to reveal—in that burst of illumination— A correspondence that must be literally accurate. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing metaphornames
The door handle is the handshake of a building Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses What is this static modernism? metaphordoorsinteraction
The strange familiar and the familiar strange The problem solver, when confronted with a new and yet unsolved problem, overlays the structure of the unsolved problem with an apparently similar problem with which he or she is experienced. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange are also principally based on the use of analogy. Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking metaphoranalogy
An emblem of friendship Bridges make connections; they bring people together—a role that has made them a traditional emblem of friendship. Consider the town of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. When fighting between ethnic factions broke out there in the 1990s, nothing symbolized the social disintegration more clearly than the destruction of a sixteenth-century stone-arch bridge that had linked the two parts of the town on opposite banks of the Neretva River. And the emblem of efforts to heal the divisions is a rebuilt bridge, opened with fireworks and fanfare in July of 2004. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape metaphorarchitectureengineering
Metaphors We Web By An Essay by Maggie Appleton maggieappleton.com As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made clear in their touchstone book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are the basis of all human thought and reasoning. The metaphors we use to speak about the web are not simply linguistic trivia – they determine how we understand it on a fundamental level. It determines what we think the web is capable of, what risks, opportunities, and challenges it poses. Which means the metaphors we use to think about the web profoundly influence what we think the web is, what we think we can do with it, and how we might change or evolve it. …Out of all of these metaphors [for the web], the two most enduring are paper and physical space. Metaphors We Live ByMenus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design metaphorwww
Websites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture An Essay by Sarah R. Barrett medium.com While there is a lot that IA can learn from actual architecture or city planning, websites aren’t buildings or cities, and they don’t have to work like them. Instead, they should be designed according to the same principles that people’s brains expect from physical experiences. informationsoftwaremetaphor
Negative Creativity An Article by Scott Alexander slatestarcodex.com Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard. Misinterpretation as inspirationSit Down And Think About It For Five Minutes ideascreativitymetaphor
Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Light and Space An Essay from Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface by Michael Auping To absorb it or build your ownA stealth architectThe measuring unit of all spaceThe walls are reserved for the sunA little too something+1 More
To absorb it or build your own Robert Smithson and other so-called land artists simply disengaged from architecture, placing their works in America's open landscape, leaving behind the museums and galleries Smithson referred to as "tombs". A new "expanded field" allowed artists to contextualize their work beyond the institutional frame of the museum or the commercial structure of a gallery. Richard Serra, who also began to move outdoors, at times chose to "attack" architecture, creating structures that disrupted or overwhelmed the buildings around them. The artists of the Light and Space movement took another tack. Rather than fight or flee the architecture, they explored and manipulated it, approaching architecture as a kind of found object, creating a series of rooms that incorporated architecture and architectural structures directly into their art. Bruce Nauman summarized it well: "When you work in a gallery or museum, the architecture is a given. If you wanted to have a show, you didn't have a choice, except to deal with it. You had to find a way to either absorb architecture into the piece of build your own." Conditional art architecture
A stealth architect By the 1970s, Irwin was in effect a stealth architect. We often talk about the ephemeral qualities of light and space in Irwin's installations, but what make those qualities palpable to our perception are practical structures—windows, walls, corridors, doorways, and skylights—in other words, architecture. And Irwin was keenly aware of how best to use all of those structures. One of his greatest talents has been to engage bad or benign architectural situations, disappearing into their details, changing them, and creating and entirely new quality of space. architecture
The measuring unit of all space The piece was titled The Portal, referring to a large opening in the center of the wall. Whether you want to call it art or architecture, it was a testament to the amazing presence that can be shown by a simple wall, which [Tadao Ando] has referred to as "the measuring unit of all space." wallsspace
The walls are reserved for the sun Maria Nordman always insisted, "Nothing should hang on a wall. The walls are reserved for the sun." It was like being inside a large cardboard box that had been gently slit open with an X-Acto knife, allowing thin planes of light to emerge. It is well known that Nordman avoided using the camera to document her installations, feeling that it abstracted and framed various aspects of the experience, which is best absorbed more holistically. It is ironic that Nordman's rooms often took the form of a kind of architectural camera in which slits in walls and corners created mysterious apertures that allowed light to leak into a room at a glacial pace. Being inside one of Nordman's spaces is like being inside a camera operating in exceedingly slow motion. wallsphotography
A little too something As Irwin had chosen a stairwell for his UCLA installation because it was curious in its banality and innocuousness, Bruce Nauman became interested in corridors and shafts as overlooked and slightly eccentric spaces. He was particularly interested in those that had "a kind of constriction that wasn't natural or was a little too long or a little too something—like the architect just hadn't really thought it out." Merely a building
Various titles of Bruce Nauman artworks Sound Breaking Wall Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room False Silence Flayed Earth Flayed Self (Skin/Sink) Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care Bruce Nauman horroreuphony