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argument carried on in a sphere We need not allow ourselves to be abashed by any suggestion that the old metaphors are out of date and ought to be superseded.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
The Circus An Essay from Every So Often a Talking Dog Appears by Smiljan Radić EnduranceThere it is againPreparing a stage
Endurance For Alfred North Whitehead, a car accident and the exposure of a pyramid to the sun on any given day are equivalent events: We are accustomed to associate an event with a certain melodramatic quality. If a man is run over that is an event comprised within certain spatio-temporal limits. We are not accustomed to consider the endurance of the Great Pyramid throughout any definite day as an event. But the natural fact which is the Great Pyramid throughout a day, meaning thereby all nature within it, is an event of the same character as the man's accident, meaning thereby all nature with spatio-temporal limitations so as to include the man and the motor during the period when they were in contact. Alfred North Whitehead time
There it is again Apparently architecture does the same job as set design, "it creates units of environment, atmosphere, or events"—whatever you wish to call them—but with more weight, carrying more material, slower. This is why it can raise the curtain more times and repeat "there it is again" for longer. Perhaps for this and other reasons there are periods in the history of architecture in which stage design or the folly, for example, have been an effective field of experimentation for serious architects. Follies architecture
Preparing a stage When a client arrives at my studio, my job consists of preparing a "stage" for the length of time he desires, whether it be for a day or years, it is irrelevant in the end. A stage in which he can move under the sun "as if he were at home," though he walks stuttering at first before learning what will come in the script, be it kind or not, and which he will repeat a thousand times until he tires. When he tires, a panel is disassembled to readapt the children's room, the roof is demolished to make a study, the façades are decorated and life continues unperturbed. design