Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity

Walter Benjamin is universally recognised as one of the key thinkers of
modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology
and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the
problem of architecture in and for Benjamin's work remains relatively
underexamined. Does Benjamin's project have an architecture and, if so, how
does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us?
In what ways are Benjamin's writings centrally caught up with architectural
concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements
that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can
Benjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the
present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of
innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars
on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs,
the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much
more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in
this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of
Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of
our own present.