Argument on topic: Allegories

MOTTO

1. The original interest in allegory is not linguistic, but optical. Walter Benjamin

The original interest in allegory is not linguistic, but optical.

2. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. Walter Benjamin

Allegories are in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.

Allegory is a representation of an abstract idea in the figurative plane. It is abundantly and charmingly present in literature, art, architecture, history, religion and other fields. Justice has an allegorical representation. The republic (and here the Romanian and French republics are no exception) has images that resort to allegory. As a literary device, allegory is a figure of speech. The meaning of a text reveals - through allegory - a hidden meaning. As an artistic method, it is a "translation" of an image.

In all domains, allegory, assuming the task of revealing, has recourse to tools of transference. It frequently contains a metaphor, which makes the transition from the abstract to the figurative - from the incomprehensible to the comprehensible. Being and operating in a zone of transition, it nuancedly assumes the condition of threshold. Within allegory there are risks of over-denotative and kitsch.

Surprising in colloquial language, the expression "something gendered" is in fact an allegorical quest. In other words, the need to represent an abstract notion in an acceptable, comprehensible form appeals to allegory.

Allegory provides, in fact, a quick reading. It translates the deep code of the denoted concept into the surface code. Allegory sometimes leaps quickly, sometimes glides gently from the evocative to the explicit. The origin of the word allegory, which in French denotes "the unfolding of imagination", is Greek. Thus, in Greek αλλος [allos] means other and αγορευειν [agoreuein ] - to speak in public.

Allegory is a method of artistic composition. The arts use it and, to a convincing extent, have also enshrined it. We set out on the adventure of identifying allegory in architecture. The analogies between literary and architectural writing are already too well-known. We will not insist in territories already too critically explored. We want in this issue to ask: does the 21st century city have an allegorical representation? If we can talk about allegory in contemporary architecture? And if so, within what limits?

Sometimes student-architects in a panic of discourse, but with a great desire for scholarship, use the word "writing". We propose to see that there is a more subtle writing - that of the assumed image. The Growing Architects and Promises columns will reveal compelling examples of this. By scaling in the photography contest "The Ephemeral City" - organized in the Faculty of Urbanism of the University of Architecture and Urbanism "Ion Mincu" Bucharest - we will consistently observe if in the coding specific to the photographic language there are allegories.

P.S.1 - Le symbole est au sentiment ce que l'allegorie est a la pensee. Emile Chartier, dit AlainThe symbol is to sentiment what the allegory is to thought.P.S.2 - Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows; in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come by in any other way. C.S. LewisIn an allegory a man can put what he knows; in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come by in any other way.