Shipwreck, Spectatorship and Self: A Metaphorical Reading of Memorial Architecture

Abstract

German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (1979) investigates how cultures rationalize their relationship to the life-world through metaphorical condensations, for which the nautical journey is a recurrent trope. Blumenberg suggests that the contraposition of shipwrecks and spectators, through its juxtaposition of peril and safety, is the primary frame of reference for the metaphorics of existence. This paper considers the thematic parallels between this seafaring-as-existence framework and memorial architecture which attempts to anchor a moment in time and space against transient beliefs and memories. It does so by looking at four separate movements which drift from universal through communal to personal, and through four corresponding built designs by Edwin Lutyens, Carlo Scarpa, Maya Lin, and Michael Arad and Peter Walker. It concludes that there is a strong resemblance between the shifts in existence-philosophy and memorial architecture.