What Lucy Benjamin discovers in Arendt is not a theory of architecture, but something more radical: that no world exists without a space in which human beings can appear to one another. Architecture is therefore never only the construction of buildings. It is the fragile art of giving form to a world that can be shared, inherited, judged, and begun anew. Benjamin's book makes this hidden architecture of Arendt's thought visible, and in doing so returns architecture to its most difficult question: not how we should build, but how we might still inhabit a common world

Adriana Cavarero, Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies, University of Verona, Italy

Lucy Benjamin's Architecture After Arendt is really two brilliantly inseparable books in one. The first digs in to Hannah Arendt's political thought for insight into-and examples of-the relationships among thinking, writing, and world-building, while the second takes us out into the world and helps us look politically at the built environment, from memorials to gardens to playgrounds to public housing, with Arendt's books and essays in hand. Original, imaginative, and powerful.

Patchen Markell, Cornell University, USA