The first aim of this paper is to investigate and analyze Alan Colquhoun's architectural hermeneutics of tradition, 'conceptual displacement of the past.' The second aim is to overcome the limit of it, and to suggest new architectural hermeneutics of tradition, 'the reactivation of the past.' The architectural work is reduced by Colquhoun to typology or arbitrary language because he believes that without arbitrary language natural language is not able to work effectively. However, he ignores that two languages cannot be separable. When they are separated the key to natural language is understood to be an unverifiable similarity between a sense perception and its correspondence in the architectural object, while the key to arbitrary language becomes mere artificial agreement on the value and function of the linguistic sign. Therefore, natural language is appropriate only when it permits spontaneous combinations of sensory data within complex structures which emerge from, and support, complex human interaction and communication(the shining of the world and of the possibility of creative being in each individual thing). Only when architecture is translated into this kind of language, can it reactivate the world's past, and become poetic.

• 이동언(동명정보대학교 건축학부) | Lee Dong-Eon (Tongmyong University)