“In the darkness of the lived moments” – 1871 Paris Commune, barricade fighting and architectural experience in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Rita de Cássia Lucena Velloso (2007) 0. INTRODUCTION Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the occupation of the capital in 1940, the text that has come down to us as The Arcades Project is in no sense a finished work. Nevertheless, it contains Benjamin’s vision of architecture, in which we find the quintessence of his concept of experience. According to The Arcades Project, architecture inheres in the darkness of the lived moments (K2a,4), belonging to the dream consciousness of the collective; in this sense, architecture is the most important testimony to the latent ‘mithology’ of a society. Benjamin’s aim is to read the character of the nineteenth century in the physiognomy of its architecture, but the range of the word architecture is enlarged if we consider Convolutes E [Haussmanization, Barricade Fighting], k [On the commune] and a[social movement] 1 in which he discusses Paris Communes taking into account that tragic inhabitants’ action to characterize the urban experience of modernity. 1 Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as AP and by convolute.