Part I - NECESSITY OF THEORY

Theory is a discourse that describes the practice and the production of

architecture and identifies challenges to it.
Deals with architectures aspiration and its accomplishment
New theory arise to account for unexamined or unexplained aspects of
the discipline
Theory poses alternative solutions based on observations of the
current state of that discipline or offers new thought paradigms for
approaching the issues.
speculative, anticipatory, catalytic nature
Theory operates on different levels of abstraction, valuating the
architectural profession, its intentions, and its cultural relevance at
large.
Postmodern architectural theory addresses a crisis of meaning in the
discipline (during modern architecture)
Art plays a greater role in postmodern architectural theory than
technology
Postmodern theory is critical, optimistic, and intellectual; it chalices
and celebrates the capacity of the mind, and it offers models of critical
and ethical thinking.
Postmodern is not a singular style but more a sensibility of inclusion in
a period of pluralism.
Postmodern concern: the creation and reception of meaning
Resolution for question on architectural themes
Physical --> resolved tectonically
Conceptual/intellectual --> problematized in manner of philosophy

Types of theory

Prescriptive (memerintah)

Offers new/revived solutions for specific problems

Establishing new norms for practice, positive standards, design
methods

Proscriptive (menolak, membuang)

The standards state what to be avoided in design.

Affirmative (membenarkan)

Critical (mengkritisi)

Evaluates the built world and its relationships to the society it serves
 Expressed political or ethical orientation
Intends stimulate change
Speculative, questioning, sometimes utopian

The Purpose of Theoretical Treatise: Defining the Scope of the Discipline

Theoretical treatise fundamentally concerned with origins of a practice or of

an art, on architecture --> imitation of nature / mimesis and in man innate
desire to improve upon it.

Issues of Origins --> the question of the meaning of architecture and the
definition of its essence and limits

Basic subject of treatise categorized using:

1. The requisite qualities of an architect in terms of personality, education

and experience.

2. The requisite qualities of architecture

3. A theory of design or construction method encompassing technique,

constituent parts, types, materials and procedures.

4. Examples of the canon of architecture

5. An attitude about relationship between theory and practice

Theory addresses following themes: Meaning, The theories of history, Nature,

The site, the city, Aesthetic issues and Technology.

Part II - WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?

Postmodernism as a Historical Period

Historical context

The 1960s are in many ways the key transitional period, a period in
which the new international order (neocolonialism, the green
revolution, computerization, and electronic information) is at one and
the same time set in place and swept and shaken by its own internal
contradictions and by external resistance Frederic Jameson, Cultural
theorist
Challenges to modern movement in architecture
The failure of modern architectures vision
The rise of theory institutions, publications, exhibitions as response to
the professional crisis
Postmodernisms Defining Theoretical Paradigms
Primary paradigms:

Phenomenology

Underlies postmodern attitudes towards site, place, landscape and

making (in particular tectonics)
Recent theory: philosophical speculation by problematizing the bodys
interaction with its environment
Requires deliberate attention to how things are made

Aesthetic of the Sublime

Philosophical paradigms that deals with the production and reception

of a work of art
The Uncanny and The Grotesque
The sublime has been described as a self-transforming discourse that
influenced the construction of the modern subject.

Linguistic Theory

Paralleled a revival of interest in meaning and symbolism in

architecture
Architect studied how meaning is carried in language and applied that
knowledge, via the Linguistic analogy to architecture

Semiotic:

Approaches language scientifically, as a sign system with a dimension of

structure (syntactic) and one of meaning (semantic).

Structuralism:

The true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in
the relationship which we construct and then perceive, between them
(Hawkes);

Focus on codes, convention and processes responsible for a works

intelligibility (how it produces socially available meaning);
Concern with the condition of signification.

Post structuralism:

Reflects the contemporary dissolution of sign and the released play of

signifiers;
 The signifier has the potential for free play and endless deferrals of
meaning, which results from an infinite chain of metaphors (Roland
Barthes)
Divides the signifier from the signified --> meaning is not immediately
present in a sign (Terry Eagleton)
Object of critique: to demonstrate that all of reality is constituted
(produced and sustained) by its representation, rather than reflected in
them.

Deconstruction:

Looks at the foundations of thought in logocentrism;

Jacques Derrida --> explores the use of rhetorical operations (such as

metaphor) to produce the supposed ground or foundation of argument, noting
that each concept has been constructed; Deconstruction analyzes and
questions conceptual pairs which are currently accepted as self-evident and
natural, as if they hadnt been institutionalized at some precise moment .
Because of being taken for granted they restrict thinking

Works from the margins to expose and dismantle the oppositions and
vulnerable assumption that structure a text.
The purpose is to displace philosophical categories and attempts at
mastery.

Marxism

Influential examining the city and its institutions

Modern movement failed to achieve the desired overhaul of social order
because only a class critique of architecture is possible
An effort to accurately describe the phenomena of culture in the
context of society and the political economy

Feminism

A political agenda to resist male domination in the postmodern period

Use critical paradigms including post-structuralism, Marxism, and
Psychoanalysis

Postmodern Architectural Themes

Formulated with respect to the city as cultural artifact, and to place, in the
phenomenological sense.

Themes:
History and Historicism

Periodization is typical of a historicist view of history, defined as

seeking to express the zeitgeist (the spirit of the age) , understood to
be unique to the present time and requiring the development of a
unique style
Two paradoxical aspects of historicism:
o Seeking an expression of the zeitgeist condemns one to a pattern
of continual change.
o Flight to the future

Definition of Historicism:

An attitude of concern for tradition of the past

The artistic practice of using historical forms

Postmodern attitudes in relation to modernity

Anti-modern Theories
o Seek a radical break with modernity, offering alternatives, either
future-oriented (critical new visions), or backward-looking
(reactionary revivals of tradition)
Pro-Modern Theories
o Desiring to extend or complete the modern cultural tradition

Meaning

Form/Content: Type, Function, Tectonics

Type --> the architecture of architecture (Derrida)

Type --> the interior structure of a form or... a principle which contains
the possibility of infinite formal variation and further structural
modification of the type itself (Guilio Carlo Argan)
Types creates continuity with history, which gives intelligibility to
buildings and cities within a culture
Type offers a rational, valueless origin from which articulate a design
method of transformation
Type is often linked to function through types based on use, to
tectonics through type based structural systems
Typology --> a catalog of general solutions to problems of architectural
arrangement, idealized to the most diagrammatic level
Function --> rational and scientific
Postmodernism gives higher value to Form rather than to Function
Phenomenology

Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural Theory edited by Neil

Leach
Phenomenology can be defined as a study to know how a phenomenon
or phenomena happen.
Phenomenon, phenomena: Is something that happens or exist and can
be seen or experienced; used especially when even or thing is being
considered in a scientific or academic way.
Beside discuss about Visual Domain, Phenomenology also concern
about ontology potential thats related with human experience and all
its senses. Although Phenomenology is a philosophy that discusses
individual experience, its goal is to define a solid base for knowledge.
Phenomenology in architecture has a strong influence since it focusing
on perception and cognition
Phenomenology that was developed by Heidegger and Gadamer,
involving interpretative dimension in the form of hermeneutic. For
Heidegger and Gadamer, art in architecture interpreted as a
representation of symbolic truth.
Space, according to their concept, not just an abstract matter, but
should be consider as a real experience, a phenomenon, which must be
seen from all aspect of phenomenology.

Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962)

Bachelard was a science philosopher and phenomenologist that

developed the theory of imagination, theory which discuss about
dialectical connection between rationalism (the world of thinking) and
empiricism (the empirical world).
He was strongly influence by psychoanalysis and surrealism and
developing a concept of surrationalism which connect rationalism with
surrealism.
He introduced the concept of house as the world of daydream where
memory and imagination meets. Bachelard use the term daydream
instead of dream, (his psychoanalysis referring to Carl Jung).

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

His philosophical thinking has a big influence among European thinker

such as Hans-Georg Gadamer or Jaques Derrida.
In his 1927 publication, Being and Time, Heidegger focusing entire
human situation in a concept called Dasein, and Being which then
become a new foundation for ontological thinking.
 In Building, Dwelling and Thinking, he introduces the different between
building and dwelling. Building that originally came from Bauen (Dutch)
or Building (English) means to dwell, to remain, to stay in a place. But
the meaning of Bauen itself are came from word Nachbar (neighbour),
which came from word Neahgebur; neah (near), gebur (dweller).
Nachgebauer or near-dweller, he who dwells nearby. Words buri, buren,
beuren, beoron are referring to dwelling, the place of dwelling.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900- ?)

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher, student of Martin

Heidegger. His writing influence by Heidegger thoughts. His
contribution for hermeneutic are his concept of understanding and
explanation.
Gadamer present all his ideas about occasionality in The Ontological
Foundation of the Occasional and the Decorative. Occasionality is
referring to an event of state which present because of art, its meaning
are determine y the present of art.
Architecture for Gadamer has two purposes to be fulfill, functions and
contribution to the site or place. Architecture must always define by its
spatial context.

Henri Levebvre (1901-1991)

Levebvre was one of French Philosopher who has a strong political

reputation. He was involved directly during the student revolution in
late 1960. His ideas mostly contradiction with others that dominant
during that era.
In his The Production of Space, Levebvre shows the impact of his grass
root activity. His known for complex thinking and concept, specially his
idea to combine Marxism and Phenomenology.

Gianni Vattimo (1936-?)

Vattimo was Gadamers student. He is an Italian Philosopher that

focusing in esthetics and phenomenology. He developed concepts of
pluralities which became a main character of postmodern.
Vattimo also discuss about centrality, and ornamentation in
architecture.
The Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord

The revolutionary thinker, Guy Debord was the leading figure of the
French intellectual group who called themselves The Situations
International. His text, The Society of the Spectacle written in 1967 is
one of the greatest theoretical examinations of our socio-cultural
condition, describing in pinpoint accuracy, the dreadful corporate
globalization craze currently sweeping the planet.
In 1989 he published his "Commentaries on the Society of the
Spectacle"
Both texts are chillingly accurate descriptions of the world of
simulation and lies that mankind has transformed his life into.

I. Separation Perfected

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is

presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that
was directly lived has receded into a representation. The spectacle
presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society,
and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point
of all vision and all consciousness.
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the
project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration
added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real societys
unreality.
In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of
the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also
represents the constant presence of this justification since it
monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production
process. The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete
social activity. Each side of such a duality is itself divided.
In order to describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions, and the
forces that work against it, it is necessary to make some artificial
distinctions. In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain
extent to use the spectacles own language, in the sense that we have
to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses
itself in the spectacle. For the spectacle are both the meaning and the
agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical
moment in which we are caught.
The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can
never be questioned. Its sole message is: What appears is good; what
is good appears.
 The society based on modern industry is not accidentally or
superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the
spectacle, the visual reflection of the ruling economic order, goals are
nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing
other than itself.
The spectacle is able to subject human beings to it because the
economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than
the economy developing for it.
When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images
become real beings. The spectacle is not merely a matter of images,
nor even of images plus sounds. It is whatever escapes peoples
activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration and
correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation
becomes independent, the spectacle regenerates itself.
The spectacle inherits the weakness of the Western philosophical
project, which attempted to understand activity by means of the
categories of vision. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it
philosophizes reality, reducing everyones concrete life to a universe of
speculation.
The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.
The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human
powers into a world beyond; the culmination of humanitys internal
separation.
The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the
specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of
speaking in the name of all the other activities. The most modern
aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic.
The spectacle is the ruling orders nonstop discourse about itself, its
never-ending monologue of self-praise, and its self-portrait at the stage
of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life.
The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass
through practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a
factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals
itself for what it is: an autonomously developing separate power, based
on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined
division of labor into parcel zed gestures dictated by the independent
movement of machines, and working for an ever-expanding market. In
the course of this development, all community and all critical
awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by
separating from each other have not yet been reunited.
 The spectacle was born from the worlds loss of unity, and the immense
expansion of the modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this loss. In
the spectacle, a part of the world presents itself to the world and is
superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this
separation. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites
them only in their separateness.
The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle
is everywhere.
The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to
the territory it represents. The spectacles social function is the
concrete manufacture of alienation.
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes
images.

II. The Commodity as Spectacle

The world at once presents and absent that the spectacle holds up to
view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience.
The commodity is this materialized illusion, and the spectacle is its
general expression.
The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in
totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no
longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the
commodity.
The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to
equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a
survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival
must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation.
Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern
industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system
to resolve the following contradiction,: The technological developments
that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve
labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of
commodities.
Use value was formerly understood as an implicit aspect of exchange
value. Now, however, within the upside-down world of the spectacle, it
must be explicitly proclaimed, both because its actual reality has been
eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because it
serves as a necessary pseudo-justification for a counterfeit life.
The spectacle is the flip side of money. It, too, is an abstract general
equivalent of all commodities. But whereas money has dominated
society as the representation of universal equivalence.
 The spectacle is the modern complement of money: a representation of
the commodity world as a whole which serves as a general equivalent
for what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is money
one can only look at, because in it all use has already been exchanged
for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not just a
servant of pseudo-use; it is already in itself a pseudo-use of life.
Once society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy
in fact depends on the society. When the subterranean power of the
economy grew to the point of visible domination, it lost its power.
Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same
project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of
classes and thus the workers direct possession of every aspect of
their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the
spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its
own making.

III. Unity and Division within Appearances

The spectacle, like modern society itself, is at once united and divided.
The unity of each is based on violent divisions. But when this
contradiction emerges in the spectacle, it is itself contradicted by a
reversal of its meaning: the division it presents is unitary, while the
unity it presents is divided.
By invoking any number of different criteria, the spectacle can present
these oppositions as totally distinct social systems. But in reality they
are nothing but particular sectors whose fundamental essence lies in
the global system that contains them, the single movement that has
turned the whole planet into its field of operation: capitalism.
The society that bears the spectacle does not dominate
underdeveloped regions solely by its economic hegemony. It also
dominates them as the society of the spectacle. The bureaucratic
regimes in power in certain industrialized countries have their own
particular type of spectacle, but it is an integral part of the total
spectacle, serving as its pseudo-opposition and actual support.
The spectacle is rooted in the economy of abundance, and the products
of that economy ultimately tend to dominate the spectacular market
and override the ideological or police-state protectionist barriers set up
by local spectacles with pretensions of independence.
The agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the
opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own
individuality as of the individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as
a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in
 order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the
succession of things.
The false choices offered by spectacular abundance, choices based on
the juxtaposition of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and
of distinct yet interconnected roles (signified and embodied primarily
by objects), develop into struggles between illusory qualities designed
to generate fervent allegiance to quantitative trivialities.
Spectacular oppositions conceal the unity of poverty. The spectacle
exists in a concentrated form and a diffuse form, depending on the
requirements of the particular stage of poverty it denies and supports.
In both cases it is nothing more than an image of happy harmony
surrounded by desolation and horror, at the calm center of misery.
The concentrated spectacle is primarily associated with bureaucratic
capitalism, though it may also be imported as a technique for
reinforcing state power in more backward mixed economies or even
adopted by advanced capitalism during certain moments of crisis.
The diffuse spectacle is associated with commodity abundance, with
the undisturbed development of modern capitalism. Here each
individual commodity is justified in the name of the grandeur of the
total commodity production, of which the spectacle is a laudatory
catalog.
The things the spectacle presents as eternal are based on change, and
must change as their foundations change. The spectacle is totally
dogmatic, yet it is incapable of arriving at any really solid dogma.
Nothing stands still for it. This instability is the spectacles natural
condition, but it is completely contrary to its natural inclination.
The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division
underlying the real unity of the capitalist mode of production.

IV. The Proletariat as Subject and Representation

The class struggles of the long era of revolutions initiated by the rise of
the bourgeoisie have developed in tandem with the dialectical thought
of history the thought which is no longer content to seek the
meaning of what exists, but which strives to comprehend the
dissolution of what exists, and in the process breaks down every
separation.
For Hegel the point was no longer to interpret the world, but to
interpret the transformation of the world. But because he limited
himself to merely interpreting that transformation, Hegel only
represents the philosophical culmination of philosophy. He seeks to
understand a world that develops by it.
 Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it does not express
the entire process of this revolution, but only its concluding phase. In
this sense it is a philosophy not of the revolution, but of the
restoration (Karl Korsch, Theses on Hegel and Revolution).
Hegel performed the task of the philosopher - the glorification of what
exists, - for the last time; but already what existed for him could be
nothing less than the entire movement of history.
Philosophy, in the process of being superseded by historical thought,
has thus arrived at the point where it can glorify its world only by
denying it, since in order to speak it must presuppose that the total
history to which it has relegated everything has already come to an
end, and that the only tribunal where truth could be judged is closed.
When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that this
historical thought has not been forgotten, its refutation of that
thoughts conclusion is at the same time a confirmation of its method.
Historical thought can be salvaged only by becoming practical thought;
and the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class can be
nothing less than historical consciousness operating on the totality of
its world.
The inseparability of Marxs theory from the Hegelian method is itself
inseparable from that theorys revolutionary character, that is, from its
truth.
Marxs theory is closely linked with scientific thought insofar as it
seeks a rational understanding of the forces that really operate in
society. But it ultimately goes beyond scientific thought, preserving it
only by superseding it. It seeks to understand social struggles, not
sociological laws. We recognize only one science: the science of
history (The German Ideology).
The weakness of Marxs theory is naturally linked to the weakness of
the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time.
The theoretical shortcomings of the scientific defense of proletarian
revolution (both in its content and in its form of exposition) all
ultimately result from identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie
with respect to the revolutionary seizure of power.
As early as the Communist Manifesto, Marxs effort to demonstrate the
legitimacy of proletarian power by citing a repetitive sequence of
precedents led him to oversimplify his historical analysis into a linear
model of the development of modes of production, in which class
struggles invariably resulted either in a revolutionary transformation
of the entire society or in the mutual ruin of the contending classes.
The only two classes that really correspond to Marxs theory, the two
pure classes that the entire analysis of Capital brings to the fore, are
 the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These are also the only two
revolutionary classes in history, but operating under very different
conditions.
The fact that anarchists have seen the goal of proletarian revolution as
immediately present represents both the strength and the weakness of
collectivist anarchist struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can
be taken seriously the pretensions of the individualist forms of
anarchism have always been ludicrous). From the historical thought of
modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the
conclusion, and its constant harping on this conclusion is accompanied
by a deliberate indifference to any consideration of methods.
The anarchists, who explicitly distinguish themselves from the rest of
the workers movement by their ideological conviction, reproduce this
separation of competencies within their own ranks by providing a
terrain that facilitates the informal domination of each particular
anarchist organization by propagandists and defenders of their
ideology, specialists whose mediocre intellectual activity is largely
limited to the constant regurgitation of a few eternal truths.
The anarchists ideological reverence for unanimous decision making
has ended up paving the way for uncontrolled manipulation of their own
organizations by specialists in freedom; and revolutionary anarchism
expects the same type of unanimity, obtained by the same means, from
the masses once they have been liberated.
Furthermore, the anarchists refusal to take into account the great
differences between the conditions of a minority banded together in
present-day struggles and of a post-revolutionary society of free
individuals has repeatedly led to the isolation of anarchists when the
moment for collective decision-making actually arrives, as is shown by
the countless anarchist insurrections in Spain that were contained and
crushed at a local level.
The illusion more or less explicitly maintained by genuine anarchism is
its constant belief that a revolution is just around the corner, and that
the instantaneous accomplishment of this revolution will demonstrate
the truth of anarchist ideology and of the form of practical organization
that has developed in accordance with that ideology.

SEMIOTICS AND STRUCTURALISM

Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture - Kate Nesbitt

Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas
SEMIOTICS AND ARCHITECTURE

Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work

The function of the theory of architecture and design has been to adapt
architecture to the needs of western social formations and connecting
the overall structures of the society and its architecture. This essay is
concerned with theory in a strict sense, as opposed to the adaptive
theory, called ideology.
Ideology can be seen as a certain set of representation and beliefs
religious, moral, political, aesthetic which refer to nature, to society,
and to the life and activities of men in relation to nature and society.
Ideology affords only a certain knowledge that is why Agrest and
Gandelsonas propose a theory, called theory of architecture as an
opposition to ideology.
Architectural theory is the process of the production of knowledge
which is built upon a dialectical environment relationship with
architectural ideology. This dialectical distinguishes theory from
ideology. The relationships between theory and ideology viewed as
continuous struggle ideology defends a type of knowledge and theory
explain the reality
Many semiotics theory of architecture serves only to consume a theory
of semiotics that provides a large tool for the production of knowledge
in architecture. Semiotics concepts related to a semiotic theory must
be distinguished from similar concepts related to other theoretical
fields, example: code
It is important to clarify the distinction between the notion of
communication and the notion of signification. The notion of
communication is related to the function and use of a system, while
the notion of signification indicates internal relation within systems.
Communication is concerned with the use and effects of sign;
signification is concerned with the nature of signs and the rule
governing them
Saussure defines semiotics as the science of the different systems of
signs and the study of langue as the study of only one of the various
semiotic systems. The concept of sign composed into signifier and
signified and signification is linking between the two.
Language is the creative aspect of architecture, creative in
architecture is a complex play of conservation and variation of shapes
and ideological notions within certain determined limits.
Geoffrey Broadbent

A PLAIN MANS GUIDE TO THE THEORY OF SIGNS IN ARCHITECTURE

Broadbent argues that buildings carry meaning and that architect

should understand the process by which such meaning is ascribed.
The way of understanding the meaning of a building is by a theory
called semiotic (Saussure) and Semantic (Peirce).
Basic division of semiotic is consisted of three levels, pragmatic,
semantic and syntactic

PRAGMATIC

Obviously consist of looking at all the way in which architecture, as a sign of

system, actually affects those who use building. Building is sending
messages, through an information channel, can be received by one of the
sense and decoded according to the observers personal experience

SYNTAX

Syntax is concerned with the structure of sign-systems, example: a column

and its relation. Mathematical basis, on how architecture can be explained,
individual spaces can be clustered together and whole spaces can be divided
up.

SEMANTICS

Signifier and signified are united in social contract. Metaphor represents a

higher level of meaning than visual analogy

STRUCTURALISM

Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural History - Neil Leach

Roland Barthes

SEMIOLOGY AND THE URBAN

The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city
speaks to its inhabitants; we speak our city, the city where we are,
simply by living in it, by wandering, through it, by looking at it.
First remark is symbolism (understood as a general discourse
concerning signification) is no longer conceived today, at least as
regular correspondence between signifier and signified.
Second remark is symbolism must be defined essentially as the world
of signifier, of correlations, and, especially, correlations that we can
never enclose in a full signification, in a final signification.
 The third remark is that today semiology never supposes the existence
of a definitive signified. This means that the signified are always
signifiers for other signified and vice versa.

THE EIFFEL TOWER

The tower also presents of the world. It belongs to the universal

language of travel. The tower attracts meaning for all lovers of
signification, it plays a glamorous part, that of a pure signifier, for
example of a form in which men unceasingly put meaning.
Then why do we visit the Eiffel tower? To become a part of the dream,
to transform the touristy rite into an adventure of sight of the
intelligence.
To visit the tower is to enter into contact not with a historical sacred,
but rather with a new nature, that of human space : the tower is not a
trace, a souvenir, in short a culture, but rather an immediate
consumption of a humanity made natural by that glance which
transforms it into space
To reconstitute, to make memory and sensation co-operate so as to
produce in your mind a simulacrum of Paris, of which the elements are
in front of you, real, ancestral, but nonetheless disoriented by the total
space they are given to you, for this space was unknown to you

Umberto Eco

FUNCTION AND SIGN: THE SEMIOTICS OF ARCHITECTURE

Why is architecture a particular challenge to semiotics? Because

apparently most architectural objects do not communicate but
function. The architectural code would generate an iconic code, and
the cave principle would become an object of communicative
intercourse.
Denotation: the object of use is the sign vehicle of a precisely and
conventionally denoted meaning its function. Primary functions
(denoted) and secondary function (connotative) will be used to convey,
not an axiological discriminates, but rather a semiotic mechanism, in
the sense that the secondary functions rest on the denotation of the
primary function. In the course of history, the primary and secondary
functions might be found undergoing losses, recoveries, and
substitutions of various kinds

TYPOLOGY AND TRANSFORMATION

Theorizing A New Agenda for Architecture - Kate Nesbitt

TIPOLOGY

Type (English)
Tipos (Greek), variation meaning: model, matrix, print, relief.
Typus (Latin), figure, repetition pattern.
Type classified into 2 concepts: Geometric Typology and Relational
Typology

Giulio Carlo Argan

ON THE TYPOLOGY OF ARCHITECTURE

The connection between the Architect and historical precedent.

Form are determined itself by its function and economic aspects.
Type is an abstraction of serial buildings beneath their general
structural feature.

Metamorphosis of type:

Formation of Type, deformation, distortion of original form, structural

deformation.
Innovation of Type.
The model understood as part of practical execution of art is an object,
which should be imitated for what it is the type on the other hand is
something in relation to which deferent people may conceive work of
art having no obvious resemblance to each other.
All is exact and define in the model; in the type everything is more or
less vague.
The imitation of types therefore has nothing about it which devise the
operation of sentiment and intelligent.
The birth of a type is therefore depends than on the existence of series
of buildings having between them an obvious formal and functional
analogy.
The type is formed trough a process of reducing a complex of formal
variants to a common root form.

It will clear that the position of the artist vis--vis history has two aspects:

The aspect of typology

o That of typology is not problematic: the artist assumes certain data,

taking as a premise of all his work a group of common notion, or a
heritage of images with all their more or less explicit content and their
ideological overtones.
o This aspect may be compared to iconographic and compositional
treatment of themes in figurative art
The aspect of formal definition

In this aspect implies a reference to definite formal values of the past on

which the artists explicitly arrives at a judgment. This judgment, however,
must itself imply a typology since, whenever a values judgment must also be
passing about the way in which the artist, in creating them, had dealt with
the relevant typological scheme

Anthony Vidler

THE THIRD TYPOLOGY

First Typology:

Primitive Hut (Laugier), Paradigm of the first typology, was founded on a

belief in the rational order of nature, the origin of each architectural element
was natural: the chain that linked the column to hut to the city was parallel
to chain that linked natural world: and primary geometries favoured for the
combination of type elements were as seen as expressive of underlying form
of nature beneath its surface appearance.

Second Typology:

Process (Le Corbusier), In these two typology, architecture, made by man,

was being compared and legitimized by another nature outside itself, as
exemplified in the work of the new Rationalist, however, there is no such
attempt at validation.

Third Typology:

Architectural component/element (Neo Rationalist)

Type

Krier ----> formal form of composition, an assembly of typology from its

elements

Rossi ---> autobiography, depends on personal memory, impression etc.

(supported by Moneo, 1978), born from architects imagination.

References:
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