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Meaningofspace Semi.2009.049.Lowlink
Meaningofspace Semi.2009.049.Lowlink
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Abstract
This article reviews and evaluates some aspects of the semiotic heritage
from a fundamental treatise on architecture. It shows how the system set
in place by Vitruvius at the dawn of our era is being today brought up to
date by contemporary architects, yielding a projection know-how that can
contribute to the design of virtual worlds.
The question is therefore, how can space make sign. According to the
Saussurean conception of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and
signified and Hjelmslev’s concept of connotation, the semiotic of space an-
swers this question and clarifies the various approaches to description of
meaning production developed in the theory of architecture. In this way
the semiotic theory can give an explanation of the modernist function-ori-
ented conception of the world, as well as of the post-modernist communica-
tion-oriented one. For this purpose it questions the concept of generative
grammar that the contemporary architects have developed starting from
the works of Chomsky.
1. Semiotic of space
the discontinuous, the homogeneous and the heterogeneous, the here and
the elsewhere.
Thus, if the sign a¤ords an object in the place of an other, space o¤ers
a possible place for this object. And, if it means it, the place can substitute
for the object. The dialectic of absence and presence (in a here or an else-
where) implies that of the void and the full (in a limited or an unlimited
space), where the full supposes the void (Barthes 1995 [1967], 1970) and
receives passive or active values, coded by traits, according to systems of
exchanges.
The links between actual and virtual space distinguish links in absentia
and links in praesentia for the knowledge of a place. The link between
the actual object and virtual objects can also be conceived as the link be-
tween the actual process and the system of places which makes it possible
(Pellegrino 2006). Within the space of our relations it refers to the link
between possible places and occupied positions. The position is the result
of the action of positioning, like putting the object in an empty existent
place; an object that occupies a place in competition with others (Des-
marais and Ritchot 2000). One can thus better understand how the fact
of positioning is articulated and extended by the fact of the available
places, in the sense of having places to distribute objects as means to a
potential action. The way of positioning is also a way of opposing; in po-
sitioning an object one has to impose it and sometimes remove another
object, sometimes even displacing an opposing object to the point of
threatening the other’s position (Pellegrino 1986).
The available place is bounded in reference to others according to
a grammatical form giving to the placed object an emerging surface
(Foucault 1969), a value and rules regulating other objects occupying dif-
ferent places. The di¤erent spaces are thus structured by places that deter-
mine them. Spaces are articulated by places which are superimposed or
mutually excluded, which are intertwined or intersected, open or closed
to each other. These places o¤er virtual positions ordered in their connex-
ities and disconnexities by the partition and composition of spaces.
Architectural treatises are many and have been written, as century fol-
lowed century, for a long time. When we go back to the founding texts
of European architecture of the last 2000 years, or at any rate to the ear-
liest text still accessible to us, in the ten books of Vitruvius’s De architec-
tura (written c. 80 BC) we find a very precise definition and an explicit
Meaning of space 273
Figure 4. A. Palladio (1997 [1570]). Variations of figurative motifs and rhythmical accents
278 P. Pellegrino and E. P. Jeanneret
Towards the end of the last century Viollet-le-Duc, in the thirteenth of his
Discourses on Architecture, a‰rmed that: ‘‘If, then, architects do not wish
to be classified in 1900 among the lost species that have passed into the
condition of extinct historical individualities, like astrologers, alchemists,
and armor-clad men-at-arms, it is time they set resolutely to work, for
the old mysteries they rely upon are beginning to be seen through . . . ’’
(Viollet-le-Duc 1977 [1863–1872]: 112, our translation).
What had happened to architecture, that one of its most ardent defend-
ers should see fit to make such a prophecy of imminent disaster? What
had the architects, the builders of palaces and stately homes, done that
in the nineteenth century their profession should be under threat?
Viollet-le-Duc made himself pretty clear: architectural learning could no
longer rely on old mysteries! They would be unmasked as mountebanks’
tricks.
What upheaval of learning took place at that time to cause Viollet-le-
Duc to fear for architecture’s very existence? The cognitive system was
challenged. The people were making themselves heard and the industrial
revolution was not merely ‘‘imposing its products,’’ as our author per-
fectly understood, but also imposing its intensive methods of production
and the sciences that made them possible: not only the natural sciences —
physics, biology, and chemistry — but also the work sciences: economics,
psychology, and sociology. The quantities to be produced were at the cen-
ter of research and scientific thought.
A rift was appearing in what had formerly been ordered as a ‘‘universal
science.’’ On the one hand, the natural sciences were developing through
the study of an object defined in its own substance, the material reality of
things; on the other, the work sciences — which pretty soon came to be
called the human sciences — were taking as their object not the material-
ity of things per se, but the practical knowledge an actor might have of
that materiality according to the point of view that he held and that he
shared with others: a practical knowledge made up of values, wishes,
and needs.
Architecture thus saw its principle of unity exploded: architecture that
had to measure not only the materiality of the buildings it erected but the
uses to which their recipients might put them according to the conventions
of their period and rank. Faced with the now-acknowledged impossibility
of a universal science purporting to embrace everything on one and the
same principle, some architects attempted to maintain their hold over the
production of buildings by abandoning all theory and taking refuge in
the area of practices in order to claim a position as ‘‘orchestra conductors.’’
Meaning of space 279
The spatial synthesis interposes itself between form contained and form
expressed, in a space that brings into play the contradiction between be-
ing and seeming: a play of veilings and unveilings in which, between the
inside and the outside, there may be as much antithesis or paradox as
transparency or metaphor. The container — a stately envelope on the
outside and a slum within — may be consistent with a content while at
the same time presenting to view a deceptive facade; a block of minimal
dwellings for poor families may have a facade like that of a block of large
luxury flats; or vice versa. The shape of a space insinuates itself between
what is contained inside and what is maintained outside; it is a threshold,
all the more so since it expresses a relationship and not merely a spatial
quantity.
Veilings and unveilings present ways of being which urban culture rec-
ognizes as forms of distinction, style, or etiquette, of self-presentation.
Style is each individual’s own way, direct or indirect, of stating and ex-
pressing himself: a way that unveils the personality and reveals its salient
characteristics; but it is also filtered information, the surface through
which the personality comes into contact with the spirit of a period, con-
forms to it or confronts it (Gromort 1946). Since it is ‘‘the characteristic
that causes periods and schools to be distinguished from one another’’
(Viollet-le-Duc 1967 [1846–1904]: 478, our translation), it is a conception
of the spirit that manifests an ideal, an ‘‘expression of art independent of
the object’’ and belonging to a generative principle that in architecture
dictates the mode of building appropriate to the scale of the projected ob-
ject. In this sense, style is an instrument of conception that, from the
plane of expression, frames and measures what emerges and takes shape
on the plane of content, and that sometimes demands to be ordered be-
fore being projected.
This definition of style comes close, in instrumental terms, to the defini-
tion of connotation given by L. J. Prieto, since he deems ‘‘connotative the
way of conceiving an operation that results from the act of recognizing
[that operation] as a member of the utility of the tool used to carry it
out’’ (Prieto 1975: 85, our translation) rather than as a means to an end.
Then, however, connotative conception presupposes the ‘‘notative’’
conception of the operation: that which consists in recognizing it as a
member of the class that determines it (the class of a system of inter-
understanding if it is a question of meaning, or of a system of what I shall
call interaction if it is a question of operation).
Connotation, in architecture as in the other arts of space, by dividing
up the relationships between signifiers and signifieds, as between opera-
tors and utilities, proposes at a secondary level (Eco 1972 [1968], 1973)
of conception the interpretation of their signification or utilization. The
282 P. Pellegrino and E. P. Jeanneret
Against this reduction, to give again meaning to their project, the post-
modern architects implicitly reverse the diagram (see Figure 7).
Such an approach aims to avoid confusing real objects and uses with
the forms (of expression and content) in which they are conceived. By de-
fining itself in the arbitrariness of an articulation of components, the plan
of the expression is endowed with a connotative articulation between ex-
pression and content.
284 P. Pellegrino and E. P. Jeanneret
This is, for example, the case of the access to the sacristy of San
Lorenzo, where Brunelleschi opens a narrow door in the large framing
of a monumental arc (see Figure 10). It is then the articulation of the de-
sign by the measuring, presenting itself as a monument, a mechanism of
communication that gives meaning to the form of the expression as well
as to the form of the content. The intention of the architect is thus mea-
sured in a design that contains and expresses it.
Exploiting this articulation, in opposition to the concept of form of the
modern architects, for whom form follows function (Sullivan 1976 [1903]),
contemporary architects develop the concept of complex form, that is to
Figure 12. M. Botta, Sketches for the Bregenzona House, 1983 (Pizzi 1991)
Figure 14. M. Graves, Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center Bridge, 1977–1978 (Dunster 1979)
Turned into mimetic in its search for a ‘‘good form,’’ where the design is
a metaphorical representation of the human body, modern architecture
288 P. Pellegrino and E. P. Jeanneret
Figure 15. P. Eisenmanm (1987). Sketches for the House VI, Cornwall, 1972–1973
4. Contemporary prospects
The current break with modernity is reinstalling the figure as the shape of
a being. In this break, in order to be composed, the figure is decomposed;
in order to be placed it is displaced. The displacement produces a meta-
phor where the placement installs a topos. The figure brings out an event
in a place and fits a memory arrived from elsewhere into a context that is
foreign to it.
The polar pair form/function, used to define the instrument of the
modern conception of the world of industrially produced objects, is thus
broken down into an articulation in which, between the form and the use
of the components of material reality, the figure is reinserted. But the
problem is to produce a figure that is no longer merely projected as ap-
pearance, but also produced as consistency of being.
Text of fiction, monument of a possible future, as much as instrument
of function, machine for an actual use, architecture develops an ontology
of the probable (Jeanneret 2007a) as a semiology of space and time. It
questions the absence in the present of what has been, will be or will
292 P. Pellegrino and E. P. Jeanneret
have been. For this very reason, in order to measure the relevance of new
forms, the contemporary theory of forms and figures attempts to be able
to compare the conditions of making and use of the figures, which vary
with the places and the times where they are planned, and the people
who live there. In this theory the meaning of an architectural form is a
projected figure, designed by reasoning (see Figure 17).
As instrument endowed with a usefulness, the building is the semiotic
object of a demonstrative meta-discourse explaining intentions that pre-
side over the partitions whose object it is and over the articulation of the
variable forms of its content and its expression. This metadiscourse is
held in the form of a project. This project disarticulates and rearticulates
its models of reference, to neutralize its context and seize its deep seman-
tic. It decomposes and recomposes its models in a graphic reasoning by
putting them at stake to test their syntactic rules. Through this process,
it becomes able to transform its context in a measured co-text (Pellegrino
2000; Jeanneret 2007b).
The relationship between what the forms arising out of architectural
reasoning signify and what is signified in the design of the building is of
the order of the project, the order of probable correspondences between
connotation and metasemiosis. These are projected correlations between
magnitudes measured in architecture and magnitudes analyzed in other
sciences, especially physics, which calculates the stability of the edifice
from the strength of the materials assembled, and the human sciences,
which assess the amenity of the housing supplied in terms of the value it
has for particular users.
The architectural project seeks to define itself among the sciences of the
artificial, where what is involved is an epistemology of knowledge of the
transformations undergone in the material reality of things.3 But whereas
the engineering sciences, approximate branches of knowledge, test mea-
surements and dictate standards defining suitable correlations between
the economics and the physics of what is to be built, architecture, a pro-
Meaning of space 293
Notes
1. In discussing classical architecture here we have been guided by the excellent work of
Alexander Tzonis; our conclusions, however, di¤er in that, as we see it, distinctive con-
notations, after having been intentional, always become functional sooner or later. Cf.
Tzonis and Lefaivre (1985 [1983]).
294 P. Pellegrino and E. P. Jeanneret
2. The articulation between the form of architectural expression and the form of the con-
tent of the product of architecture could no longer be left to a single logico-deductive
calculation (stone edifices age well, this edifice is in stone, this edifice will age well), but
required a statistico-abductive calculation (stone edifices age well, I want the edifice I am
planning to age well, it is highly probable that I would do well to choose to build this
edifice in stone) — a calculation in which creative invention emerged from significant
di¤erences between probable cases (I can also conceive that it could happen that this ed-
ifice, even though built in stone, might age badly on the chosen site, and I can also con-
ceive that this edifice might be built of other materials and age well).
3. In evaluating the object of an architectural project, history is not left behind, for it dic-
tates a judgement based on the measurements supplied to it by other sciences and sub-
mits to that judgement the beauty of the objects weighed by its critical thinking.
References
Pierre Pellegrino (b. 1947) is a full professor at the University of Geneva 3pellegri@
bluewin.ch4. His research interests include the semiotics of space. His recent publications in-
clude ‘‘Le sens des formes urbaines’’ (2005); ‘‘Semiotics of space’’ (2005); ‘‘Il senso delle
forme urbane’’ (with E. Jeanneret, 2006); and Le sens de l’espace, Livre IV, Le projet archi-
tectural (2007).
296 P. Pellegrino and E. P. Jeanneret