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page131from Building Ideas
4
Systems of Communication
Structuralism and Semiotics
Phenomenology was introduced in Chapter 3
as emerging from Edmund Husserl’s dream of philosophy as a legitimate and “rigorous”
science. In order to place philosophy on a firm foundation of scientific
certainty, he had attempted a return to the study of “things in themselves”. This
had led some philosophers to focus on the individual’s subjective experience
and the influence that the body has on our understanding of the world around
us. As a consequence of this, phenomenology has been charged with being too
restricted in its interest, considering things as isolated objects cut off from
the social context of reality. On the other hand a more deterministic version
has developed which sees language as the source of all meaning – affecting our
understanding by limiting the way we think. In more recent years this emphasis
on language has proved attractive in the shift towards science, as linguistics
has developed a series of far-reaching interpretive models which have since
been applied more generally to the understanding of culture as a whole. The
innovations that inspired this dramatic transition are still central to our
understanding of architecture today, as modernism, post-modernism and even
deconstruction have all been affected by this new conception of language.
The
discussion in Chapter 3 of the significance of places was intended to establish
the importance of meaning in architecture. The fact that buildings, in a sense,
can be “read” as cultural “texts” will now be the
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