Countless times in the course of a normal day, similar “acts of theatre” take place, with architecture as an ever-present backdrop playing its part in the drama.

         How we understand these various languages of non-verbal communication has been the subject of the second part of this book. That we do understand each other at all, in our different models discourse, is testament to the presence of various shared underlying structures. With phenomenology, the problem centred on the notion of “intersubjectivity” and the extension of bodily experience beyond the individual’s perceptual realm. Structuralsim appeared to offer a social context for this experience, by embedding the individual in a network of pre-existing codes and conventions. At the same time, structuralist analysis failed to deal with historical change and the various brands of political criticism were shown to address this more specifically. In this conclusion we will consider further the whole question of historical tradition and the role of hermeneutic practices in the understanding of architecture. This is not to suggest that all these strategies could be incorporated in a single discipline, merely to show the relative merits of the different approaches to interpretation.

         The critical element I have suggested in the title “critical hermeneutics” should serve to highlight a problem that will become apparent in the conventional understanding of the term. It is meant to suggest a certain vigilance towards the conservative tendencies of hermeneutics, and to restore the quality of questionableness with regard to historical traditions. As the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard recommended, in The Postmodern Explained: “Everything that is received must be suspected, even if it is only a day old.”2

The Hermeneutic Tradition 

The dictionary definition of the world “hermeneutics” states that it concerns “interpretation, especially of scripture or literary texts”. The 

Conclusion

Towards a “Critical” Hermeneutics

The use of the word “hermeneutics” in the title of this conclusion is not meant to suggest another discipline which might replace all the others. Hermeneutics today is a problematic term because of its historical associations, but I am using it in the broadest sense to mean the general practice of interpretation. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book set out two contrasting schools of thought – two opposing views on the question of meaning in architecture. The first assumes that architecture has no meaning at all, except as a solution to the problem of providing convenient sheltered space. The second approaches architecture as a pure artistic exercise, with its priority to community a message rated above all other concerns.

         Both positions do not, of course, exist in actuality. I have used these ideas rather as interpretive frameworks – lenses through which to consider various tendencies. The fact that they are only tendencies and that architecture is always less straightforward should have become clearer in the subsequent chapters on the various interpretive models. That buildings always carry messages, whether intentionally or not, renders architecture representational along with all human endeavours. As the theatre director Peter Brook wrote, on the origin of dramatic art: 

         I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.1

“text”, all objects have a dual potential as modes of practice and modes of critique. The merging of theory and practice into a broader, more critical discipline, will be discussed in the conclusion of this book under the general heading of “hermeneutics”.

         Both the historicist and the poststructurlist tendencies correctly pointed to the failures of the modern movement’s instrumental rationality, its narrow teleology, and its overblown faith in technology, but these two positions have erred in another direction in their abjuration of all realms of the social and in their assumption that form remains either a critical or affirmative tool independent of social and economic processes. That contemporary architecture has become so much about surface image and play, and that its content has become so ephemeral, so readily transformable and consumable is partially a product of the neglect of the material dimensions… - programme, production, financing and so forth – that more directly invoke questions of power. And by precluding issues of gender, race, ecology and poverty, postmodernism and deconstructivism have also forsaken the development of a more vital and sustained heterogeneity.39

         This view implies that we are still caught up in the dilemma suggested by Le Corbusier, when in 1923 he presented architecture as an alternative to revolution.40 It should be clear from the modes of resistance set out be recent Marxist philosophers that the real “revolutions” take place at the level of spatial practice. The strategy of subverting the dominant paradigms through the unofficial use of various tactics – such as improvising with “found” objects, technology transfer and “poaching” of spaces, as de Certeau remarked – provides a range of possibilities for the enlightened consumer to step outside the commodification process. The more the strategies of coercive advertising and media manipulation are exposed by political artists, commentators and critics, the more informed people might become in the choices they make regarding their economic and cultural conditions. As a method of criticism of the art and architecture produced under capitalist conditions, the contextual background to the particular work becomes of paramount importance to the Marxist view. However, as Foucault and Derrida have suggested in the notion of the cultural 

12 Ralph Erskine –Byker Wall Housing, Byker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1969-80.(Jonathan Hale)