4 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown – Research laboratories, Princeton University, 1986. (Alistair Gardner)

satisfy both demands by disconnecting them from each other, hence the functional “shed” and its expressive “decoration”. This strategy involved a kind of honesty in its separation of the two functions and has led to a series of buildings characterized by their surface articulation – Venturi accepts that the architect often controls only the building’s skin, so he treats it as a screen for the display of surface pattern. The more recent buildings at Princeton, such as Wu Hall from the early 1980s, and the ISI Building in Philadelphia, from 1978-79, show the implications of this approach to the decoration of surface. Another building which plays with the concept of the “empty” signifier is the Benjamin Franklin Museum which stands on the site of his former house. Instead of rebuilding the house from historical records, an outline of its form has been created in white-painted steel. This is an extreme example of a building that tries to deny its own substance,

3 Robert Venturi and Denis Scott Brown – Wu Hall, Princeton University, 1980-83.(Neil Jackson)

1 Ventury and Rauch –Franklin Court, Philadelphia, 1973-76.(Neil Jackson)

2 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown – Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London, 1986-91.(Neil Jackson)

Meaning and Architecture and edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird. Jencks went on to champion the use of semantic references in buildings, which became the basis of what we now refer to as the “language” of postmodernism in architecture. Robert Venturi was perhaps the first architect to make explicit use of these ideas, in terms of the self-conscious “quotation” of historic forms in his buildings. While in his early work from the 1960s these references are still fairly abstract – such as in the arch form across the doorway of the house for his mother, near Philadelphia – in his later work they appear in a much more literal form, as in the classical pilasters and Egyptian decoration of his Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. Uniting these two extremes is the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, which in his written work Venturi had translated into an intriguing architectural theory. On the basis that any object could be made to signify a particular use, he saw a problem in the modernist principle of expressing a function through a specific form. Illustrated by his famous sketch of the “duck” and the “decorated shed”, Venturi showed how a building could signify without resorting to functionalist expression. Rather than trying to make the form of the building express the character of what goes on inside, Venturi advocated the application of signs, as seen in his studies of Las Vegas hotels. He felt that modernism had compromised itself by insisting on functionalist expression and it was time to learn from commercial architecture in its techniques of communication:

         By limiting itself to strident articulations of the pure architectural elements of space, structure and program, modern architecture’s expression has become a dry expressionism, empty and boring – and in the end irresponsible. Ironically, the modern architecture of today, while rejecting explicit symbolism and frivolous appliqué ornament, has distorted the whole building into one big ornament. In substituting ‘articulation’ for decoration, it has become a duck.16

         To get over what he claimed was a problem within modernism of functional expression compromising functional operation, he tried to 

successive transformations of “archetypal” buildings. Rossi’s book was only translated into English in 1982, but his work had in the meantime become internationally famous. The Architecture of the City had appeared in Spanish and German in the early 1970s, around the same time as another landmark work, what became the book Collage City written by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, which appeared as a journal article in 1975. This work also looked at traditional cities as a palimpsest of layers, as Roland Barthes had suggested in his analysis of literature.

         The historical depth that all these writers were searching for in architecture was disappearing from the new “functional city” and their intention was not just to preserve it but to reinvent it as a method for making new buildings in the contemporary context. The effect of this reassessment of the principles of modernism was to open the way for linguistics in architecture – the possibilities for readdressing the relations between form and meaning were taken up with great interest around this time.

         A good summary of this process was provided by Geoffrey Broadbent in his essay published in Architectural Design in 1978. Entitled “A Plain Man’s Guide to the Theory of Signs in Architecture”, the piece contained a systematic treatment of the field’s major figures,along with explanations of their competing terminologies. He made a distinction between the two main areas of influence in architecture, using Saussure’s division between syntactic and semantic. He described how the two fields might be pursued independently of each other, leading to contrasting expressions of form. The first, the syntactic view of architecture, with its emphasis on structures, is dismissed as hermetic activity – the preoccupation with the rules of formal combination is seen as ignoring what buildings actually mean. The shortcomings of this criticism will be considered later in more detail, but for the moment it is worth noting Broadbent’s conclusion. He regards the semantic dimension of language as inescapable for architecture, as even so-called neutral structures will inevitably carry meaning.

         One of the first manifestation of this semantic tendency in architecture was the collection of essays published in 1969, entitled