functional and symbolic form – is inverted in the case of the Expo pavilions, as they have no function except to symbolize their sponsors. This conclusion is based on the earlier definition of an architectural sign as denoting a function, such as the example of a staircase whose literal meaning would be the possibility of walking up it or down it. The principal theme that emerges in Eco’s writing on architecture recalls Barthes’ idea of the “free-play” of signifiers – the interpretation of buildings can never be controlled by the designer, just as the author cannot predetermine the reader’s reading. Eco finally recommends that the architect must design for “variable primary functions and open secondary functions”15, in the hope of inviting the user’s creative engagement, or reappropriation, as Barthes had recommended with language.

         Notwithstanding any ambiguity in the translation from language to architecture, these ideas have had a huge influence on architectural theory. Fundamentally, this thinking showed a new concern for the role of the interpreter, previously neglected in the modernist emphasis on functional norms. Rather than analyzing user requirements and letting technology take care of the rest, the 1960s saw the reappearance of the question of meaning – a concern with how buildings were understood by their inhabitants and the role of history in this process of interpretation. A series of important books appeared from a variety of different sources that addressed a similar shortcoming in mainstream modernism. This consisted of a perceived poverty of expression in architectural form, resulting in a lack of engagement between buildings and their users. The first of these books, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, was written by Robert Venturi, and set out to reassess the lesions of history in architecture which he felt had been suppressed within modernism. The Architecture of the City, written by the Italian Aldo Rossi, also appeared in 1966. In this book urban form was considered as a series of historical layers, based on

Semiotics in Architecture – The Rediscovery of Meaning

Where does all this leave us in terms of structuralism and the “language” of architecture? A possible connection was of course suggested by Barthes’ use of the city as a metaphor. However, the more specific question of the building as a system of signs related to functions was left to the Italian writer Umberto Eco who wrote a lengthy essay on this topic. Eco was close to the work of Barthes with hi interest in the sign-systems of everyday life, particularly the presence of archetypal themes in the narratives of popular culture. In a study from 1973, following the US President Nixon’s fall from office, Eco set out an intriguing analysis of the narrative structure of Nixon’s resignation speech. The essay was called “Strategies of Lying” and compared the speech with the pattern of fairytale, tabulating its characters and episodes as Lévi-Strauss had done with the Oedipus myth.14

         In his essay devoted to buildings, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture”, Eco considered the more ambiguous problem of how an architectural element “signifies” its function. He began by dividing the question into primary and secondary functions which relate to the distinction adopted in linguistics between denotative and connotative meanings. The former refers to the literal meaning, or what the word denotes or “says”, whereas the latter involves the more implicit references that are suggested by the manner of the saying. In everyday language the denotative is dominant, such as in the communication of facts or information, while the connotative becomes important in the case of poetic language, where information is of secondary concern. This division, however, oversimplifies the issues, as in reality the two categories coexist – as language is never a truly neutral means of communication, the poetic dimension will always intrude. Eco acknowledges this situation in another essay on architecture, on the 1967 Expo World Fair, where he describes the pavilions as reversing conventional functions, as the connotative takes over from the denotative. The normal relationship between primary and secondary – or between 

This implies that each act of speech is in some sense a repetition – that our words have always been spoken before us, and that language speaks “through us”, as even Heidegger had suggested.

         Barthes’ thinking, however, is based on Saussure’s idea of the arbitrariness of the sign, which allows the notion of the “free-play” of meaning to disrupt such “totalizing” discourses as “reason, science and law”.12 It is here that Barthes is echoing a major theme in deconstruction, one that Derrida had already instigated in Of Grammatology in 1967. As Barthes describes it in the same essay, with the emphasis again on syntactic “structures”:

         In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’(like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.13

         For Barthes it seemed that a deterministic structuralism could itself become just another myth and he wished to question its restrictive assumptions, such as its reliance on binary oppositions. This theme extends into deconstruction as part of what we now refer to as post-structuralist thinking, which builds on, rather than dismisses, the earlier philosophy – contrary to what the misleading label suggests. Other fields in which structuralism has found favour are touched on in Chapter 5 of this book, including two of Lévi-Strauss’ “three mistresses” – Marxism and psychoanalysis.

sign must be part of a system, he considered all objects equally worthy of this kind of meticulous textual analysis. Barthes’ idea that we are always somehow locked within various networks of representation anticipated Derrida’s famous notion that there is “nothing outside the text”. Barthes provided a demonstration of the importance of these cultural “texts” – including works of architecture – and he tried to describe in his later writings the tools by which these texts could be “read”. As he described in his essay on cities, given as a lecture in 1967:

         Here we rediscover Victor Hugo’s old intuition: the city is a writing. He who moves about the city, e.g. the user of the city (what we all are), is a kind of reader who, following his obligations and his movements, appropriates fragments of the utterance in order to actualize them in secret.10

         This dynamic engagement with the city, which he compared with the reading of modernist literature, provided a mechanism by which Barthes claimed it was possible to counteract society’s myths. One of those he set out to attack was the literary opposition between reader and author, where the writer is the “creator” of meanings that the passive reader merely receives and deciphers. As the city is a collage of fragments, so too was writing in the modernist sense, and Barthes saw the enlightened reader as a dynamic agent in the interpretation process. In his famous essay “The Death of the Author”, written in 1968, he describes the “instability” of meaning that results:

         We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.11

reading with the alternative “systematic” (or categorical) approach.8 The gridded structure that Barthes makes use of here was often adopted by Lévi-Strauss, particularly for the complex analysis of mythemes in his later work on the science, or “logics”, of myth.

         Barthes, however, by contrast with Lévi-Strauss, used the term “myth” to refer to “ideology” which he saw as a way of distorting meaning in favour of a dominant political or economic power. The thinking behind this process of distortion will be dealt with more fully in Chapter 5, but for now it is important to recognize that Barthes also had another agenda – questioning the deterministic principle of Lévi-Strauss’ linguistic model. Barthes does this be returning to the nature of the sign and the arbitrary attachment between signifier and signified, thereby challenging the inference in Lévi-Strauss’ work that culture should be seen as a “static” system. If signs are agreed on by convention then Barthes claims they must be capable of change, and therefore to neglect the historical dimension of language leads to the confusion of nature and culture. As he wrote in his collection of essays, Mythologies(1957):

         The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and commonsense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history … I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.9

         Reflecting on matters as divergent as a wrestling match, Elle magazine, a plastics exhibition and the new Critröen DS, Barthes was constantly on the lookout for the political undercurrents in everyday experience. On the principle that every object is a sign and that every