The Words Between the Spaces

Buildings and Language

Deborah Cameron, Thomas A. Markus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134763450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Using language - speaking and understanding it - is a defining ability of human beings, woven into all human activity. It is therefore inevitable that it should be deeply implicated in the design, production and use of buildings. Building legislation, design guides, competition and other briefs, architectural criticism, teaching and scholarly material, and the media all produce their characteristic texts.
The authors use texts about such projects as Berlin's new Reichstag, Scotland's new Parliament, and the Auschwitz concentration camp museum to clarify the interaction between texts, design, critical debate and response.

Chapter 1:

Why Language Matters

Language is a neglected subject in discussions of architecture, which is conventionally regarded as a visual rather than verbal activity. ‘Architects’, observes theorist and practitioner Ellen Dunham-Jones, ‘tend to refer to themselves as visual people’ (1997:16). This professional self-image is faithfully reflected in popular representations of architects, which typically show them poring over plans, making drawings and models, or manipulating images on computer screens. But in reality, architects’ work is both visual and verbal: language plays some part in almost everything they do.

This point is underlined by Dana Cuff’s detailed study of architectural practice (Cuff 1992), for which she observed and interviewed numerous professionals and students. In training, she notes, students are encouraged to spend long hours in the studio, where they do not only draw, but also talk with instructors and each other; at regular intervals they face ‘crits’ delivered by architect-teachers in the medium of spoken language. In practice, the talking continues. Cuff cites findings showing that the average architect has only about half an hour a day when his or her work is uninterrupted by some kind of interaction (the architects she spoke to herself thought this an overestimate). Even the most ‘creative’, schematic design phase of a project rarely matches the idealized picture in which a solitary designer spends long silent hours at the drawing board. Making a building is a collaborative process which involves continual dialogue—with clients, with colleagues, with other professionals like engineers and landscapers, with building contractors. Cuff aptly describes what goes on in these interactions as ‘constructing a word-and-sketch building’ (1992:97). She also makes clear how much written language is produced in any architectural project. Meetings are recorded in memos and minutes; letters may have to be written to various authorities and community representatives; agreements and contracts must be drawn up. Other texts to which architects may refer include building and planning regulations, briefs or building programmes, design guides and handbooks. Many of these texts are linguistically dense and complex, with a high proportion of verbal to visual material.

The observation that language pervades architectural practice is in one sense very obvious and banal. Everyone knows that architects must talk to clients, hold meetings with contractors, write memos, read planning regulations, and so on. But although architects may spend a lot of time actually engaged in these activities, few would spend much time reflecting on them. Whereas architects are expected to reflect on issues of design in a way that might be called ‘abstract’, ‘theoretical’ or ‘analytic’, they are not expected or encouraged to reflect in the same way on issues of language and its relationship to design. Language may be all around them, but it remains very much a background phenomenon, a part of what the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel called the ‘seen but unnoticed’ of everyday life.

In this book, our aim is to place language in the foreground: to ‘notice’ as well as ‘see’ what role it plays in the making of buildings. We argue that the language used to speak and write about the built environment plays a significant role in shaping that environment, and our responses to it. We try to show that reflecting systematically on language can yield insight into the buildings we have now, and the ones we may create in future.

The significance we claim for language in relation to the built environment is a function of its significance in human affairs more generally. Natural languages ¹ are the richest symbolic systems to which human beings have access, and the main purposes for which we use language are fundamental to the kind of creatures we are. One of those purposes is, of course, communication with other people. Humans are not telepathic, and it is mainly by way of language that we are able to get more than a rudimentary sense of what is going on in another person’s mind. But we also use language as an aid to our own thinking, whether or not we communicate our thoughts to others.²

Both these functions of language are relevant to the activities of designing and making buildings. True, language is not the only symbolic system involved: architects need to make mathematical calculations, and to represent form and space in drawings and models of various kinds. But they also need to use language to conceptualize what they are doing and convey it to others (given that making a building is typically a collaborative process). We say, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, but people rarely communicate, or think, in pictures alone; if called upon to elaborate the meaning of a picture or a mathematical formula—or, as we shall see, a building—they will use language.

Architects, like many other professionals, make use of linguistic resources developed over time for the purpose of reflecting, in speech and writing, on the phenomena which are their distinctive concerns. Architecture has its own linguistic register (the term used by linguists to denote a set of conventions for language-use tailored to some particular situation or institution—other examples include ‘legalese’ and ‘journalese’). One obvious feature of the register of architecture is the extensive technical vocabulary architects must learn in the course of their training. Learning what words to use is every bit as necessary as learning how to draw plans, calculate loads or use computer software for modelling; for the technical vocabulary of architecture is not merely a convenient shorthand, it is a system for thinking with. It provides the classificatory schemes which enable architects to ‘see’ as they do—and, importantly, as other architects do. Professional registers are often criticized as mystifying jargon whose main purpose is to exclude outsiders; but while that may indeed be one of their functions, they also allow a professional community’s accumulated knowledge to be codified and transmitted in precise detail. In architecture as in medicine or law, ‘learning the language’ is inseparable from mastering the craft as a whole.

But when we claim that language plays a significant part in the theory and practice of architecture, we are not thinking only about technical terminology. Architects do not interact only with other architects, nor are the buildings they create expressions of some unique inner vision which need not be discussed with anyone else. As most introductory texts point out early on, architecture is a ‘social art’. Any practice which is social must have a verbal component too, given that language provides humans with their primary means of social interaction.

Language-using is itself a form of social practice: as such it is implicated in the reproduction of the beliefs, relationships, attitudes and values that exist in a given society—and also, of course, in attempts to challenge the status quo. In other words, language is not simply a neutral vehicle for conveying factual information. All natural languages provide their users with multiple ways to represent the same object, state, event or process; the expression of differing perspectives on reality, just as much as the communication of facts about the world, appears to be among the purposes that language evolved to serve. The linguistic choices speakers and writers make can cue hearers and readers to make certain inferences about the meaning of an utterance or text, and these go beyond its purely informational content. Often, as we will see later on, they are ideologically significant, implicitly presupposing certain values and social relations. While they remain implicit and unnoticed, these presuppositions are difficult to resist or challenge. Noticed and made explicit, however, they can become objects of critical scrutiny.

Encouraging readers to take a critical position, both on language and on buildings, is an important goal of this book. Following Markus (1993), we regard buildings as primarily social objects (i.e. not just aesthetic or technical ones) which can and should be subjected to social critique. There are a number of issues this kind of critique may focus on. For instance, it may focus on the way a building’s design reproduces particular kinds of social and power relations among its various categories of users (e.g. managers and workers in a factory building or staff and visitors in a museum). It may focus on the kinds of activities and social encounters a building design facilitates, and what other activities and encounters it makes difficult or impossible. It may also focus on the capacity of a design to endorse—overtly or covertly—certain social values (e.g. ‘privacy’ or ‘community’) at the expense of alternatives.

Various tools have been developed for thinking critically about the social workings of buildings, many involving direct analysis of their form and the way they organize space. We want to suggest that the analysis of language is also a useful tool for understanding buildings as social objects. Texts ³ about buildings often turn out to be a source for the social, political and ideological values which other critical techniques reveal by analysing buildings directly. In this book, we will treat the analysis of buildings and the analysis of texts about them as complementary approaches to the same project. By focusing on the texts, we hope to alert readers to their non-obvious or ‘hidden’ meanings. Where appropriate, we will also show how these meanings emerge in actual buildings.

Because we want readers to be able to replicate the kinds of analyses we offer, we are not going to use a highly formal and technical linguistic apparatus. But some linguistic apparatus will be necessary, because the linguistic patterns which produce certain effects are not necessarily evident from a surface reading. Identifying them requires a deeper analysis, one which is attentive to linguistic form as well as content, and to regularities which manifest themselves across whole texts and sets of texts. At this point, therefore, we must spend a little time clarifying, for the benefit of readers with no specialist knowledge about language and linguistics, what we do and do not mean by those terms.

‘Language’ and ‘Linguistics’: Beyond Structuralism and Semiotics

At the beginning of this chapter we said that language is a neglected topic in discussions of architecture. Some readers may have found this claim puzzling, for it is certainly not true that the subject of language goes unmentioned in architectural writing. On the contrary, it has long been commonplace for writers and theorists to make comparisons and analogies between architecture and language. In his book Words and Buildings, the architectural historian Adrian Forty devotes a whole chapter to language metaphors in architectural discourse, which he subcategorizes under six main headings (Forty 2000, Ch. 4). ⁴ He mentions, for example, the idea that works of architecture are ‘texts’ that can be ‘read’, tracing it back as far as Quatremère de Quincy’s 1803 essay De l’Architecture Egyptienne. This analogy, essentially between buildings and literary works, has been reinf lected over time, but is still a familiar one. Another productive metaphor compares architecture to grammar rather than literature, suggesting that buildings, like sentences, are constructed by combining a set of formal elements according to a set of formal rules. Forty traces this idea back to 1802, when Durand published his influential teaching text, Précis des Leçons d’Architecture; he comments that the analogy had obvious attractions for educators charged with producing competent professionals in a relatively short time. However, the ‘grammar’ analogy has also attracted historians and critics. It is developed systematically in such works as John Summerson’s The Classical Language of Architecture (1963), and Charles Jencks’s The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977), which includes chapters actually entitled ‘Words’, ‘Syntax’ and ‘Semantics’. ⁵

The ‘architecture as grammar’ metaphor prefigures, and in more recent works such as Jencks’s, overlaps with, what is probably the most important linguistic analogy of recent times: the application to architecture of ideas developed in the early twentieth century by Ferdinand de Saussure in Europe and C.S. Peirce in the USA under the headings of ‘structuralism’ (Saussure) and ‘semiotics’ (Peirce). ⁶ As Adrian Forty notes (2000:80), ‘Strictly speaking, semiotics and structuralism propose language not as a metaphor for architecture, but rather that architecture is a language.’ We want to make clear straight away that this is not our own position. But we are aware that the structuralist equation of architecture and language has been influential (as well as controversial): we recognize that many readers will find it ‘natural’ to approach a book which announces its subject as ‘buildings and language’ with the assumptions of structuralism in mind. To make our position clear, therefore, we must explain how and why it differs from the structuralist position. That entails giving some preliminary attention to what structuralism says about language, and how the principles of structuralist linguistics have been applied to the domain of architecture.

The pioneer of structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, was a Swiss linguist who had been trained in the comparative-historical methods of nineteenth century philology; his major achievement, however, was to develop an alternative to those methods, which subsequently became the basis for the modern discipline of linguistics. The great work which bears his name, the Cours de Linguistique Générale (Course in General Linguistics), was not written by Saussure, but reconstructed from his students’ lecture notes after his death and published in 1916. The Cours elaborated a method for studying the structure of a single language at a single historical moment: ‘synchronic’ analysis, as opposed to the ‘diachronic’ (historical) approach that had previously prevailed. He proposed that a language could be regarded as a self-contained system of signs (it is easiest, though something of an oversimplification, to equate ‘signs’ with ‘words’ for the purpose of following Saussure’s reasoning here). Signs are entities composed of a signifier (a form, like the sound sequence /kæt/, ‘cat’) and a signified (a concept, e.g. ‘feline domestic animal’). The link between signifier and signified is not natural but arbitrary (in French the same signified is paired with the signifier chat, in Hungarian with macska, and so on). Arbitrary signs work not by corresponding directly to things in the world, but by contrasting with one another. A sign-system in other words is a system of differences, in which the individual signs acquire meaning by contrast with other signs.

The most immediately graspable illustrations of this principle are not, ironically, linguistic at all. In introductory textbooks a popular example is the sign system used for traffic signals: red means stop, green means go. Although they have become so familiar that they may seem ‘natural’, the meanings of red and green in this system are in fact arbitrary—designers could have reversed them, or used blue and yellow instead. ⁷ The point is not their substance but the difference between them. Another simple example of a sign system might be the coins in a system of currency. On its own, a nickel (say) is entirely meaningless and valueless; its value can only be determined with reference to the whole system and by contrast with other terms in that system (a nickel is worth half as much as a dime, a fifth as much as a quarter, a twentieth of a dollar…). These contrasts only operate within the relevant ‘code’, in this case the US monetary system.

Saussure understood that the principles he was outlining applied to systems other than languages, and he suggested that linguistics would in time come to be regarded as part of a more general ‘science of signs’ which he called ‘semiology’, though nowadays a more common term in English is ‘semiotics’, which was the label used by Peirce. This insight was taken up by theorists in various disciplines outside linguistics, who pointed out that many cultural phenomena can plausibly be regarded as sign systems, in which formal contrasts are productive of meaning. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss applied the structuralist approach to kinship systems; the critic Roland Barthes applied it to literary texts and to the ‘fashion system’. And it has also been applied to architecture and its products (buildings, cities).

As a number of writers have pointed out, architecture is a challenging case for this approach, because, in the words of the semiotician Umberto Eco (1986:57): ‘apparently most architectural objects do not communicate (and are not designed to communicate), but function’. It might seem then that the meaning these objects convey is confined to a rather simple denotation of their primary use: a roof denotes covering, a stair the possibility of movement up and down. However, Eco argues that architectural objects also have, in common with other primarily functional human artefacts (e.g. clothing, whose primary function is to cover the body), a series of secondary ‘connotative’ or symbolic meanings. He gives the example of Gothic architectural styles connoting ‘religiosity’, a meaning which depends on associations between the vertical emphasis of a Gothic structure and the elevation of the soul towards God, and between strong contrasts of light/shadow and mysticism. These associations are part of a particular ‘language’ or code, which is not the only one in existence: Eco suggests that the Greek temple, though formally quite distinct from a Gothic cathedral, was intended to communicate quite similar religious meanings. The temple, however, is built in a different idiom from the cathedral: the meaning ‘religiosity’ is tied to different formal signifiers in the Gothic and Classical architectural codes, just as the meaning ‘feline domestic animal’ is tied to different sequences of sounds in the English, French and Hungarian languages.

Semiotic and structuralist approaches, Adrian Forty suggests (2000:81), are ‘concerned not with what things mean, but with how meaning occurs’. One basic principle, as noted already, is that meaning works by contrast: the meaning of form A is grasped through its difference from form B in a given communication system, as with the contrast between red and green lights in the traffic signal system. Eco alludes to two significant formal contrasts in relation to the Gothic cathedral: vertical versus horizontal and light versus dark. Another scholar who has used structuralist techniques, Donald Preziosi (1979), systematically analyses plans of Minoan palaces in order to identify the formal properties of what he calls their ‘architectonic code’: the basic elements that are found in these buildings, and the rules that govern the combination of those elements into larger spatial structures. At the level of formal analysis, that is to say identifying the formal contrasts which make up the code, it appears that the structuralist approach is readily applicable to architectural phenomena. But complications arise with the other element of the Saussurean sign, its signified, or in plainer language, the meaning which is conveyed by the use of form A as opposed to form B. At this point we confront the issue of whether what Preziosi calls the ‘architectonic code’ is capable of communicating meaning independently, in its own right and on its own terms. Natural languages like English and Hungarian clearly do function in this way: if someone speaks Hungarian, utterances delivered in that language do not have to be translated into any other language before they can be understood. But can the same be said about architecture? Do buildings communicate directly, in their own semiotic codes?

In his discussion of the Gothic cathedral, Umberto Ec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Why Language Matters
• 2. Buildings and their Texts: A Brief History
• 3. Classification
• 4. Power
• 5. Value
• 6. Heritage
• 7. Images
• Afterword: Some Applications
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index