HOW BUILT SPACES MEAN 361expansive boulevards without encroaching buildings are widely perceived as displaying status
and power. Mosse’s (1975) analysis of the architecture of Third Reich buildings or Lasswell’s
(1979) study of U.S. governmental buildings are two examples of such analyses.
Decor
Lastly, built spaces may be analyzed with respect to their “decor” or furnishings, using that term
broadly to encompass not only desks, chairs, and other furniture proper, but also displays of
artwork, family photographs, jokes and cartoons, signage, and the like. Even uniforms could be
considered an element of decor (such as at Disneyland; Van Maanen 1991): One might argue that
the general dress code, including hairstyles and facial hair, rather than being an aspect of per-
sonal, individual choice, was externalized, objectified, and collectivized as part of the organiza-
tional decor communicating organizational meanings (see, e.g., M.G. Pratt and Rafaeli 1997;
Rafaeli et al. 1997).
As with other analytic categories, these four elements are usefully distinct for analytic purposes:
Each highlights different features of built spaces used in the communication of meaning, and the
analytic separation imparts some conceptual and procedural systematicity to such studies. In practice
they may overlap, as when analysis of the meanings communicated to and read by various publics
explores the interplay of design vocabularies, gestures, and proxemics. In the community center
case, analysis of the meanings conveyed through design gestures, proxemics, and decor sup-
ported the assessment of the meanings communicated through materials and other design vo-
cabularies, as well as, in the larger study, through organizational and societal acts and language.
In short, there is an “intertextuality” operative in spatial meanings: Much as words get their mean-
ings from other words, sentences from other sentences, passages and entire texts from other pas-
sages and texts, spatial elements develop meaning from other spatial elements.^24
MAKING SENSE OF SPACES
Settings for human action are, then, neither empty nor neutral. Through various ways, they com-
municate meaning(s). Moreover, although built spaces act on people in shaping behavior and
action, they are not necessarily determinative of them: According agency to their users means
recognizing that users can “act back” on others’ designs. Attention to all of this is part of the
researcher’s sense making in spatial analysis; and the sense making has to be sensitive to the
situational, contextual, and cultural specificity of meaning.
Although the distinction between methods of accessing data and methods for analyzing them
is analytically neat, in practice, analytic categories inform the ways one looks at built spaces,
including the kinds of data one looks for. In accessing, generating, and analyzing data, a context-
specific comparative analysis of similarity and difference is central. What made the centers’ de-
sign distinctiveness stand out was the sharp contrast of their design vocabulary with other buildings
serving similar purposes, other public buildings, and local residences. The clearest answer to the
question “How do built spaces mean?” may be: through relationships of similarity and difference
to their surroundings. These comparative elements become occasions for inquiry; the central
analytic question is, “The same or different with respect to what?” The appropriate analytic com-
parison may not become evident until one has dwelled with one’s data for some time—in the
community center case, drawing on metaphor analysis in combination with space analysis and