repertories. This means not that the referent is non-existent, but that it is the object of
other sciences (physics, biology, etc.): semiotics can, and must, confine itself to the
universe of the cultural conventions governing communicative intercourse.
If for architecture, then, or for any other system of signs, we had to admit that the
plane of content involved something that did not belong to the semiotic universe, we
would be faced with a phenomenon confounding semiotics, or at any rate confounding all
the notions we have elaborated, here and elsewhere, on semiosis.^22
So it is not casually that we have been referring to an anthropological ‘system’; we
have been referring, that is, to facts that while belonging to the universe of the social
sciences may nevertheless be seen as already codified, and thus reduced to a cultural
system...
To put it differently, let us say that the architect has decided to restructure the urban
fabric of a city (or the ‘shape of landscape’ in a certain area) from the point of view of the
perceptibility of its ‘image.’^23 He might then base his operation upon rules of a code
concerned precisely with phenomena of image-recognition and orientation (a code that
could be elaborated on the basis of data from interviews and basic research on perception,
and perhaps even take into account exigencies of commerce or circulation, medical
findings on factors contributing to stress, etc.). But then the validity and significance of
the operation, based on that code, would depend upon confining oneself to that particular
point of view. As soon as it became necessary for the architect to relate his architecture to
some other system of social phenomena as well—the one dealt with in proxemics, let us
say—the code concerned with image-recognition and orientation would have to be
broken down and integrated with a code concerning proxemic phenomena; and since
there would no doubt be more than just these two external systems to relate to, it would
become necessary to find the relations between a number of different systems tracing
them all back to an underlying Ur-code common to all of them, on which elaboration of
the new architectural solutions would ultimately have to be based.^24
So the architect, in practice, is continually obliged to be something other than an
architect. Time and again he is forced to become something of a sociologist, a
psychologist, an anthropologist, a semiotician... And that he can rely in this to some
extent on teamwork—that is, on having experts in the various fields working with him—
does not change the situation very much, even if teamwork makes it seem less a matter of
guesswork. Forced to find forms that will give form to systems over which he has no
power, forced to articulate a language that has always to express something external to
it—we said there were possibilities of the poetic function and self-reflexiveness in
architecture, but the fact remains that because of its very nature (and even though it has
traditionally been understood as a matter of pure ‘arrangement’, regarding only its own
forms) these can never ‘take over’ in it, as they can in other types of discourse, such as in
poetry, painting or music—the architect finds himself obliged in his work to think in
terms of the totality, and this he must do no matter how much he may seem to have
become a technician, a specialist, someone intent on specific operations rather than
general questions.
CONCLUSION
Rethinking Architecture 190