One might at this point be left with the idea that having the role of supplying ‘words’ to
signify ‘things’ lying outside its province, architecture is powerless to proceed without a
prior determination of exactly what those ‘things’ are (or are going to be).
Or one might have come to a somewhat different conclusion: that even though the
systems of functions and values it is to convey are external to it, architecture has the
power, through the operation of its system of stimulative sign-vehicles, to determine what
those functions and values are going to be—restricting men to a particular way of life
dictating laws to events.
These both go too far, and they go along with two unfortunate ideas of the role of the
architect. According to the first, he has only to find the proper forms to answer to what he
can take as ‘programmatic’ givens; here he may accept on faith certain sociological and
ideological determinations made by others, which may not be well founded. According to
the second, the architect (and we know what currency this delusion has enjoyed) becomes
a demiurge, an artificer of history.
This alternative to these varieties of overconfidence has already been suggested: the
architect should be designing for variable primary functions and open secondary
functions.
NOTES
1 Christian Norberg-Schutz, Intentions in Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.
2 Roland Barthes, Elements of Sociology, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (trans.), New York:
Hill & Wang, 1968.
3 In this case it is the aesthetic function that is predominant in the architectural message, what
Roman Jakobson, speaking of acts of verbal communication, has termed the poetic function
(Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in Thomas A.Sebeok, ed., Style in Language,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966, pp. 350–77.). But architectural messages display also
the five other communicative functions listed by Jakobson: architecture involves
communication that is connative (or imperative, making one inhabit it in a certain way),
emotive (think of the calm of a Greek temple, the turbulence of a baroque church), phatic
(obviously in the many attention-getting devices of architecture—the phatic function might
be found to be predominant, then, in such messages as obelisks, arches, and tympana—but
also at the level of urban fabric, where ‘channels’ are opened and established for
architectural messages, as in a piazza’s ensuring continued attention to the facades of the
buildings that surround it), metalingual (where, for one example, to relieve any confusion
about the code for interpreting the message architecture assumes a self-explaining, or
‘glossing’, function—think of the benches built into certain otherwise inhospitable American
plazas), and of course referential (what we will be concerned with here for the most part—
that is, the denotations and connotations of architectural objects).
4 We should note that the symbolic value of forms was not entirely ignored by the theorists of
functionalism: see Louis Sullivan, ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Reconsidered’, in
Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, New York: Wittenborn, Shultz 1947, pp. 202–13;
and Renato de Fusco (L’idea di architettura, Milan, Communità, 1964) shows that their
symbolic value was important not only to Sullivan but also to Le Corbusier. On the
connotative value of forms at the level of urban design—turning to the relational forms in
the fabric of large urban areas—see Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1960: esp. p. 91: cities are to be given forms that can stand as symbols for urban
life.
5 For a bibliography on this question see Paul Frankl, The Gothic Literary Sources and
Interpretation Through Eight Centuries, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960.Umberto Eco 191