HOW BUILT SPACES MEAN 349349CHAPTER 20
HOW BUILT SPACES MEAN
A Semiotics of Space
DVORA YANOW
I’m not sure what led me to focus on built spaces: No one in my family is either an architect or an
engineer, although I remember paying a lot of attention to wallpaper colors and designs as an
adolescent imagining redesigning my bedroom. But I have long been interested in settlement
patterns and their spatial organization—my first undergrad major was Middle Eastern archaeol-
ogy, and for the first course I wrote a paper on house-shaped burial urns and their relationship to
cemeteries, which were located outside of residential areas.
I began my professional life (post-B.A., pre–grad school) as a community organizer in an
Israeli “development town.” My first assignment was to “map” the town, not only in terms of the
traditional planning divisions of residential-commercial-industrial-governmental land use, but,
more importantly for our purposes, in terms of which “race-ethnic” groups and socioeconomic
classes lived where, where their respective synagogues and clubhouses and other gathering places
were, where the competing and complementary social service agencies were, who talked to whom,
and which groups and leaders were not on speaking terms. I did this by walking around—a lot.
To this day, I can usually get back to someplace I’ve been once, without consulting a map, as long
as I navigated there the first time—but I can’t always tell you the street names.
I ended up doing my doctorate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT,
located in the School of Architecture and Planning. I had earlier taken a seminar in national
urban development policy taught by Paul Ylvisaker (then dean of the Harvard Graduate School
of Education and creator of the Ford Foundation’s “grey areas” programs, which eventually
became the War on Poverty programs), after making two aborted attempts at master’s degrees in
urban studies in Israel. There, I had been captivated by land-use planning in Israel and its history
under successive Ottoman, British, and Jewish legal regimes. So somewhere in my makeup is an
orientation toward spaces.
I have learned that I have an acute sense of pattern, texture, and light—more those than
building materials. While in the Ph.D. program, I had a handful of close friends who attended to
architecture, landscape, and interior design; interactions with them enhanced my own latent
sensibilities, including my sense of color. I always go to sit in the back of a lecture hall, where I
can see what’s going on, and I commonly attend to who is sitting, or standing, where, whether I’m
teaching, running a meeting, or observing. I pay similar attention to how space is arranged in a
conference room when I’m presenting.