STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is an inter-disciplinary movement that has sought to transcend the
limitations of earlier ad hoc interpretation by grounding analysis in universal systems. It
is, as Foucault observed, an ‘attempt to establish between elements that may have been
split over the course of time, a set of relationships that juxtapose them, set them in
opposition or link them together, so as to create a sort of shape’.^1
Structuralism was highly popular in the 1960s and early 1970s, but owes its origins to
the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Saussure drew the
distinction between langue and parole, that is between language as a system and
individual utterances. Saussure’s concern was to understand the underlying system. Here
it should be recognized that langue need not refer merely to literary systems. All cultural
forms could be analysed by analogy with language, and could therefore be ‘read’.
Structuralism proved highly popular in a range of disciplines, not least anthropology,
where Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas and others based their research on patterns of
kinship and so on.
Saussure was concerned with words as ‘signs’. The sign is made up of the ‘signifier’
and the ‘signified’. The ‘signifier’ refers to the form, whereas the ‘signified’ refers to the
content or meaning. For Saussure, the relationship between the ‘signified’ and ‘signifier’
is arbitrary. There is no fixed relationship, for example, between the word ‘cat’ and the
animal to which that word refers within the English language. In other languages
different words would be used. Furthermore, the ‘signified’ is defined by what it is not.
Thus a cat is a cat, because it is not a dog. The principle of opposition is fundamental to
structuralism, and the world can be seen to be structured according to a system of paired
opposites, of ‘binary oppositions’, such as theory/practice, inside/ outside, male/female,
etc.
Structuralism has obvious applications to the world of architecture through the
discipline of semiology—the science of signs. Semiology offers a mechanism by which
the built environment can be ‘read’ and ‘decoded’. The work of Umberto Eco and Roland
Barthes, no less than that of A.J.Greimas, has exposed the limitations of previous
attempts by architects to ‘read’ the city, the best example of which has been provided by
Kevin Lynch, who focused on the legibility of architectural features, rather than any
semantic understanding of them. Later work by Diana Agrest, Mario Gandelsonas and
Françoise Choay in particular has attempted to engage more directly with the field of
semiology.
Structuralism as a system began to fall out of favour as its limitations became exposed.
Poststructuralist theorists, for example, argued that, through its tendency to universalizet,
structuralism represented too rigid a system that could not account for the specificity of
time or place. The exhaustion of the structuralist moment is evident in the article of
Barthes, ‘Semiology and the Urban’, included here. Here Barthes stresses how readings
are always only provisional and shift with time. Structuralism has also been attacked by
ontological thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, who argued that the world should be
perceived not as ‘text’, but as ‘texture’, and that to understand the environment as a
codified system of meaning is to privilege the eye over the other senses. The message of
structuralism, however, has yet to be fully absorbed by the architectural community.
Traditionally architects—often in contrast to the general public—have privileged
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