inserting himself into a given economy and technology and trying to embrace the logic
he finds there, even when he would like to contest it...EXTERNAL CODES
ARCHITECTURE AS BASED ON CODES EXTERNAL TO IT
To recapitulate:
1 we began with the premise that architecture would, to be able to communicate the
functions it permits and promotes, have to be based on codes;
2 we have seen that the codes that could properly be called architectural establish rather
limited operational possibilities, that they function not on the model of a language but
as a system of rhetorical formulas and already produced message-solutions;
3 resting on these codes, the architectural message becomes something of mass appeal,
something that may be taken for granted, something that one would expect;
4 yet it seems that architecture may also move in the direction of innovation and higher
information-content, going against existing rhetorical and ideological expectations;
5 it cannot be the case, however, that when architecture moves in this direction it departs
from given codes entirely, for without the basis of a code of some kind, there would be
no effective communication...
It goes without saying, for instance, that an urban designer could lay out a street on the
basis of the lexicon that embraces and defines the type ‘street’; he could even, with a
minor dialectic between redundancy and information, make it somewhat different from
previous ones while still operating within the traditional urbanistic system.
When, however, Le Corbusier proposes his elevated streets (closer to the type ‘bridge’
than to the type ‘street’), he moves outside the accepted typology, which has streets at
ground level or, if elevated, elevated in a different fashion and for different reasons—and
yet he does so with a certain assurance, believing that this new sign, along with the rest of
his proposed city, would be accepted and comprehended by the users. Now whether such
a belief is justified or not, it would have to be based on something like this: the architect
has preceded architectural design with an examination of certain new social exigencies,
certain ‘existential’ desiderata, certain tendencies in the development of the modern city
and life within it, and has traced out, so to speak, a semantic system of certain future
exigencies (developing from the current situation) on the basis of which new functions
and new architectural forms might come into being.
In other words, the architect would have identified:
1 a series of social exigencies, presumably as a system of some kind;
2 a system of functions that would satisfy the exigencies, and that would become sign
vehicles of those exigencies; and
3 a system of forms that would correspond to the functions, and that would become sign
vehicles of those functions.
From the point of view of common sense, this means that to produce the new architecture
Le Corbusier was obliged, before thinking like an architect, to think like a sociologist, an
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