6 Abbot Suger, Oeuvres complètes de Suger, Richard Albert Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Paris
- Abbot Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St Denis and its Art Treasures,
Erwin Panofsky ed. and trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946.
7 Umberto Eco, Il problemo estetico in San Tommaso, Turin: Edizioni di ‘Filosofia’, 1956.
Umberto Eco, ‘Sviluppo dell’ estetica medievale’, in Momenti e problemi di storia dell’
estetica, Milan: Marzorati, 1968.
8 See Giulio Carlo Argan, Progetto e destino, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1965. Giulio Carlo Argan et
al., ‘Designe mass media’, in Op. Cit. (Selezione della critica d’arte contemporanea), 2,
particularly the title essay, where the notion of works that remain ‘open’ (the ‘opera aperta’)
is applied to architectural design. One way of understanding the ‘openness’ of architectural
and urbanistic objects is suggested in Roland Barthes’ ‘Semiology and the Urban’ [see pp.
166–72, this volume]. Agreeing with certain views held by Jacques Lacan—discussed in
Eco, 1968 op. cit., ch. D. 5, ‘La struttura e l’assenza’—Barthes believes that with regard to
the city the question of meaning becomes less important than a detailed analysis of
abstracted ‘signifiers’. Thus, ‘in this attempt at a semantic approach to the city we should try
to understand the play of signs, to understand that any city is a structure, but that we must
never try and we must never want to fill in this structure’, for ‘semiology at present never
posits the existence of a final signified’, and ‘any cultural (or, for that matter, psychological)
complex confronts us with infinite metaphorical chains, in which the signified is always
deferred or becomes itself a signifier’. Now it is true that any city confronts us with
phenomena of enrichment (and substitution) of meaning, but the semantic value of the city
emerges not only when one sees it as a structure that generates meaning: it emerges also
when, in experiencing it, one is filling it with concrete significations. Indeed, to oppose to
the concrete process of signification—in the light of which the city is designed—the notion
of a free play of pure sign-vehicles might be to empty the activity of architecture of much of
its creative thrust. For if this notion were carried to an extreme, and the significative power
of a city considered really infinite—as infinite as the significative power of verbal languages,
which in spite of the fact that man has little say with regard to their constitution and laws still
permit him to be adequately ‘spoken’—then there would no longer seem to be any point in
designing a ‘new’ city: in any existing city there would already be the elements of an infinite
number of possible combinations, permitting every type of life within that form. In reality,
the problem of architecture is that of defining the limit beyond which an existing form no
longer allows the type of life one has in mind, the limit beyond which the architectural sign-
vehicles that pass before one appear no longer as a matrix of freedom but as the very image
of a domination, of an ideology that imposes, through the rhetorical forms it has generated,
various modes of enslavement.
9 Eco, 1968, op. cit., ch. B.1–3, ‘I codici visivi’, ‘Il mito della doppia articolazione’ and
‘Articolazioni dei codici visivi’.
10 Through the use of the wrong code, then, a plan might be read as a section of vice versa; see
the amusing situation described in Giovanni Klaus Koenig Analisi del linguaggio
architettonico, Florence: Fiorentina, 1964, ch. 8, and L’invecchiamento dell’ architettura
moderna ed altre dodici note, 2nd edn, Florence: Fiorentina, 1967.
11 Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture, Joseph Barty, ed., Milton
Gendel (trans.), New York: Horizon Press, 1957, and Architettura in nuce, Venice and
Rome: Instituto per la Collaborazione Cutturale, 1960.
12 The term choreme is derived from chora (‘space, place’). For a theoretical consideration of
the stoicheia as primary elements of the spatial arts, including architecture, see the remarks
by Mondrian discussed in Fusco 1964, op. cit., pp. 143–5, and L’architettura come mass-
medium: Note per una semiologia architettonica, Bari: Dedalo Libri, 1967.
13 See Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
Rethinking Architecture 192