Most misunderstandings come from the differences between people, from the different meanings they assign to words, phrases, and actions. We do not exactly know what a person meant if we don’t know the context of the dialogue or the person’s way of thinking. The same is true for architecture, for its theory and its products, physical and drawn buildings and spaces. If we don’t know the environment and the context of a building, both in time and space, we don’t understand the meaning behind it, and we observe it just as an object where some functions happen. This is what modernism imposed on us: buildings without context. Over time, it became easier to see that this universality of buildings created an alienation from the site.
If meaning depends on context, and every context is different, how do we understand each other at all?
In the 1960s, the idea of architecture as a sign system resurfaced. Architects and architectural theoreticians looked at how meaning is conveyed through other sign systems, like language. Three theories from this period, structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction, each answered this question differently, and each answer made it harder.
Structuralism sees meaning inside the relations within a system. Meaning is social: it lives in shared codes, so it is always available to people, whoever the individual reader is. Even the modernist object building, a structuralist would argue, still means through its context, by differing from it. Here, understanding seems guaranteed: as long as we share the codes, we share the meaning.
Poststructuralism argues that meaning depends more on the reader than on the structure. The links inside the structure become loose, and the meaning changes with each reader-inhabitant. There is no fixed meaning. Understanding begins to look accidental.
Deconstruction, a part of poststructuralism, goes further. It argues that the foundations a system rests on were constructed, and that they depend on what they exclude. What is excluded actually defines what is included. If even the foundations are unstable, understanding seems almost impossible.
Yet we still understand each other most of the time. I started by saying that misunderstandings come from different meanings. But perhaps understanding never depended on shared meanings in the first place. To reference Chomsky, our language is a generative system: a finite set of rules produces endless possible sentences. As long as our grammar stays the same, we connect and somehow understand each other.
Architecture is different. Modernism was an attempt at a universal grammar, but its method was to design the same object for every place. It was the wrong method for a good intention. A grammar works the other way: because of its rules, it produces different sentences for different situations, and the sentences stay local. A generative system for architecture could be universal without being placeless.
I would attempt to define this grammar as follows: one that establishes no hierarchy of meaning (and excludes no one), that makes buildings and design feel as though they belong to everyone, that remains firmly rooted in its specific place and history, and that does not carry entirely disparate meanings for those who design the space and those who live within it.
But if understanding never depended on shared meanings, can a grammar make designers and inhabitants share them?
In an earlier entry, I looked for this shared meaning in the dialogue between the architect and the inhabitant: entry 25. – speaking the city. Now I wonder whether a system could carry it instead.
