Chapter I

Introduction

Humans live in an extraordinarily complex world of made objects. In any given environmental setting, the array of copresent objects exist as components in a variety of interrelated sign systems, each system addressed to partly unique and partly redundant functions. It is characteristically the case that the same object formation will have variant meanings and behavioral associations in different contexts, or even in the same context at different times. Moreover, both object formations and their conceptual associations change over time, often in different ways.

It is a major problem of human knowledge to understand how such complexities arise and how it is we come to scaffold our individual and collaborative lives through the appropriation of and interaction with this omnipresent world of objects.

Not only do we use and make objects; objects in turn have, in a sense, made us what we have become as a species. It seems evident that we have evolved ourselves in large part to interact with this artifactual^a world of sign-formations—in other words, that human evolution is in part the product of our long interaction with systems of built forms.¹

Like verbal language, the built environment^a—what will be called here the architectonic^a code —is a panhuman phenomenon. No human society exists without artifactually reordering its environment—without employing environmental formations (whether made or appropriated) as sign-tokens in a system of visual communication, representation and expression.

Every human society communicates architectonically. The component units of an architectonic code^a or system^a consist of contrastively-opposed formations in media addressed to visual perception. Distinctions or disjunctions in material formation are intended to cue culture-specific differences in meaning in a manner precisely analogous to other semiotic systems such as verbal language or bodily gesturing.

In the broadest sense, communication consists of the transmission of information regarding the perception of similarities and differences. The system of the built environment, like any semiotic^a code, is a complexly-ordered device for the cueing of such perceptions.

This does not mean that every single disjunction in material formation perceptually palpable to a given observer or analyst will necessarily be directly correlated to differences in meaning. In other words, every architectonic code specifies which disjunctions in formation are to be correlated to differences in meaning. Not everything in a built environment is meaningful in quite the same way. Some differences may be trivial, irrelevant, and normally overlooked by the code, while others, seemingly minute to an outsider, will often be profoundly significant to the native user of a given built environment. A difference between crimson and scarlet in the color of houses in one code may be seen as contextual variants^a of a single color-scheme, while in another code the color-contrast is strongly linked to differences in social status, and so forth.

An architectonic system, as a system of signs, is hierarchically organized. A given architectonic formation such as a building is composed of material units of different sizes, shapes, weights, etc.; each component entity serves a given systemic function in the organization of the whole. But paradoxically, an architectonic code is not organized like the material-aggregation of a house, in an ‘atomistic’ fashion. Rather, like any semiotic system, the system of the built environment is best seen, to paraphrase Heisenberg,² as

The architectonic code is essentially a system of relationships in which significative entities are defined in terms of their relative positions in a multidimensional network of relationships. For this reason, two apparently identical formations in different systems are only superficially ‘homonymous,’ since each belongs to, and is defined principally in relation to, the overall system of signs of which each is an exemplar or material realization.

A simple analogy may be made with colors. The perception of a given color is in large part a function of the environment in which that color is embedded; hence a given grey seen against a darker ground will appear lighter than the same grey seen against a lighter ground. In a similar fashion, the object-formations in a given environmental setting (a given architectonic corpus of forms) will acquire different significations depending upon its systemic^a relationships with other copresent formations. Any architectonic object is perceptually and conceptually different in contrastive contexts. Two ‘identical’ Hilton hotels in Prague and Casablanca are not the same architonic formations.

In the broadest sense, the task of architectonic analysis involves the elaboration of models to account for the invariance and variability of object formations in given built environments. The architectonic code is built upon a principle of relational invariance^a, as is any semiotic system. Its ‘vocabulary’ is spatial and geometric in nature, and architectonic formations are organized according to the parameters of topological, perspectival and euclidean metric formative features.

As we shall see below, this does not mean that what distinguishes an architectonic system from other systems are characteristically ‘regularized’ geometric constructs: the gardens of Versailles are not any more ‘architectonic’ than the ephemeral encampments in an appropriated environment by !Kung Bushmen or Australian aborigines who frequently do not ‘build’in our sense of the term.³

Architectonic analysis begins by posing simple questions such as “what is similar and what is different about two formations,” and goes on to establish the many complex relationships among objects in an environmental array, so as to formulate generic models which account for formative variation and invariance.

But the object of architectonic study is not only formative variation per se, but rather the relationships between formal variation and variations in meaning and reference. In other words, the objects of analytic study are sign-formations or significative unities and their cross-indexed networks of relationships. An architectonic sign^a is a combination of a formation (that-which-signifies) and a meaning (that-which-is-signified). A system or code of sign-formations is an ordered body of rules which specify the conventional associations between formations and meanings, and between the signs (as combinations of formations and meanings) themselves and other signs, of the same or of different types.

But ‘meaning’ is not, strictly speaking, a thing in itself; it comprises specified sets of relationships among formations both within a system and external to that system. Furthermore, this is not to be confused with ‘external reference’ in the sense of association to something non-semiotic or existing with some ontological reality outside of human perception and cognition. In this respect we shall follow Peirce’s formulation of meaning as the translation of one sign into another,⁴ whether the latter is a component member of the same sign-system^a or another sign-system. A culture, in the broadest sense, consists of time-and-space-specific sets of rules of correlation among sign-systems.⁵

As a system of signs, a built environment does not exist in a vacuum but is co-occurrent with ensembles of other sign systems in different media. Each sign system offers certain advantages over others under the varying conditions of daily life. A built environment does certain things which verbal language does not do, or only does by weak approximation and circumlocution—and vice-versa.

Sign systems often provide partially-redundant ways of doing functionally-equivalent things. I can maintain my privacy, for example, by building a wall around myself, putting up a ‘no trespassing’ sign, wearing a loincloth, or gesturing dramatically whenever a stranger comes within six meters of my person.

But normally, humans will do several things at the same time, and will orchestrate anything at their disposal to communicate information. Architectonic formations, in daily life, are embedded in large-scale communicative events^a, which incorporate a great many different kinds of signs in various media, simultaneously and in tandem, in syntagmatic and paradigmatic association.⁶

What distinguishes us as a species is not the possession and use of any one powerful method of communication—verbal language, artifacts, etc.,—but rather a tendency to employ anything and everything in a communicative fashion, to use any available resources in a significant manner, to transform anything into a sign. While we are far from being able to reconstruct in an unambiguous manner the picture of human origins, it does seem clear that the origins of language, somatic gesturing, and environmental structuring are inextricably interwoven and mutually implicative.⁷ Each of the sign systems evolved by humans is (relatively) coherent in its own right, but at the same time each is designed to operate in concert with others, and each incorporates elements which are functionally cross-indexed with signs in other systems.⁸ In other words, each sign system incorporates sign-formations which are semantically ambiguous without reference to signs in other systems.

The architectonic code is one of several fundamental panhuman sign-systems which in concert provide individuals and groups with a multimodal^a and multiply-stereoscopic template for the creation of humanly-meaningful realities. No one sign-system creates the human world in itself. No single perspective is complete in itself. Rather, each contributes its partly-unique perspective on the totalities of sociocultural experience.

In the writer’s view it is fair to say that our understanding of the built environment is in certain respects still in its adolescence. We know both so little and so much about this extraordinary human phenomenon, rivalled in its encyclopedic power only by verbal language itself.

In effect, our understanding of the built environment still has the form of the component images of a teleidoscope which focuses upon an object and refracts its image into random sections, each section coveted by domains of several different analytic disciplines. A science of ‘architectonics’^a exists only as the sum of phantom images in the work of a great many students of different aspects of the built environment.

The emergence of an architectonics as an integrated framework for the study of built environments has become an inevitable and necessary result of the ongoing overlapping and convergence of many different perspectives on environmental structuration. But it cannot come about as a simple sum of the aforementioned phantom images, for these do not add up to a coherent domain, and many of their perspectives, methods and conclusions are mutually contradictory. ‘Architectonics’ should be more than an academic cover-term for superimposed and mutually indigestible disciplines. Research and methods elaborated under the rubrics of proxemics, kinesics, environmental psychology, man-environment relations, architectural history, body-language, and perceptual psychology all have significant input into architectonics, but not all of what each of these has to say will be relevant. Moreover, each of these approaches has been elaborated for different ends: they are not all component bricks adding up to a structurally-integrated edifice, however cleverly we pile them on top of each other.

One of the primary aims of the present study is to design a coherent framework for architectonic analysis. This book has both the merits and faults of any first approximation, as will become evident to the reader. It is in certain respects both too specific and too general. But this is a necessary concomitant of an attempt to clear the air (or the jungle), for a great many things need to be addressed—some very general received assumptions as well as a great many analytic details concerned with methodological specifics. If first approximations are like midwives, then the present study aims to ease delivery by setting a reasonable stage. Moreover, this text appears in print at a time when the research which led to the preparation of this manuscript has advanced beyond the discussions here by over a year. A number of issues addressed here have received a different focus in subsequent writings, notably the crucial problem of metaphorical and metonymie relations in architectonic signing (see Appendix A).

The are many reasons for our inability to adequately handle the complex systematicity^a of the built environment. In part this inability is related to a lack of adequately lucid methodological frameworks. It is at the same time related to our subscription to many assumptions—hidden and patent—in the received tradition.

Among students of built environments, there is very little agreement on many fundamental issues, including the nature of the medium itself, the basic units of organization, the meanings and functions of architectonic objects, and the relationships of built environments with other symbol systems. Moreover, the task of architectonic analysis has for many generations been a captive either of art-historical connoisseurship and ‘criticism’ directed at the social and ‘aesthetic’ merits of formations, or of architectural ‘analysis’ aimed at sharpening the wits of would-be practitioners. Architectonic descriptive theory has often been the servant of prescriptive^a ideologizing. What has passed for architectural theory has commonly consisted of little more than semantic maneouvering to gain a maximal congruence of idiosyncratic classification in the service of academic and professional ambition, and architectural theory has tended to be a fragile ship open to the cross-currents of fashion.

But to question whether ‘architecture’ is ‘art,’ craft, engineering (physical or social), theatre, housing, or three-dimensional economics is as pointless as asking the same of language. We shall explore this pointless but crucial issue below. For the moment it will be sufficient to sensitize ourselves to the multifunctionality^a of architectonic formations.⁹

Moreover, as will be evident below, we shall attempt to show that it is only through a semiotic framework that the complex multifunctionality of the built environment can be adequately situated, and its relationship with other aspects of culture more clearly oriented.

A great deal of confusion has centered upon the nature of the architectonic medium itself. In contrast, for example, with the linguistic code, which employs a relatively uniform and narrowly circumscribed medium of acoustic signals addressed to the vocal-auditory channel—and which, it now seems evident, is processed by the brain differently from nonlinguistic acoustic phenomena,¹⁰—the medium of the built environment can be anything from frozen blocks of water in the Arctic to carved limestone and poured concrete, from bamboo and mud and animal skins to clearings of a forest floor or the appropriated flora of a given landscape.

But this confusion is more apparent than real. The medium of the built environment is in fact anything and everything visually-palpable which can be employed to serve place-making functions. As a system of relationships, the architectonic code signifies conceptual associations through similarities and differences in visually-palpable formation per se. It is important to distinguish contextual variation in material realization from the geometric properties of formations themselves. It is the latter which constitute the Vocabulary’ of architectonic formations, as we shall see.

The physical medium of the built environment, then, is potentially coterminous with the entire range of material resources of the planetary biosphere which can be employed to construct significative formations addressed to the visual channel^a. The architectonic system of a given culture employs anything at hand which it perceives as suitable for communicating architectonically.

This is not to say, however, that everything so palpable is, in a given culture, a necessary component of an architectonic code. A room, a sewing machine in the corner of that room, and a tree or mountain seen through the window of that room—however else the latter three may function—may serve as signs in a system of signs creating a conceptual world. Each of these ‘natural’ or man-made formations may acquire architectonic significance by virtue of their space-shaping and space-defining properties, as these are differentially appropriated by different cultures.

Moreover, what is significant in one architectonic system may be differently significant or nonrelevant in another system. Once again it is necessary to stress the fact that the significance of given formations is in large measure a function of definition by a system as a whole.

A necessary question arises as to where we are to fix the boundaries or limits of an architectonic system. The answer is again in concert with the foregoing remarks—anything visually-palpable may be incorporated into an architectonic code by virtue of its palpable space-defining properties; but what in fact is so employed will be a function of a given culture-specific system.

It will be evident, then, that while an architectonic system includes what in Western parlance is termed ‘architecture,’—namely ‘buildings’ and their infrastructures^a—it will necessarily also incorporate everything up to and including the generic ‘environment’ itself. And in some societies the mountain on the horizon is assimilated to the system of the built world, while in others it may be seen as an irregularity in the ‘empty’ space between cities—although even in the latter case, its significance is necessarily architectonic.

A corollary of this is the fact that an architectonic code is not necessarily equivalent to the sum of artifactual or made formations, but will normally incorporate formations ‘appropriated’ from a ‘natural’ landscape. In other words, an architectonic system can get along without ‘buildings.’

Such a situation is aptly characterized in the following observation:

An important property of built environments is the dispensibility of formations. This is not a privileged property of !Kung Bushmen or of people living in warm climates, but is a property of any architectonic system. While it may be trivially obvious that one doesn’t need to have a garage if one drives a car, it is nevertheless an observation which is the concomitant of two features of architectonic systems: first, a given environmental array need not incorporate every formation potential in a code (any more than a given sentence need not contain all the vocabulary of a language), and, secondly, form does not follow function any more than function follows form. In other words, in the second case there will, in any code, be alternative means for accomplishing isofunctional or equivalent ends. In the first case, it is evident that any given semiotic code unfolds piecemeal in space and time.

These properties are shared by the built environment with any semiotic system. It is therefore the case that even in certain ‘traditional’ societies which appear to ‘have’ no ‘architecture’, the given environment is itself employed architectonically, as has been observed by Rapoport and others.¹² A group of elders sitting in a circle in a meadow once a month is as fully ‘architectonic’ as a council chamber.

But if the latter observation is so, then it is important to be clear about the ‘boundaries’ of architectonic communication, representation and expression vis-à-vis other nonarchitectonic signings in the visual channel. We must distinguish between ‘somatotopic’^a behaviors wherein bodies construct spatial frameworks architectonically, and somatic gesturings wherein body-parts such as the limbs and portions of the face are employed in support of a verbal message. In the first case, a body or bodies serve space-defining functions partly surrogative of artifactual formations, whereas in the latter case kinetic formations composed by parts of a body are intended to communicate information in a manner analogous to or derivative of verbal language.

The latter will incorporate various kinds of ‘sign’ languages which serve as replacements for vocalizations or verbal messages. These may be of several types, depending upon the ability of a given gesture-system to more or less ‘fully’ replace linguistic signings: some systems are relatively autonomous of verbal language, while others may be closely cross-indexed with vocalizations and principally serve paralinguistic or augmentative functions relative to vocalizations. In the latter case would be included various kinds of gestural signals which operate in close rhythmic synchrony with speech.

Each kind of gestural sign-system is differently related to linguistic and architectonic signings, but it is evident that autonomous somatic sign-systems do exist independently of either. It now appears to have been demonstrated that in the absence of linguistic models, deaf children will spontaneously develop systems of ‘sign’ language which incorporate a number of salient design features shared with non-somatic sign-systems such as verbal language.¹³

It is evidently the case that both verbal language and the architectonic code are similarly ‘ambitious’ in their capacities to assimilate the world of experience to themselves in an encylcopedic fashion. That is to say, both manifest an analogous ‘effability’ in attempting to translate any content, including those codified by other systems, into their own symbol systems.¹⁴

It is equally clear that the differences between these two fundamental human modalities^a are profound in a number of respects, and many of these differences are necessary products of their contrastive media.

One of the most striking aspects of architectonic codes induced by their formative media is a property of object-permanence. That is to say, architectonic formations manifest a permanence of ‘broadcast’ relative to other systems of signing such as verbal language and ‘sign’ language. An architectonic formation will continue to broadcast long after the more ephemeral transmissions of a speech act, whose traces remain in the auditory channel only momentarily. Thus any given architectonic formation may serve to ‘contextualize’ or ‘ground’ other kinds of semiotic formations, since its signal will ‘decay’ at a much slower rate rhan the latter.

But it is important not to take the property of object-permanence in an absolute sense: we are speaking of a permanence relative to other modalities. Moreover, there is a very wide range of permanence, even in the same corpus of forms. A formation may continue to ‘broadcast’ for generations, centuries or millenia, but it may also be a transitory and ephemeral phenomenon, such as an umbrella in a rainstorm, a place on a stage created by spotlights lasting for two hours, a parade down mainstreet, or a set of space-framing gestures by bodies. Furthermore, the relative permanence of architectonic signals is a joint product of the characteristics of certain signing materials and the intentions of builders. There is, furthermore, no direct correlation between the slowness of the rate of decay of formations or transmissions and cultural sophistication or even technological sophistication.

The ability of architectonic formations to ‘contextualize’ non-architectonic formations—a result of the parameters of its media—does not mean (as so often may be inferred in literature on linguistic signing) that the built environment is a kind of passive ‘stage-set’ for other semiotic behavior. The moon necessarily does revolve on its axis even though we normally see only one of its faces. A building can only best be understood in this regard as a sustained note in an ongoing and dynamic orchestration of signs in different media, some of which are more ephemeral than others in their sensory channels. While this is not always easy to see, particularly from the stand point of a more ‘monument’-oriented art-historical perspective, it is nevertheless an important property of architectonic systems, and has to be taken into account in any serious semiotic study.¹⁵

Parenthetically, another factor related to this, essentially a misconstrual of the consequences of this phenomenon, should be noted. It is simply not the case that we apprehend the complexities of a built environment only because of our abilities to linguistically label components of an environment. This is equivalent to saying that verbal formations are only meaningful because of their connections to external reference.¹⁶ We will take up this question in some detail below in our discussion of architectonic meaning.

A built environment is an ongoing, dynamically unfolding array of signs, existing spatially and temporally. A given environmental setting reveals the existence of sign-formations of contrastive relative ages much in the same manner that a given sentence will reveal the copresence of formative elements with different histories. The same sentence (e.g., ‘the cats jumped over the sheep (pl.)’) may incorporate two different ways of forming plurals, one historically more recent than the other.

Built environments are dynamic in yet another sense. An architectonic formation is not necessarily stable or static, but may be rolled, floated or flown away, or carried in disassembled fashion on one’s back to the site of the next encampment. Once again, formational permanence is relative.

Perhaps the most important confusion regarding the nature and organization of architectonic systems is concerned with the identification and definition of its organizational units, and it is to this question that much of the present study is directed. We will begin to address this problem in the next section.

It is becoming increasingly evident that our growing understanding of the built environment as a complex system of signs will have important ramifications for the study of other semiotic systems such as verbal language and somatic signing. It is clear that the latter do not exist in a vacuum, despite tendencies to study the latter in that manner. Our understanding of the internal organization of these other panhuman codes should be significantly affected by our picture of the organization of architectonic systems, in ways which at present can only be partially outlined.

These changes will be induced by an ongoing shift in analytic orientation from the formal mechanisms of linguistics to the characteristic embeddedness of linguistic (and other) signings in large-scale communicative events. In addition, as our understanding of the systematicities of various kinds of nonverbal communication expands, we shall be in a better position to understand the unique power and potential of each of the sign-systems employed by humans in the ongoing semiotic bricolage of sociocultural life.

FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER 1

¹See D. Preziosi, The Origins of the Built World (1978c), forthcoming, for a detailed discussion of this question.

² W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, New York, 1958, 107.

³See J. Yellen, Archaeological approaches to the Present: Models for Reconstructing the Past, New York, 1977, on the !Kung; and A. Rapoport, “Australian Aborigines and the Definition of Place,” \n Man-Environment Systems, January 1970.

⁴Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Writings 4.127.

⁵See Preziosi, op. cit., Chapter V, for a discussion of cultural organization as a relational system of signensembles, summarized below in our concluding Chapter.

⁶discussed in detail in D. Preziosi, ‘Multimodal Communication,’ (1978k), forthcoming; see Appendix below.

⁷ See Preziosi, 1978c, Chapters IV and V.

⁸See above, n. 6.

⁹See Preziosi, 1978c, Chapter III, and id “Architectonic and Linguistic Signs,” paper presented to the International Conference on the Semiotics of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan, May 3-6, 1978, to be published.

¹⁰Evidence for this is discussed in R. Jakobson and L. R. Waugh, The Sound Shape of Language, Chapter I (Bloomington, Indiana, 1979, forthcoming). It remains to be seen if the perception of architcctonic/artifactual formations is equivalently lateralized in the brain.

¹¹L. Marshall, “!Kung Bushman Bands,” Africa, vol. 30, no. 4, 1960, 342-3.

¹²See above, n. 3, and id., House Form & Culture, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1969.

¹³ Reported by S. Goldin-Meadow and H. Feldman, “The Development of Language-Like Communication without a Language Model,” Science, Vol. 197, 401-3, 22 July 1977. Relationships between sign-systems is discussed in Preziosi, 1978k, with reference to gesture.

¹⁴The question of ‘effability’ is insightfully discussed by U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana, 1976, 173, and in Preziosi, 1978e.

¹⁵There is an important operational paradox here, for sign-systems offer alternative perspectives on the contents of other systems such that each may serve to a certain extent as a ‘metalanguage’ with respect to others in sociocultural contexts. See Preziosi, 1978c, Chapter V, and id., “Toward a Relational Theory of Culture,” The Third LACUS Forum, Columbia, South Carolina, 1977, 278-288.

¹⁶On the question of referentiality, see M. Silverstein, “Shifters, Lexical Categories and Cultural Description, in K. Basso and H. Selby, eds., Meaning in Anthropology, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1976, 11-56; and U. Eco, op. cit., 58-66 and 163-171. The statement by Leach that “A modern urban street is wholly man-made and it is only because all the things in it carry individual names, i.e., symbolic labels, that we can recognize what they are,” E. Leach, Culture & Communication, Cambridge, England, 1976, 33, is, on the face of it, untrue. See Preziosi, 1978c, Chapter V, and below, on architectonic meaning.