INTRODUCTION

In our introductory chapter, we noted that equivalent geometric forms may exhibit variation in a large number of ways with respect to materialization. In other words, two space-cells X₁ and X₂ of identical geometric configuration—for example cubic—may contrast with respect to (1) metric size (wherein X₁ is 5 x 5 meters, and X₂ is 6 x 6 x 6 meters), (2) medium (wherein X₁ is made up of timber and X₂ is made up of mud-brick + timber), (3) texture (wherein X₁ is made up of timber which has been left rough-hewn or unfinished and X₂ is made up of timber which has been smoothly sanded and finished), (4) color (wherein X₁ is unpainted (grey) cinder block and X₂ is painted white).

It will be evident that two given cubic cells may contrast on all of these axes, or several, or only one, or none. In addition, two cubic cells may be identical in all respects except that their relative positions in an aggregate or cluster of cells results in the former being sunny and well-lit and the latter dark and dank. Furthermore, two identical cells may contrast with regard to their relative acoustic environments: the former may be situated in a cluster overlooking a busy street, while the latter, only two doors away, is snug and quiet at the same time of day. Various constructional materials have different acoustic (as well as thermal or insulating) properties, and a very great degree of variation in such properties may be observed, all dependent upon complex relationships of size, media, texture and color. Two cells identical in all material respects except color, for example, may as a result contrast with respect to relative warmth or coolness.

The implication here of course is that all these (often extremely subtle) differences in materialization may be associated with different meanings or usages, and the presence of certain material properties may be highly significant for individuals and societies. Often such associations provide a culture with a “vocabulary” of contrasts which, while seemingly irrelevant to an outsider, project conventionally important contrasts of meaning to the society itself. What is a random stick in the ground to an outsider may be the central axis mundi of a village. The history of human relations is saturated with misunderstandings arising from this paradoxical situation. And yet this paradox lies at the core of the organization of architectonic systems. It may well also be that properties of illusion, paradox, ambiguity and camouflage are built into the nature of architectonic systems, and may have contributed to the adaptive advantages such systems have over pre-human built environments.¹

As just noted, subtle differences in materialization may be mapped onto highly contrastive meaningful associations; in addition, it is evident that corpora contrast in this regard so that in society A, rough-textured architectonic objects are conventionally associated with secular construction, while in society B the reverse is the case. Even in situations where objects are positionally related to a cosmology mapped onto the geometry of the human body (left vs. right, up vs. down, front vs. back), the significance of a given position or orientation will differ: “left” may be lucky or unlucky, and “north” may be “up” or “down,” good or evil. Moreover, even within the same society (no matter how small its population), different classes or clans may reverse the connotative geometry constant for another class or group. And both may change over time.

The question of the “inherent” meanings of given colors or textures or media or sizes (relative to the human form) is a vexed one, and we do not yet fully or securely understand what may be cross-culturally constant, or why it may be so. We shall consider this issue in the next section; for the moment consider the question of color symbolism.

For much of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods in human history, a great many human skeletal remains are found with traces of applied red coloring. Moreover, this is not limited to any one geographical area of the world, but recurs on several continents among groups which apparently had no contact with each other. It might seem that we could generalize from this phenomenon and claim that for human beings the association “red = blood = death” is in some way innate. But we must be careful here; for while human blood is normally reddish in color, the phenomenon of death being associated with spilled blood does not always hold, and the associations of death with other aspects of a cognitive system may for some relate to other colorings —say something on the “cool” end of the spectrum, e.g., blue, since from this point of view, a dead body is cool while live ones are warm.

We can go on indefinitely. But the apparent fact remains that whatever may be innate in color (or material or texture or size) symbolism, such associations are expressed through systems of meaning founded upon conventional relational mechanisms. An object magnified from human size to twice that size may be uplifting or threatening or ambiguously both; and its conventional associations for a given group will be a function of its position in an overall architectonic system of contrasts as much as it is directly relatable to the absolute metric size of any adult human.

Our chief concern in this chapter is two-fold. First, we shall consider the relationship between formal configuration and structure and the physical or material variations exhibited by such entities and aggregates. Secondly, we will explore the organization of material organization itself both for our analytic corpus and for architectonic systems in general. Both of these questions, clearly, are interrelated.

MATERIAL ORGANIZATION AND FORMAL STRUCTURE

It has been noted that given formal configurations—for example geometrically identical space-cells—may exhibit variation with respect to metric size, media, color, texture, etc. Furthermore, among the four latter, cells may exhibit a variety of contrasts, or combinations of features. For example, a given entity /E/ (wall) may contrast with another wall otherwise identical on three out of these four axes:

In addition, material variation may be observed in other respects which modify the relative appearances of the two entities. For example, with respect to medium, the bricks might be laid horizontally in one case, or in a herringbone pattern in the other; or the wall may be two brick-thicknesses or three, thereby contrasting with respect to size as well. In the former case, we are dealing with what we may term composition,^a an aspect which relates to all three latter items (medium, texture, and color).

Hence a wall /E/_n will exhibit a tridimensional compositional aspect incorporating (a) the arrangement of medium, texture and color relative to each other, and (b) an internal relationship of parts on each count. Thus, regarding the latter, a wall may be composed, with respect to medium, as a vertical layering of (1) a rubble-stone foundation course; (2) an “ashlar” or finely-squared row of limestone blocks; on top of which is (3) a dozen rows of mud-bricks; surmounted by a course of squared timber near the ceiling level; this will contrast, moreover with other walls otherwise identical with respect to size, texture and color:

Figure 1

In the diagram, walls /E/_a and /E/_b contrast as indicated; consider both as painted ochre and smooth in texture, and of the same metric size. In addition, our /E/_b may contrast with an /E/_c made up of gypsum blocks but of the same composition, etc.

It becomes evident that such variations as may occur can multiply into the transfinite. How can we conceivably specify the range of all this material variety? This question becomes even more pressing when it is considered that architectonic systems appear to be realizable in material construction of nearly any conceivable type, drawing upon the physical resources of the planet in every ecological niche—from blocks of limestone to blocks of frozen water to the skins of animals to a shaded canopy provided by a cluster of trees in a forest.

Another complication arises: the resources of an ecological niche may be employed differently by different societies or different settlements in a niche belonging to the same society; in other words, the “boundaries” of routines of material usage will not necessarily be coterminous with the temporal or geographical “boundaries” of a corpus. Nor will it be necessarily found that contrastive corpora employ contrastive material syntactic modes. For example, the architectonic systems of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece are clearly contrastive in terms of formal syntax, and yet we find, by and large, that the same materials are employed in expression, often in nearly identical ways, even across sub-routines of composition.

Whereas in sum, the two corpora contrast both formally and materially (and certainly functionally), many of the details of material expression are identical, although the use of materials in relationship to such aspects as size, texture, coloration and composition will be found to be different. Same ecological resources, different systemic usages.

Hence, it would be wisest to eschew an approach to our problem which smacks of “ecological determinism” wherein the material expression of a corpus is constrained to a narrow band of available resources.² In other words, those resources which a culture exploits will be only in part a direct function of what appears to be “objectively” available to an outsider (or insider). At the same time, what is seen is also a function of what a society of individuals chooses to see for reasons which may be only peripherally related to the “grammar” of an architectonic system in se. Constraints upon the choice of materials are inevitably found to be a result of cosmological, political, economic, technological, and other factors—factors which, along with architectonic and linguistic ones, comprise in large part the cognitive “map” a society has of itself. In other words, such constraints arise out of an equilibrated network of cognitive relationships, with each factor in some way a reflection of some or all of the others.

Moreover, the cognitive map of a culture is diachronically mutable, and subject to changes in its components over time in lesser or greater ways, and even differently or at different rates according to its components. Technological change may be more or less rapid than economic, and so forth.

But if we eschew an ecological determinism in the constraints upon the exploitation of ecological resources, we would at the same time need to recognize relative limits on such exploitation. It is clearly the case that such constraints will be broader than a deterministic view would suggest, and yet limited in some way. It may be well to bear in mind one of our observations above namely that such constraints will be simultaneously ecological and cultural or systemic.

We might consider that constraints upon material expression represent a simultaneous projection of factors onto a common expressive plane. Some of these factors will be derived from the nature of the formal structure of a corpus itself; others will be ‘external’ to the architectonic system.³

In other words, it would appear that what we have come to call “material structure” is partly architectonic in origin, and partly “cultural” or “external” to an architectonic system per se. And even though material structure is bound up with a seemingly finite range of physical choice, that range is inevitably bound up with how it is “seen” or processed by a society. That is to say, material structure is simultaneously bound up with architectonic and extra-architectonic factors. It might be useful to consider, then, that material syntax or composition functions in the overall architectonic system as an “interface” between a “core” set of formal orderings and the external, physical world.

If we broaden our perspective, it would then appear that metaphorically the architectonic system in some way mediates between what we may term the cognitive environment and the physical environment. It is important to note here that by material structure or composition is not meant the actual physically-realized objects of a corpus, but rather the geometry or logic of representation specific to a corpus of forms. In other words, material structure will be seen as a complexly-ordered series of mappings which mediate between a core set of formal or geometric orderings and the physical environment itself.

To reiterate: the architectonic system in toto mediates between a “cognitive environment” and the “physical environment,” whereas material structure mediates between an innermost or core formal structure and the physical environment.

But what does “material structure” itself comprise? Does it manifest an internal “structure” of its own which tends to be invariant across corpora?

We have noted a number of aspects of material structure above: size, medium, color, texture, composition. Not all of these exist with respect to each other on a single “axis,” for the aspect of composition, for example, cross-cuts medium, color and texture. Moreover, within an aspect such as medium, we have been ambiguously referring both to material identity and material composition and modularity. Wall /E/₁ may be realized in limestone blocks, as is wall /E₂; but the internal composition of the blocks—how they are laid out in courses, and the sizes of individual blocks—may contrast sharply, even if all four othe aspects remain invariant.

One thing about material structure is already abundantly clear: its orderings, or levels of organization, are considerably more complicated than the orderings manifest in formal structure. The routines comprising material structure, in other words, appear to be much more highly ordered in some sense than those of formal structure: many more aspects are involved, and their interactions seem to be highly complex.

Seen as sets of orderings, it is evident that formal structure and material structure interrelate as partially-ordered sets (posets), wherein an assymmetry of mappings is manifest. In other words, a single formal item may map onto a wide variety of alternative material “items,” and, conversely, a given material item may map onto a variety of formal items.

For example, formal item /A/ (column) is invariant with respect to alternative material representations (e.g., timber or stone (of a couple of varieties)); while from a material point of view, either wood or stone is invariant with respect to its mapping onto a wide variety of formal items (not only columns but walls, floors, ceilings, etc.). It is in this sense, then, that the overall sum of inter-set mappings may be termed partially-ordered: not every item in one set maps onto every item in the other set. This asymmetry is a function of series of constraints imposed both architectonically and extra-architectonically or culturally. We might imagine the situation as describing a “figure” in a conceptual space comprised of a network of all the possible mappings that could occur in architectonic systems: not all “points” in such a grid will be touched by the “figure” described for a given corpus, and corporea will be found contrastive in this respect.

Let us now try to specify the internal organization of material structure. We require at least the following aspects or components:

(1) an inventory of materials specific to a corpus (medium);

(2) a set of regulations whereby such materials are positionally related to each other (composition);

(3) a further set of regulations whereby such material compositions are assigned a metric size (we may term this aspect modularity^a).

In (1) we include two additional sub-routines of orderings, which we will term (a) texturization and (b) coloration. These may be seen as sub-routines of (1) in the sense that contrasts are observed in the corpus between two identical media and their physical finishing or texturing (e.g., a roughly-hewn limestone block and a smoothly polished one—there may be a broad continuum between the two poles) or their coloration (note that two walls of identical media and texturing may be contrastively colored, and vice-versa: two walls of identical media and coloration may be contrastively textured or finished).

It is important to note that there may be variations within a corpus or even within a space-cell with respect to the sequencing of these ordering routines and sub-routines over time. Thus, a block of limestone may be inserted into a wall in a rough-hewn state resulting solely from the process of its separation from other blocks in a quarry, or it may be finished or textured in a variety of ways after it is in place in a wall. Or there may be whole sequences or “scores” of routines performed at various stages in the processing of a material from its “natural” state to its architectonic state. Moreover, such routines of work will be partly embedded in the requirements of the architectonic system itself and in certain conventional routines of labor—the organization of work-crews, economic or financial factors, requirements of an “aesthetic” nature, and so forth.

If so many extra- or para-architectonic factors enter into the realization of architectonic objects, how is it then possible to specify what is strictly architectonic and what is not?

We cannot specify the relative positioning of certain routines over time for a given architectonic object except insofar as evidence for this can be deduced from the appearance of the objects themselves. Moreover, identical results might be achieved by different sequencing operations—whether we put together the parts of a watch in a linear, additive sequence or if we organize the construction of the watch by a series of hierarchically-related subroutines (now the springs, now the facets, etc.), in many cases the finished results will appear identical—though the latter routines of assembly may be faster.⁴

Let us see how these aspects may interact by considering the realization of formal items specific to our corpus. The corpus distinguishes approximately 18 contrastive materials in the realization of its space-cells, comprising eight types of stone, treated and untreated vegetation, and a variety of media which consist of processed combinations of ecological resources. These 18 materials reveal a number of distinctions in contextual usage—certain hard stones are employed in paving, softer ones in internal flooring; certain materials have conventional associations with space-cells used for sacred vs. secular purposes, etc.

The inventory of materials employed in the corpus is as follows:⁵

among various types of stone; these are graded here from harder to softer (1. to 8.)

among materials derived from a combinatory processing of stone, earth, water and vegetation; and

We shall refer to these materials by abbreviation in what follows, or, in the case of tight diagrams, by number.

It may be of interest to classify this inventory according to the interaction of its members:

Figure 2¹⁰

Out of the continuum of the ecology, then, certain distinctions are made which serve as a basis of an inventory of materials employed in the realization of forms. This inventory represents a set of contextually-distinct variants. These distinctions, in other words, are contextually significant: i.e., a given formal configuration is realized materially as member “x” in a specific functional context, and as member “y” in a different functional context.

But this is not invariably so; a given material distinction may not be made. In other words, for example, if a given functional context—say a “pillar crypt”—is realized materially by a given material item, this occurrence may only be characteristic rather than universal across all examples, and we should be wary of claiming that in every stance of this functional context the same material item will always be present.

In some cases, in other words, a corpus will specify that a given cellular context must incorporate as a component of its organization a given material item or items, and a given material composition; but there will be cases of relatively “free” Variance, where such a material item need not necessarily occur. What may be constant or invariant across the realizations of a given functional context will be something— but this may be a constancy of size, or orientation, or shape, or coloration, or relative position in an aggregate of cells, etc.

For example, if we look at the plans of the three major Minoan “palaces,”⁶ it would appear that there is a constancy of orientation of the long axis of the central courtyards (i.e., north-south, generally). But if we also consider the orientations of the long axis of the courtyards of other palatial compounds (i.e., in addition to the major “palaces” at Knossos, Mallia and Phaistos, look at Plati, for example), then it would appear that what is constant is not the “north-south” orientation, but an alignment on the peak of a (religiously-significant?) mountain.⁷

In a similar fashion, we should be wary of affirming constancy or invariance in a corpus on the basis of the presence or absence of specific items, and look to sets of underlying relative equivalencies across various levels of organization of contexts.

In Figure 2. above, it will be seen that the inventory of materials arises out of a series of distinctions made on the basis of gradations of hardness-softness, treated-untreated, baked-unbaked, etc. These “features” may exist in continua or as binary oppositions.

Our classification distinguishes between stone, water, earth, and vegetation. This is not to assert, however, that this 4-fold distinction is itself significant in the architectonic system, nor that it represents a distillation of material variety such as to possibly suggest that to members of this society the world is seen as composed of (these) “four basic elements”: we simply don’t know, and may not ever know that much about some Minoan cosmology, or cosmologies.

Nor are we suggesting that the Minoans “had a word” for each of our 18 contextually-distinguished material items. They may not have made verbal distinctions on a one-to-one basis with these architectonic entities at all—or they may have had a dozen more verbal distinctions for fine gradations of limestone, though I suspect not. To be sure, what we signify by the lexical item “snow” is distinguished among various sub-Arctic peoples into many contrastive categories, according to the function of different gradations of frozen water (“x” is useful for hewing blocks for igloos, “y” for close-packing cracks between blocks, etc.).

The relationships between architectonic and lexical items are often surprisingly complex,⁸ but for the moment we are not concerned with this issue. We are concerned, however, with the distinctions made within the architectonic system itself, based on significant contrasts of contextual usage: according to the way they built (not according to how they may have talked about the way they built), the Minoan corpus makes these 18 distinctions.⁹

Thus far, we have examined the inventory of materials in the corpus—its media; we will now turn to a consideration of the manner whereby certain forms are represented or expressed in these media.

With respect to medium, given forms distinguished by the corpus will be realized in a variety of materials in various contextual situations. The following diagram illustrates the set of alternative realizations of the form /E/ (wall). In the diagram, “i” refers to contexts where a wall is an interior partition in an aggregate of cells; “e” to contexts where a wall is an exterior wall of a cell or a cellular aggregate.

Figure 3

The set [(sdh) (ksk) (gyp) (snd) (lmr) (stc) (tmb)] may be seen as the domain of the mapping of /E/ onto material form, and the mapping-configuration as the material structure of the relationship of /E/ and this set. Different forms will map onto partially-contrastive domains; for example, /D/:

Figure 4

In the diagram, “i” and “e” are to be read as in the previous Figure; the arrow ↓ refers to a “floor” context; ↑ to a “ceiling” context; and the arrow ↕ refers to a mapping onto either ground-floor or ceiling contexts.

Hence, the domain of the mapping of /D/ onto material form is the set [(sdh) (alb) (ksk) (gyp) (snd) (shs) (lmr) (poz) (clc) - (lpd) (stc) (ear) (tmb) (rds)], representing the range of canonical realizations for the corpus.

It will be seen in both previous diagrams that in addition to the specification of alternative realizations (portrayed by divergences from the symbol), there are general specifications of combinatory realizations (portrayed by divergences from the symbol), or in other words, a consideration of material composition. It would appear possible to portray this second aspect of material ‘syntax’ by specifications of ordered conjunctive^a relationships.¹¹

Thus, /E/ is seen as realized by various stone items as well as (a) lime mortar (lmr) or (b) stucco (stc) applied, respectively, on interior (“i”) surfaces and exterior (“e”) surfaces. And in addition, timber (tmb) is employed as an interpenetrating “half-timber framework” within the composition of the various types of stone wall—in an interior context, timber is used with (ksk), (gyp) and (sdh); in exterior walls, timber is found used with either (sdh) or (snd).

Other formal items may be similarly portrayed with respect to their own contrastive realizations, but these two examples should be sufficiently illustrative of our point.

Considering, then, that the aspect of composition can be portrayed as a series of ordered conjunctive relationships—i.e., not only medium (a) + (b) + (c), but an ordering of these media in a tridimensional frame (such that (a) is positioned as a timber framework, (b) is a stone “infilling” of that frame, and (c) is a stucco wash over the vertical surfaces of the whole object)—then it may be possible to specify both medium and composition with the same diagrammatic notation employed in our figures. Furthermore, we can also portray coloring as a marked state of the surface organization— vs. an unmarked state wherein the natural coloration of materials is left as is; and a similar situation may be described for texturization.¹² But such markings are necessarily corpus-specific.

Coloration, then, may be seen as a subroutine of ordering which projects simultaneously into the given mapping of materials and composition, and may be added to or contrasted with the limemortar and stucco already part of our inventory (pigment is also, in other words, a material added to an object much as other (thicker) materials are affixed or infixed).

We might incorporate coloration into our inventory of materials in a simple way by considering that pigments are made up of combinations of natural materials—earth, vegetation, water, oils, ground stone—so that certain combinations of given materials in the inventory will generate additional members of the inventory. Such an operation would expand our inventory to cover the range of contrastive colors employed in the objects of our corpus, but the expansion would not be very great at all.

IMPLICATIONS

It will be evident in the foregoing discussions that the organization of material structure not only reveals systemic as well as sematectonic properties in terms of signification, but that it also reveals gradient as well as discrete formative features. It thereby shares with formal structure certain organizational properties with respect to the ordering of its constitutive elements.

There are found to exist relationships among these items of (1) conjunction^a (or additive composition); (2) disjunction^a (or alternative realization); (3) negation (existing as a constraint upon the realization of forms in materials); as well as (4) equivalency (wherein certain material objects exist as equivalent realizations in specifiable contexts: thus, in the mapping of /E/, items (sdh) and (snd) are equivalent realizations in “exterior” contexts).

It would seem that a similar relational geometry underlies the organizational interaction of entities in both material and formal structure. Note that, in both cases, out of a range of possible distinctions, certain ones are made which serve to establish an equilibrated network of units or items. These distinctions arise by means of the relative contrasts of certain bundles of simultaneously-occurrent features. In the case of formal structure, these features are either topological, perspectival, or geometric. In the realm of material structure, formative features comprise graded or binary-contrastive material properties (hard to soft, opaque to transparent, processed/ unprocessed, etc.), and material entities are made to serve contrastively in specific contexts. In both organizational areas, the number of items is small.

In addition to an equilibrated set of items serving as systemic units, both material and formal structure reveal a set of relationships which units enter in upon with respect to each other; these are of the four types noted just above: conjunction, disjunction, negation, and equivalency.

Also, there is manifest in both material and formal syntax sets of regulations or constraints upon relationships between items or unities: not every item relates in the same way to every other—certain relationships, while possible in other corpora, are forbidden in ours; some relationships are possible but no examples are currently found; and some relationships are both forbidden and impossible in any corpus.

At the beginning of this section, we suggested that formal structure stands, relative to material structure, as a core series of orderings in an architectonic system behind or beneath the complex variety of realized forms. We have now seen that what we have come to call material structure is essentially a structure of mappings of formally-distinguished entities into and across aspects of medium, composition and modularity, resulting in physically-realized architectonic forms. This structure of mappings is specific to a given corpus and involves routines and sub-routines of highly complex orderings. We would suggest, moreover, that in its essential structural nature it underlies the material realization of forms in architectonic systems in general.

Let us now summarize these observations on the nature of material structure in an architectonic system.

Material structure will comprise

In conclusion, we have seen that an architectonic system reveals a duality of structuring where in its relationally-contrasted unities fall into two “structural” categories or facets of organization —what we have called formal organization and material organization.

These two sets of organization in the system manifest a semi-autonomous relationship to each other in the sense that their interactive mappings form a partially-ordered set (poset): invariant formal configurations, as we have seen, are realized alternatively and contextually as material configurations. Conversely, and asymmetrically, contrastive formal configurations may be realized in identical material compositions (which may then be seen as relatively invariant with respect to a domain of forms). The details of this relational invariance on both counts may be read in the mappings given above for our corpus, Figures 3. and 4.

However, it would appear that both of these levels of organization in an architectonic system share the same “design features” in the sense that both organizations manifest (1) sets of relationally-contrasted unities defined by the presence or absence of simultaneously-occurrent features (different types of features in both levels). Formal structure contrasts with material structure in this area in the sense that the former manifests an internally-contrastive series of organizations in three space-manifolds (geometric, perspectival, topological).

Both organizations manifest (2) conjunctive, disjunctive, negative and equivalent relationships among their contrasted elements, and (3) in both cases these relationships are constrained in terms of what a given corpus will specify as permissible or forbidden. Corpora will contrast on all three counts.

We should be wary, however, of attributing the ‘duality of structure’ revealed by the above to the necessary organization of the code itself. This ‘duality’ is principally an artifact of our analytic stance, which has focussed sequentially upon ‘geometric’ and ‘material’ properties of architectonic signs. Indeed, our suggestion that ‘material structure’ exists as a semi-autonomous network of ‘mappings’ between formal relationships and physical media has been metaphoric in nature, for our interest above has been to elucidate the nature of the systemic relationships between geometric and material sign-formations. ‘Material structure’ is not a ‘surface structure’ to a ‘deep structure’ of formal relationships. From the perspective of a given architectonic array, ‘formal’ and ‘material’ relationships are copresently manifest in syntagmatic simultaneity and sequentiality. The relationships among formal and material ‘entities’ in a code are discussed further in Appendix B, dealing with the network of architectonic signs.

It is evident that an architectonic system is an enormously complex system of signs of various types, and that the nature of architectonic significance is also highly complex, as we have seen in our discussion of architectonic multifunctionality. In this chapter and the previous we have attempted to portray some of the complexities of architectonic meaning as well as some of the salient features of the systemic organization of the code, its ‘mechanisms’, so to speak.

Both the nature of the architectonic medium and its relative signal-permanence induce significative potentials in the code which are largely unique vis-à-vis other sign systems, and contrast strikingly with verbal language. But the two systems have their own powerful advantages: while verbal language may be relatively impoverished in terms of its phonesthetic potential compared to the extraordinary multidimensional richness of the architectonic code,¹³ it nevertheless offers a unique power in terms of its rapidity and effability of focus.

But we should be wary of seeing these unique systemic properties as ‘deficient’ in its complementary sign-system. Meaningfulness is not the privileged property of any one code, and human communication is inherently multimodal, orchestrating meaning through the intercalation of co-present signings drawn from many different sources and addressing many of our senses simultaneously.

FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER V

¹See Preziosi, Origins . . . , Chapter II.

²See on this subject the sober remarks of A. Rapoport, House Form and Culture, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1969.

³In the sense, that is, of being related to non-architectonic factors situated elsewhere in the concerns of a society.

⁴See H. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, for a discussion of organizational hierarchies related to practice.

⁵See J. W. Graham, The Palaces of Crete, Princeton, New Jersey, 1962, 143 ff.

⁶Ibid., Plates.

⁷On the question of topographical alignments of Minoan buildings, see the conjectures of V. Scully, The Earth, the Temples and the Gods, New Haven, 1968, second edition, incorporating the present writer’s corrections.

⁸See Preziosi, 1978k.

⁹Compare B. L. Whorf, op. cit., 199 ff.

¹⁰In the diagrams of the present chapter, the symbols used signify an additive or conjunctive relationship (closed half-circle) or a disjunctive or either/or relationship (half-circle) among items connected by lines, as explicated in the glossary below.

¹¹I.e., as series of hierarchically-ordered additive relations.

¹²The question of ‘markedness’ is evidently an important one in architectonic systems, as it is in the linguistic system, although as yet no comprehensive study of the phenomenon has been made.

¹³Clearly, we are assuming here that the sematectonic usage of material formations in the architectonic system is generally correlative to linguistic phonological phenomena such as phonesthesia. But this is a complex problem; see R. Jakobson and L. R. Waugh, op. cit., Chapter IV. The current research of Dora Vallier on architecture promises some clarification of these problems.