Preface

This book is concerned with the analysis and description of the built environment as a semiotic system—as a system of meaningful signs. It seeks to establish some of the principal ways in which what will be termed architectonic systems are similar to and different from other forms of human symbolic communication.

As an introduction to the systematic analysis of built environments from a semiotic perspective, the present volume is intended to be relatively self-contained, presupposing little or no familiarity with the subject on the part of the reader. At the same time, the reader familiar with current research and speculation in semiotics, anthropology and art and architectural history will find many contemporary issues and problems addressed both directly and indirectly.

The present text is an arrested moment in an ongoing research project begun in 1970 while I was teaching at Yale, continuing since 1973 at MIT. During this time, the research has been supported in part by various grants and fellowships, including a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1973), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1975, Summer), and various supportive grants from the Department of the History of Art at Yale. I am grateful also for the in-house leaves from the Department of Art and Architecture at MIT during 1973 and 1974 which enabled me to put in order the accumulation of data begun several years before. Initial field work for the analysis of the specific data employed in the present text was supported by a Charles Eliot Norton Fellowship from Harvard, and a Harvard Travelling Fellowship (1964-66).

The number of persons whose interactions with the writer have affected the present study to its benefit is very great. Many colleagues, students and friends have left their imprint on this book in direct and indirect ways, and it has been often the case that a chance remark or a brief conversation in a hallway or convention lobby has stimulated a train of thought which ultimately led to the clarification of the aims of this project.

I must above all acknowledge the contributions of many students and friends in my graduate seminars at Yale and MIT whose lively, informed and insightful conversations and enormous energies were crucial both in the launching of this project and in its continuation. My teachers at Harvard and my colleagues at Yale, MIT and Cornell have similarly been generous with their time with someone perhaps obsessively impatient to define the right questions to ask. The following list is partial, and I have tried to include all those with whom some (even momentary) personal interaction has affected the present report to its benefit: Wayne Andersen, Stanford Anderson, Michael Bales, Keith Basso, Dwight Bolinger, Marie-Henriette Carre, Whitney Chadwick, Kwangchih Chang, William Davenport, Peter Eisenmann, Robin Fawcett, Mario Gandelsonas, Marie-Christine Gangneux, Paul Garvin, Charles Gates, Wladimir Godzich, Ernst Gombrich, Steven Grossberg, François Guerin, Morris Halle, M.A.K. Halliday, Dolores Hayden, Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jakobson, Hong-bin Kang, Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky, George Kubier, Sydney Lamb, Heather Lechtman, Neil Levine, Shelagh Lindsey, Robert Manoff, Miranda Marvin, Jonathan Matthews, Arden and Ulric Neisser, Sheldon Nodelman, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Werner Oechslin, Maggie Rogow, Irving Rouse, Lynne Rutkin, Nicholas Rykwert, Meyer Schapiro, Hal Scheffler, Vincent Scully, Jr., Thomas Sebeok, Grace Seiberling, Edward Stankiewicz, Arthur Steinberg, Eléanor Steindler, Linda Suter, Alexander Tzonis, Paolo Valesio, Dora Vallier, and Linda Waugh. I would also like to thank the patient owners of the Piroschke Cafe in Cambridge, where this book was begun. I am most particularly grateful to Linda Waugh and Roman Jakobson, whose continuing stimulation and support have clarified the direction of my questions.

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As an attempt at a systematic analysis, the present volume introduces some special terminology. An attempt has been made to keep this to a minimum, and to provide a running explanation of potentially unfamiliar terms. The book includes a glossary of new or unusual terms, cross-indexed to first occurrences in the text by means of a superscript letter (thus, architectonic^a). Plates I-VIII, Chapter II, were drawn by David Peck, and the text was patiently and expertly typed and composed by Mrs. Coraleen L. Rooney.

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