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The Figures of Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture” Mr. Andrew Peter Steen B.A., B.B.Env., B.Arch., M.Phil.

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Queensland in 2015 School of Architecture

Abstract This thesis addresses English-language architectural theory discourse. It is an interrogation of the intellectual history of architectural theory language. While explicitly a contribution towards understanding a discrete discursive territory in existence in 1969, the study’s significance extends to the broader fields of architectural writing and design. The thesis investigates one text: Charles Jencks’s “Semiology and Architecture”, chapter one of Meaning in Architecture, an anthology edited by Jencks and George Baird. This single text is taken as a case study: it is used to assess the significance and functioning of the language and structure of address of so-called architectural theory. The thesis focuses in particular on the diagrammatic figures within “Semiology and Architecture”. Highly formal extensions of Jencks’s written body, the figures concentrate attention on the message as matter, and encourage an analysis directed towards the text’s paradigmatic axis. The figures’ conspicuous in-text presence helps denaturalize names and reify concepts, modifying the communicative role of each of these linguistic units. This thesis argues that the figures and names, thus understood, change the fundamental nature of “Semiology and Architecture”. Under their influence, the referential function of the text — that aspect supporting the argument — is repeatedly usurped by the poetic function. This pattern acts to disrupt commonsense assumptions regarding authorship. In place of a distinct Jencks, the thesis extracts authorial constructs or personas. This thesis uses the poetic function of Jencks’s text, and its authorial constructs, to characterize the underlying discursive formation. Each of the thesis’s five body chapters performs the same set of operations. One or two figures are isolated; Jencks’s argument as determined by referential function is traced, and the paradigmatic selections demonstrative of the poetic function analyzed; the relevant textual constructs are exposed; and the discursive functioning is characterized, significance thus articulated. Through close textual analyses, this thesis contributes novel understandings of Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”, and the ongoing practice of architectural writing. It advances historical and theoretical arguments: it addresses the function of the author and the process of writing within architecture’s discursive formation, and advocates for the significance of formal textuality in studies of architectural theory. 2

Declaration by author This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis. I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award. I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the policy and procedures of The University of Queensland, the thesis be made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 unless a period of embargo has been approved by the Dean of the Graduate School. I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis.

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Publications during candidature Peer reviewed papers: Andrew P. Steen,

“Guerrilla in the midst: The Universitas Project and a new type of institution.” In Architecture, Institutions and Change: 32nd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (Sydney AU: SAHANZ, 2015): 640-651.

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“Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture.” In Fabrications 25:1 (2015): 130-145.

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“Operation Marginalia: Translations of Semiology and Architecture.” In Translations: 31st Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Christoph Schnoor (Auckland NZ: SAHANZ, 2014): 345-354.

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“Jencks’s Semiological History: ‘Pop – Non Pop’.” In Open: 30th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast AU: SAHANZ, 2013): 3-15.

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“Epigraphs, Poetics, Architectural History.” In Fabulation: Myth, Nature, Heritage: 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, edited by Stuart King, Anuradha Chatterjee and Stephen Loo (Launceston AU: SAHANZ, 2012): 1035-1051.

Chapter in edited book: ——————,

“Kurilpa Bridge.” In Semi-Detached: Writing, Representation and Criticism in Architecture, edited by Naomi Stead. 80-83. Melbourne, AU: URO Media, 2012.

Online journal article: ——————,

“Station to Station.” In Australian Design Review, 2013. australiandesignreview.com/opinion/36564-station-to-station

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Publications included in this thesis No publications included.

Contributions by others to the thesis None.

Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree None.

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Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without the invaluable contributions of my generous, enthusiastic, and thought-provoking primary supervisor Prof John Macarthur; my secondary supervisors, the meticulous and judicious Assoc Prof Naomi Stead, and the incisive Dr Silvia Micheli; my ATCH research centre friends and colleagues Mr Jared Bird, Dr Alexandra Brown, Dr Amy Clarke, Prof Andrew Leach, Dr Gill Matthewson, Dr Antony Moulis, Dr Ashley Paine, and Dr Andrew Wilson; my milestone advisors Dr Rex Butler, Prof Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, and Prof Paul Walker; my yoga gurus Dan Adler and Ally Goodwin; all my friends, particularly Martin Bignell, Keith Hudson, James Pierre du Plessis, and Clair Keleher; and my family, especially my Mum and Dad. My sincere and eternal thanks go to all of these people.

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Keywords charles jencks, semiology and architecture, meaning in architecture, architectural semiotics, architecture theory and intellectual history, historiography of architecture, history of theory, linguistic turn, theory moment

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC) ANZSRC code: 120103, Architectural History and Theory, 80% ANZSRC code: 220313, Philosophy of Language, 10% ANZSRC code: 220317, Poststructuralism, 10%

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification FoR code: 1201, Architecture, 100%

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures………………………………………………………………………..

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Chapter 0. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”……………………….

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Chapter 1. Meaning, Semiology, Jencks……………………………………………

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Chapter 2. Bicycle Saddles………………………………………………………….

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Chapter 3. The Semiological Situation…..…………………………………………

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Chapter 4. Duck–Rabbit–Thingummybob.…………………………………………

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Chapter 5. Opposition and Association.……………………………………………

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Chapter 6. Language Uses, Language Abuses……………………………………..

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References..…………………………………………………………………………..

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Appendix. ‘Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”’.…………………….

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 0a. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 10-25. Figure 0b. Details from Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 10-25. Figure 1a. Title page of Charles Jencks and George Baird eds, Meaning in Architecture (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 3 (left); title page of Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 10. Figure 2a. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 12-13. Figure 2b. Jencks, “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 12-13. Figure 2c. Detail from Jencks, “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 12. Figure 3a. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14-15. Figure 3b. Jencks, “The Sign Situation,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 15. Figure 3c. Jencks, “The Semiological Triangle,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 14. Figure 4a. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18-19. Figure 4b. Jencks, “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 18. Figure 4c. Jencks, “Archigram Robot II, 1968,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 18-19. Figure 4d. Detail from Jencks, “Archigram Robot II, 1968,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 19. Figure 5a. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 22-23. Figure 5b. Jencks, “Degree of Surprise,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 22. Figure 5c. Jencks, “Semantic Space of Current Architects,” “Semiology and Architecture,” 23. Figure 6a. Detail from Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

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Nothing is more essential to a society than the classification of its languages. To change this classification, to relocate discourse, is to bring about a revolution. — Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth

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0. CHARLES JENCKS, “SEMIOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE”

Figure 0a: Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”.

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0.1.

Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture” is sixteen pages long. 1 It is

chapter one of Meaning in Architecture, a book edited by Jencks and George Baird. Meaning in Architecture is a significant historical artefact. When it was published, books by single authors on singular, canonical subjects dominated architectural theory. 2 Meaning in Architecture is not a monograph, but a truly multi-authored volume; and while it has links to the Architectural Association of London, 3 it is not made coherent by any overarching programme, doctrine, methodology, or ideology. As a collection of papers, the publication has more in common with professional journals of the period like Architectural Review and Architectural Design, and student journals like VIA (University of Pennsylvania School of Design) and Arena / AAQ (AA). 4 It is nonetheless typologically contrasted to these referents in terms of materiality (hardback, dust jacket, binding type) and functional content (lack of advertising and currency, different models of discursivity (e.g., no “Letters to the Editor”)). Meaning in Architecture actively confronts all of these aspects of the established discursive formation. One of the most conspicuous features of Meaning in Architecture is the marginal commentary included within each chapter. 5 In his “Preface” to the book, in his role as editor, Jencks claims these shape the book “in the form of a controversy or debate.” 6 The margin holding the comments takes up a third of each page. Each comment is rendered in

1. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 10–25. 2. Anthony Vidler, “Review. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory and The Anaesthetics of Architecture by Neal Leach,” Harvard Design Magazine 11 (Summer, 2000). Accessed 26 May, 2015, www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/11/rethinking-architecture-a-reader-in-culturaltheory-and-the-anaesthetics-of-architecture-by-neal-leach. Vidler provides one exception — Ulrich Conrads, Programme und Manifeste zur Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt DE: Verlag Ullstein, 1964), published in English as Programs and manifestoes on 20th-century architecture, translated by Michael Bullock (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1970) — but this book was published in English after Meaning in Architecture, anthologizes post-facto a loose collection of authors from Henry van de Velde through the Situationists to Hans Hollein, and importantly for this thesis, contains very few figures, and no multi-figured chapter. 3. Meaning in Architecture edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird follows the special issue of Arena “Meaning in Architecture”, edited by George Baird and Charles Jencks (June, 1967). 4. Meaning in Architecture might be said to prefigure Rem Koolhaas and OMA-AMO, Content (Köln DE: Taschen, 2003) in its book–journal (or book–magazine) hybridity. 5. For an analysis of the margins of “Semiology and Architecture”, see Andrew P. Steen, “Operation Marginalia: Translations of Semiology and Architecture”, in Translations: 31st Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Christoph Schnoor (Auckland NZ: SAHANZ, 2014): 345-354. 6. Charles Jencks, “Preface,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 7.

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smaller font, headed by the name of the critic in full capitals and a colon (e.g., “ BAIRD :”). The comments are keyed into the host writing by a black triangle pointing to a specific part of the text (i.e., “”). The names, the triangles, the marginal comments as blocks of writing, and indeed the white space where there is no such commentary, gain figural presence on the page: their accumulated form is a graphic communication of the fragmented and pointed discursive formation behind the book. The spirit of the book might be seen as condensed in the primary editor’s initial chapter, purpose-written for the volume. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture” is rich in external references, complex in composition, intellectually catholic, and philosophically eclectic. This is most evident in the pictorial figures that occupy over a quarter of the page surface area. Some architectural books of the period — e.g., Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (1963) — contain no images. Others — e.g., Peter Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) — include images of architecture, art, and design grouped together on separate, glossy pages. Many significant architectural books pre-1969 — e.g., Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (1923), Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (1941), Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects (1964), Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), Alison Smithson, Team Ten Primer (1968), and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (1968) — intersperse images of architectural drawings, photographs of architecture, works of fine art (largely painting and sculpture), industrial design, and graphic design through the written text. The figures of “Semiology and Architecture” include images of art, improvised industrial design, and radical architectural visualizations; but also popular culture (in the form of a magazine cover), philosophical diagrams, psychological aids, and data-modelling graphs. They can be likened to conceptual art practices of the period: the mix of sources is reminiscent of the Independent Group’s Parallel of Art and Life exhibition (1953); and the combination of images and writing recalls Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1965).

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Figure 0b: Details from Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”.

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But perhaps more notable and idiosyncratic — both for its time and for the contemporary history reader; and especially in the contexts of the IG and Graham — is the fact that “Semiology and Architecture” includes no visual representations of buildings. It is a work of architectural theory with an extremely tenuous connection to architecture, both conceptually and formally. This is one of the bases of its significance for architectural discourse in general and this thesis in particular. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture” is considered here to be a groundbreaking historical text: the first chapter in an edited book on architectural theory that includes several figures without featuring a single representation of conventional architecture; and a text that at once approaches and embodies ideals and models of rhetoric and discourse, language and semiosis.

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1. MEANING, SEMIOLOGY, JENCKS

Figure 1a: (left) Meaning in Architecture title page; (right) “Semiology and Architecture” title page.

1.1.

This thesis addresses English-language architectural theory discourse. It is an

interrogation of the intellectual history of architectural theory writing. While explicitly a contribution towards understanding a discrete discursive territory in existence in 1969, the study’s significance extends to the broader fields of architectural writing and design. The object of this thesis is one text: Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”. 1 As noted above, “Semiology and Architecture” is a chapter in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Jencks and George Baird in 1969. 2 This single text helps this thesis reveal structural aspects of the underlying discursive formation from which it was generated.

1. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 10–25. 2. Charles Jencks and George Baird eds., Meaning in Architecture (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969). Also published in New York by Braziller in 1969. Reprinted by Barrie & Jenkins and Braziller in 1970. Translated into French (Le Sens de la ville, 1972), Italian (Il significato in architettura, 1974) and Spanish (El significado en arquitectura, 1975). Jencks’s “History as Myth” is also a chapter in Meaning in Architecture (244–265). It was not, however, written for the 1969 volume, but rather as chapter 1 of Jencks’s PhD, Charles Jencks, “Modern Architecture: The Tradition Since 1945” (PhD Thesis,

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This thesis does not investigate the source, Charles Jencks. Following work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault contemporaneous with “Semiology and Architecture”, the thesis separates the biographical man from his textual operations or “author function”. 3 This thesis considers how this Charles Jencks functions in architectural theory discourse. The foci of the study are the images, diagrams, graphs, and objective signifiers within “Semiology and Architecture”. These forms will be referred to within this thesis as figures. The figures are a diverse group: some are original, others appropriated; some are illustrative, others analytical; and each has a unique relation to the text’s written body. The thesis interrogates the collected figures’ mediation of the text’s functioning. A fundamental assertion of this thesis is that the graphic nature of the figures promotes a concentration on the construction of the syntagmatic axis, that axis constituted by combinations of linguistic units. Each figure constitutes a conspicuous paradigmatic selection: their boldness as objects inserted into the text draws focus towards and reifies components of their own forms, as well as colouring prominent linguistic units embedded in the written body. 4 In so doing, the figures divert attention from the “theory” that is referred to and developed by Jencks. As a collective, the figures emphasize the material formality of the text, highlighting the aspect that, following the work of Roman Jakobson — again temporally adjacent to the work under interrogation 5 — will be referred to throughout this thesis as the poetic function of language. 6

Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, 1970). “Semiology and Architecture” is thus more embedded within Meaning in Architecture and is a better reflection of “meaning”, “theory”, and “semiology”. 3. The term “author function” is derived from Michel Foucault, “What is an author?” (1969), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca US: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124–127. See also Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author” (1967), in Image – Music – Text, edited by Stephen Heath (London UK: Fontana, 1977), 142–148. 4. The figures functionality can be considered separate to graphic design and visual style. In an interview conducted by Andrew P. Steen, Robert Riddel and Janina Gosseye, Jackie Cooper and Haig Beck assert Jencks was uninterested in graphic design – see www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q9NZ7nP5fs. 5. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok (New York US: John Wiley & Sons, 1960), 350–377; Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance,” in Fundamentals of Language, (den Haag NL: Mouton, 1956), 55–82; and others. Jakobson’s language theories have been unpopular since the mid-1970s — see Richard Buchanan, Roman Jakobson: Life, Language, Art (London UK: Routledge, 1994), 76 — but aspects are revitalized here to analyse the function of both “Semiology and Architecture” and “Jencks”. Chapter 5 of this thesis discusses how Jencks, though he did not mention Jakobson, can in fact be seen as indebted to his work on poetics. 6.

Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 356.

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The figures help classify two sequential conditions in Jencks’s text: one in which the line of reasoning or argument is effectively contiguous, and the communication process is assumed to be transparent; the other in which the argument is diverted or even stalled by a formal selection that disturbs contiguity by interjecting incongruous and often contradictory information. The unimpeded advance of the former, which exercises the referential function of language, is of transitory concern to this dissertation: smooth progression along the syntagmatic axis develops progressive theoretical argumentation. Rather it is the diversions and stalls constitutive of the latter that are the focus of study. It is here that the significant aspect of the constitution of Jencks as author is affected; and it is within the ambiguous terrain between referential and poetic functions, argumentation and naming, that Jencks gains resolution. Due to the poetic function of the text — to the “set” towards the message itself, 7 manifested most clearly in the text’s figures — the authorial status of Jencks becomes overtly constructed. This thesis argues that the poetic function of the figures helps associate Jencks with two discursive constructs, each embedded within the text and predicated upon the formal aspects of its message. The first construct is an intellectual character marked by agonist asceticism and sober ratiocination. Borrowing from the work of Ian Hunter, this type will be referred to as the persona of the Theorist. 8 The second construct exploits unexpected intertextual conjunctions, affects a casual bearing, adds humour, and plays with language forms. This thesis relates it to the tradition and structural formation called the Wit. Other related constructs might have been employed throughout the thesis — the Joker, associated with occult trickery; the Thief, identified with secrecy and deception; the Shaman, a manipulator of language and consciousness; the Messiah, the liberator of a community anointed by a god; the Enfant terrible, dependent on intergenerational hostility or disrespect for tradition or canonical knowledge, and marked by rebellion,

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Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 356.

8. Ian Hunter, “History of Theory,” Critical Enquiry 33:1 (Autumn, 2006): 78–112; Ian Hunter, “The Time of Theory,” Postcolonial Studies 10:1 (2007): 5–22. The “persona of the theorist” presented by Hunter will be detailed in chapter 2. In short, Hunter’s “theorist” — exemplified for Hunter by Jacques Derrida — is an echo of the early university Christian metaphysician. This “theorist” transcends the everyday, standing above the commonsense forms of language and objects of received knowledge to deliver a new and overarching mode of analysis and engagement. This thesis argues Jencks conforms to some, but not all, of these characteristics. While not part of its argument, this thesis suggests understandings of “theory” in architecture more broadly would profit from Hunter’s conceptual object. This thesis does not trace the intellectual type as an historical object as Hunter does, but rather looks for the textual functioning of the persona of the Theorist within “Semiology and Architecture”.

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confrontation, and lack of decorum; and many others — but to stretch the analysis over too many mythical personas would dilute the effect of this presentation of the poetic function of the text. The Theorist and the Wit are considered appropriately typological and representative, allowing analysis without proliferating a mythical microcosm. Each chapter of this thesis will address distinct figures of “Semiology and Architecture” to support the above claims and arguments. The method investigates the referential content that is drawn into Jencks’s text ostensibly as transparently communicated fragments of interdisciplinary “theory”, to reveal its underlying poetic significances. The resultant figuration of language reveals synecdochal relationships and metonymic connections while conceptualizing the discursive practice of naming. In so doing the thesis restructures the relation of words to things within architectural intellectualization. The remainder of this introductory chapter will realize nine functions: provide historical contextualization for the study; investigate the historical significance of the key word “meaning”; investigate the academic significance of “meaning” and the related terms “linguistic turn” and “theory moment”; give a brief history of the use of language and semiotic analysis in architectural discourse; present the existing literature on Meaning in Architecture; present the intellectual position of this study relative to this existing literature; critique the existing literature on “Semiology and Architecture”; detail the specific objects and define the basic concepts of the thesis, and provide a short position statement to act as a projective conclusion for the thesis; and, lastly, provide a chapter outline of the thesis.

1.2.

The architecture theory scene in mid- to late-1960s London formed an intense

milieu. A collection of intellectuals, all connected to higher education institutions — the Bartlett, University College London, the Architectural Association, Cambridge University, the Warburg Institute, and the Royal College of Arts — and associated with architectural journals — the Architectural Association journal Interbuild / Arena / AAQ, Architectural Review, and Architectural Design — aggregated into a loose community. 9

9. The collection of individuals included but was not limited to Peter Reyner and Mary Banham, Alison and Peter Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, James Stirling, Alan Colquhoun, Kenneth Frampton, Colin Rowe, Peter Eisenman, Stanford Anderson, Joseph Rykwert, George Baird, Charles Jencks, Nathan Silver, Geoffrey Broadbent, Martin Pawley, Cedric Price, Peter Cook, Ron Herron, Michael Webb, Warren Chalk, Alvin Boyarsky, Léon Krier, and Rem Koolhaas. During this period, scholars from the continent,

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A number, including Jencks, came to England from prestigious North American universities to pursue doctoral studies in the expanding United Kingdom tertiary sector. 10 As well as comprising a social network, this community produced an outpouring of texts, ranging from pop magazines, to newspaper articles, to scholarly journal essays. In customary accounts based on an historical narrative, these texts are positioned as symptomatic of the milieu in which they were produced. 11 Conflicts over ideology and interpersonal politics are framed as determining the nature of these textual objects. 12 Alternate accounts of the period and its texts are suppressed by this dominant story.13 The discursive formation behind these texts has not received due scholarly address. As stated above, this thesis closely interrogates the text “Semiology and Architecture” and the author function “Jencks” within it. The person Jencks, 14 and his later and betterknown works are nevertheless important to the basic set-up of this study, and require a

especially France and Italy, exerted an influence on the London-based architectural community, either in person or through texts. Within Meaning in Architecture, these two extra-English sources are represented by Françoise Choay and Gillo Dorfles, respectively. Due to the scope of this project — its focus on texts rather than biographically inflected contexts or milieus — this cross-cultural interaction will not be a major focus. 10. UCL student Jencks followed fellow US Ivy-leaguers Eisenman and Silver, both students at Cambridge University, to England. Canadians Baird and Boyarski also migrated across the Atlantic. For details on the history of universities in England in the 1960s, see Robert Hewison, Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960–75 (London UK: Methuen, 1986), 58–60. The movement of students from the US and Canada to the UK was reciprocated by moves from the UK to US by British lecturers Rowe, Frampton, Banham, and Colquhoun. 11. Common anthologies — K. Michael Hays, Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1998), Harry Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: An Historical Survey, 1673–1968 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Harry Mallgrave, An Introduction to Architectural Theory 1968 to the Present (Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Kate Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995 (New York US: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), and Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (New York US: Columbia Graduate School of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993) — promote this logic. 12. Symptomatic here is Peter Eisenman, “Building in Meaning. Book Review: Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird,” Architectural Forum 133 (July/August, 1970): 88+90, an article to which discussion returns below, both directly and indirectly. The colouring of the history of the 1960s is described by Lara Schrijver as continuing to be affected by “the rose-coloured glasses of the time” – Lara Schrijver, Radical Games: Popping the Bubble of 1960s Architecture (Rotterdam NL: NAi, 2009), 15. 13.

Schrijver, Radical Games, 9–11, points out this issue.

14. A very brief, concessional biography: Charles Alexander Jencks was born 21 June 1939 in Baltimore, USA. He received a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature from Harvard University in 1961, and a Master of Arts degree in Architecture from Harvard Graduate Design School in 1965. He was chief editor of the Harvard journal Connection, in which he published his first articles. At the turn of 1969 he had published a mere five articles, all in issues of the AA journal. For the forty-five years since he has published a vast number of books, articles, and films, and spoken at many institutions and events.

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small digression. As well as providing helpful context, this content underwrites the dissertation’s claims to significance over a broad territory of intellectual history. Jencks is highly significant to the architectural discourse of the late twentieth century. He is best known for his many contributions to “Post-Modern” architectural theory. His prominent book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, first published in 1977, was revised and republished in 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, and 1991, and translated into French, Japanese, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Czech, and, in part, Chinese and Italian. 15 Taschen’s Architectural Theory: From the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Bernd Evers and Christoph Thoenes, nominates The Language of Post-Modern Architecture as “one of the most successful works on architectural theory from the post1945 era.” 16 Irrespective of the theoretical and practical contributions of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Jencks’s marketing of “Post-Modern Architecture” as an architectural term must rank as one of the most effective examples of the twentieth century. Jencks’s undeniable publishing and discursive success has led to his own name having a conspicuous, brand-like significance that encompasses his varied intellectual positions over almost five decades. The grounds of this name are due a tilling. The basic supposition underwriting this thesis is that a text from the period preceding The Language of Post-Modern Architecture can provide a lens through which to view the formation of Jencks as that author function extends to The Language of Post-Modern Architecture and beyond. In this respect, “The Early Critical Bases of the Critic Charles Jencks”, the third case study in Judith M.C. Brine’s doctoral thesis, “The Nature of Public Appreciation of Architecture: A Theoretical Exposition and Three Case Studies”, (1987) provides a valuable precedent. 17 Brine’s focus, as the title indicates, is on the “Critic” Jencks. Distinctively, the foci of this current work might roughly be said to be on the “Theorist” Jencks, and his shadow, the “Wit” Jencks.

15. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture 1 st ed. (London UK: Academy Editions, 1977). 16. Gilbert Lupfer, Jürgen Paul, and Paul Sigel, “20th Century,” in Architectural Theory: From the Renaissance to the Present: 89 Essays on 117 Treatises (Köln DE: Taschen, 2003), 802. 17. Judith M.C. Brine, “The Nature of Public Appreciation of Architecture: A Theoretical Exposition and Three Case Studies” (PhD Thesis, Adelaide University, 1987). In the same year, another PhD thesis covered Jencks’s semiological enterprise within an intensive survey of the broader field: see Paul Walker, “Semiotics and the Discourse of Architecture” (PhD Thesis, University of Auckland, 1987). Both of these texts support this current thesis.

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The following pages will not write a history of Jencks, nor of Post-Modernism. While these broader trajectories are assumed knowledge, the present study is constrained to a single point in time and expresses structural relations. This thesis scrutinizes one of Jencks’s earliest texts, what might be called his breakthrough work. 18 While its reception was at the time and continues to be somewhat limited, the text is very ambitious: it is linguistically and ideologically dense; and it is holistic and imperious. “Semiology and Architecture” might be seen as a test run for the writing style and mode of authorship of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. In its treatment of naming — its denaturalization of proper names, and reification of concepts — it might be understood as conceptual grounding for Jencks’s widely distributed Evolutionary Trees. This thesis nonetheless presents “Semiology and Architecture” as a discrete exemplar, its linguistic constitution emblematic of the poetic function’s effect in architectural discourse. “Charlie” Jencks was an active member of the London-based architectural community. From 1966 to 1970, he was undertaking doctoral research at the Bartlett, University College London, under the supervision of Peter Reyner Banham, and attending lectures, and conducting seminars at the Architectural Association. He was a man about town. In the late 1960s, Jencks also published articles in the AA’s journal Arena / AAQ; in Architectural Design; and in Architectural Review. 19 These texts established the author Jencks within English-language architectural discourse. This discursive function is accessed in this current analysis through the single work, “Semiology and Architecture”. Ostensibly, Meaning in Architecture constitutes a summation of the dialogue within architecture theory that developed throughout the 1960s. 20 It intentionally includes

18. His first edited book and his first book chapter: as noted above, Jencks also writes the short “Preface” (7–8) to Meaning in Architecture, and the later chapter, “History as Myth” (244–265). 19 . See Charles Jencks, “Gropius, Wright and the Intentional Fallacy,” Arena (June/July, 1966); “The Problem of Mies,” Arena (May, 1966); “Alvar Aalto and Some Concepts of Value,” Arena (November, 1967); “Adhocism on the South Bank. Review of the Hayward Gallery,” Architectural Review 14 (July, 1968); “Pop – Non Pop. Part 1,” AAQ 1:1 (Winter, 1968/1969) and “Pop – Non Pop. Part 2,” AAQ 1:2 (April, 1969); “Pigeonholing Made Difficult: On the Use of Numerical Taxonomy as a Delicate Way of Classifying Architects,” Architectural Design (November, 1969). 20. The book collapses several years. Baird’s “‘La Dimension Amoureuse’ in Architecture,” Banham’s “Flatscape with Containers,” and Choay’s “Urbanism and Semiology” date from 1967. Frampton’s “Labour, Work and Architecture” was read at Princeton University in 1966. Banham’s “A Home is not a House” and the original Italian version of Rykwert’s “The Sitting Position” were first published in 1965.

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contradictory positions. 21 The volume contains works produced by many of the significant parties within the London milieu. 22 It offers a selection of the enunciative positions available at the time, each one active and assertive. Kenneth Frampton has referred to the London architectural milieu in the 1960s as a “crucible”. 23 Characterizations of the period based on its constitutive milieu are commonly structured around antagonism and heated struggle. This thesis avoids the interpersonal frictions underlying the discourse. It argues that much can be discovered through more temperate analyses of the formal objects themselves, in their own terms. Approaching “Semiology and Architecture” through textual analysis allows for a rearticulation of the intellectual territory under investigation that resists undue weight on historicizing accounts of motive. Focusing on textuality reveals an archaeology with the potential to enrich the theoretical and historiographical conditions of the present.

1.3.

The criterial word in Meaning in Architecture predates modern English. The

Oxford English Dictionary lists several obsolete or archaic usages of “meaning”, and two categories extending to the present, and relevant to this thesis. 24 The first of these is defined as “[t]he significance, purpose, underlying truth, etc., of something.” 25 The examples given by the OED reveal the early significance of pre-scientific religious ideology; the rise of science; and the rise of romantic ideology. 26 The second “meaning” is defined as “the sense or signification of a word, sentence, etc.” 27 This second usage represents a preoccupation with the stakes of communication. 21. In his “Preface,” Jencks claims “the book is in the form of a controversy or a debate” – Charles Jencks, “Preface,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 7. 22. The authors are: internationals Françoise Choay, Gillo Dorfles, and Aldo van Eyck (with Paul Parrin and Fritz Morgenthaler); members of the old guard Reyner Banham, Kenneth Frampton, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Joseph Rykwert and Alan Colquhoun; and young turks Jencks, Baird, Geoffrey Broadbent, Martin Pawley, and Nathan Silver. 23. Kenneth Frampton, “The English Crucible,” in CIAM Team 10, The English Context, edited by D’Laine Camp, Dirk van den Heuvel and Gijs deWaal (Delft NL: TU Delft, 2002). Accessed 4 October, 2014, www.team10online.org/research/papers/delft1/frampton.pdf. 24. “meaning, n.2,” OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press, accessed 29 October, 2014, www.oed.com/view/Entry/115465. 25.

“meaning, n.2,” OED Online.

26. One notable definition is: “[s]omething which gives one a sense of purpose, value, etc., esp[ecially] of a metaphysical or spiritual kind; the (perceived) purpose of existence or of a person’s life – [f]req[uently] in [‘]the meaning of life[’]” – “meaning, n.2,” OED Online. 27.

“meaning, n.2,” OED Online.

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Most of the examples of the use of “meaning” provided by the OED evidence a premodern desire to ascertain the substance of thoughts and actions in society; and the remainder demonstrate the emerging significance of the law in English-speaking society. Many of the uses quoted in the OED are inflected by Christianity. 28 Concerns for “meaning” are often related to the metaphysical, invoking God and the illusion of order and certainty in an uncertain world — largely through the medium of language. The most pertinent sense of “meaning” to twentieth century intellectual history relates to signification. The objects of the social world understood as spiritual mysteries before the seventeenth century become subject to individuated and objective analysis at that time. The question type, “what is the meaning of ———?” is representative of this change. Signification as a systematic process, the knowability or otherwise of an individual subject’s intention, and the mediation of ideas in sign vehicles, have replaced divine will as primary objects in the years since the scientific revolution. The place of “meaning” in modern society is indeed in large part linked to the ascendance of the dictionary, the thesaurus, and the encyclopaedia. While the scientific revolution mainstream has worked to discredit the “meaning” defined as “a message, warning, idea, etc., … symbolized by a dream, vision, omen, etc.,” its effect might be ongoing within the processes of symbolization present in the collective subconscious. As intimated throughout the thesis, the residue of superstitious belief clings to language. The history of the word “meaning” itself does little to express the rise of the concept in intellectual history. Compound usages, however, are more revealing. The OED lists fifteen forms that include “meaning”. 29 Notably, all fifteen compound usages arose in the twentieth century. Nine of fifteen date from between 1947 and 1965. Thus while the 28. John Trevisa’s translation of Benedectine monk Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, published sometime before 1387, contains two usage varieties; and sometime in the 16th century, J. Frith promises he “wyll bryflye declare the meaninge of the apostle” – “meaning, n.2,” OED Online. 29. “Meaning analysis”, Louis Wirth and Edward A. Shils, 1936; “meaning area”, Chaim M. Rabin, 1958; “meaning-change”, Fred G. Cassidy, 1954; “meaning component”, Journal of Anthropological Institutions, 1937; “meaning-content,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1906; “meaning-making”, Owen Barfield, 1947; “meaning-postulate”, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 1952; “meaning potential”, Philosophy Review, 1954; “meaning-relation”, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1904; “meaning-relationship”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1923; “meaning-unit”, Isaac Goldberg, 1938; “meaning-bearing”, Noam Chomsky, 1953; “meaning-carrying”, Henry A. Gleason, 1965; “meaning-free”, Mind, 1949; and “meaning-text model”, Aleksandr K. Žolkovsky and Igor A. Mel’čuk, 1965 – “meaning, n.2,” OED Online.

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meaning of “meaning” has changed little in over six hundred years, the word’s presence in English-language discourse mushroomed in the years post World War Two, and by the late 1960s it performed many functions. The word had become technical and jargonistic.

1.4.

“Meaning” was an important term in academia in the years leading up to the

publication of Meaning in Architecture. It was used in a variety of academic discourses, being many things to many scholars. For linguist-philosopher Charles K. Ogden and literary critic Ivor A. Richards — who published their tour de force The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism in 1923 — “meaning” is a logical and pragmatic object of inquiry that is involved in the complex relationship between words and objects. For German-American art historian Erwin Panofsky — who published Meaning in the Visual Arts in 1955 — “meaning” is related to vision, helping process interpretations of cultural forms. For Charles E. Osgood, George J. Suci and Percy H. Tannenbaum — collaborators on The Measurement of Meaning, 1957 — “meaning” can be scaled and factored using experiments in psycholinguistics and mathematical modelling. Ogden and Richards, Panofsky, and Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum all feature in “Semiology and Architecture”, and for that reason are included in the discussions of this thesis. 30 Academic approaches to the concept of “meaning” came from diverse directions. Over the postwar period, the aggregated mass of texts using the term began to assert its weight on intellectual history. By the mid 1960s a very heavy impression had been made. In 1964, Susanne Langer asserted that “the concept of meaning, in all its varieties, is the dominant philosophical concept of our time.” 31 The architectural community contributed to the textual wave of “meaning” during the 1960s. Joseph Rykwert published “Meaning and Building” in 1960 after a stay at the

30. Chapter 3 of this thesis demonstrates how Ogden and Richards’s inquiry into “meaning” destabilizes the relationship of words to things; Panofsky’s “meaning” is critical to his iconographical and iconological analyses, as discussed in chapter 4; and the “meaning”-focused work of Osgood et al is central to the discussion of “The Semantic Space of Current Architects” carried out in chapter 5. 31. Quoted in Robert G. Hershberger, “A Study of Meaning in Architecture” (PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1969), 18, and again in Robert G. Hershberger, “Architecture and Meaning,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 4:4 (October, 1970): 39. Marjorie B. Creelman, The Experimental Investigation of Meaning: A Review of the Literature (New York: Springer, 1966) reveals the amount of scholarly material existent in the mid 1960s.

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Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm. 32 In the same year, David A. Crane’s article “The City Symbolic” explored “meaningfulness” in the urban environment. 33 Christian NorbergSchulz’s Intentions in Architecture, 1963, gives “meaning” intensive and extensive treatment in its examination of the symbolic dimension of architecture. 34 Denise Scott Brown titled an article “The Meaningful City” in 1965; and the argument of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of the following year was couched in the term. 35 George Baird and Charles Jencks edited a special issue of Arena: The Architectural Association Journal under the title of “Meaning in Architecture” in June 1967. This was revised and considerably expanded into Meaning in Architecture, edited by Jencks and Baird in 1969. 36 Robert G. Hershberger published a doctoral thesis on “meaning” in 1969, and this research extended into a series of articles up to the mid1970s. 37 Hershberger’s rigorous studies went as far as proposing a general theory of meaning in architecture, and testing the theory with experiments. 38 The comparative anonymity of Hershberger in relation to Jencks is important to note. 39 It sketches an intrinsic theme underwriting this current thesis: the domination of architectural theory not by the referential but by the poetic function; textuality not marked by cogency but rather by mannerism; discourse not cohered and progressed by ideas but rather by names.

32.

Joseph Rykwert, “Meaning and Building,” Zodiac 6 (1960): 193–196.

33.

David A. Crane, “The City Symbolic,” AIP Journal 26:4 (November, 1960): 280–292.

34.

Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Oslo NO: Universitetsforlaget, 1963).

35. Denise Scott Brown, “The Meaningful City,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 43 (January, 1965): 27–32; Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York US: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). 36. Baird was primary editor of the Arena special issue, but left the UK for his native North America before 1969. Jencks took over as primary editor for the edited book. 37. Hershberger begins his dissertation’s “Introduction” by writing: “In recent years many architects have been stressing the importance of meaning in architecture. Few, however, have made thorough studies of the nature of this meaning” – Hershberger, “A Study of Meaning in Architecture,” 1. 38. Hershberger promotes a “two-stage model of meaning” that “combines the “mentalistic” and “meditational” theories of meaning”. His study establishes a “framework of meaning as an internal stimulus-response situation composed of representations and various internalized responses [with] two types of representation: presentational and referential; and three types of internalized responses: affective, evaluative, and prescriptive” – Hershberger, “A Study of Meaning in Architecture,” 34, 23; 42. 39. This is not to degrade Hershberger. His career was impressive: he was a Professor at the College of Architecture at the University of Arizona, and Dean from 1988 to 1997; practicing architect with Hershberger and Nichols Architects/Planners; and has continued publishing, most recently on architectural programming. However, Hershberger’s name — his celebrity — is not comparable to Charles Jencks within the architectural mainstream.

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Scholarly concerns for “meaning” in the late 1960s are linked to what many consider a major event in intellectual history conceptualized under the label, the “linguistic turn”. 40 The “linguistic turn” was initiated in philosophy. Twentieth-century philosophers turned away from traditional philosophy based on metaphysics towards so-called linguistic philosophy based on the relation of language to ideas. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) led the turn; and debates around Ideal and Ordinary Language at Oxford University in the 1930s saw the movement gather momentum. Gustav Bergmann, author of Meaning and Existence (1959), first used the term “linguistic turn” in a review published in 1960. The anthology The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, edited and introduced by Richard Rorty and published in 1967, constitutes a major discursive landmark. From that point on, the term and the general programme spread through the academic landscape. Into the 1970s, the “linguistic turn” became interdisciplinary. A “turn” is said to have affected almost every field of the humanities; and these actions are commonly characterized as one monolithic event. 41 Intellectualizations based on language became established as the prevailing condition in the humanities. Architecture conformed to and supported this trend. K. Michael Hays, Harry Mallgrave, Kate Nesbitt, and Joan Ockman — Americans all once removed from the 1960s London milieu — anthologize volumes consistent with these broader arguments. 42 The “linguistic theory” to which Nesbitt refers influenced discourse in the humanities and human sciences, and in the arts, both fine and liberal. 43 Hays quotes French philosopher Jacques

40 See, for example, Richard Rorty, “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge US: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50–65, and John E. Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” The American Historical Review 92:4 (1987): 879–907. 41. For example, Seán Burke refers to “what has been called the linguistic revolution” – Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 12. 42. Hays, Architecture Theory Since 1968, Mallgrave, … Architectural Theory … 1673–1968, Mallgrave, … Architectural Theory 1968 to the Present, Nesbitt, … An Anthology of … 1965–1995, and Ockman, Architecture Culture 1943–1968. Hanno-Walter Kruft, History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present (New York US: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994) also covers the period, but does not include England. In Kruft’s opinion, “[a]fter the Second World War the British contribution to architectural theory remained reserved” (434). Hays, Nesbitt, and Ockman are part of the Eisenman–Rowe lineage, having worked at the IAUS or in the office of Eisenman Architects. The PhD of Mallgrave was supervised by Stanford Anderson, AA affiliate in 1962–63 and IAUS member from its inception in 1967. 43. Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda, 33. Nesbitt also claims “[a] shift in concerns in postmodern cultural criticism has also been effected by the restructuring of thought in linguistic paradigms. Semiotics, structuralism, and in particular poststructuralism (including deconstruction) have

27

Derrida, who nominates the late 1960s as “the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse.” 44 By these accounts, language- and sign-based texts overran traditional, “centred”, architectural theory. The significance of the “linguistic turn” and the discourse attending to conceptions of “meaning” developed from a broad base. Linguistic philosophy was bundled with linguistics, specifically structural linguistics and its offshoot semiology. Semiological investigations were aggregated with other studies applying doctrines of signs more accurately termed semiotics. The significance of “meaning” was thus coupled with analyses on signification; and the position of “meaning” was framed within the thenpervasive structuralist framework. The manner in which the parallel discourses of linguistic philosophy, structural linguistics, semiology, and semiotics were treated as synonymous, and concepts such as “meaning” were extracted as discrete discursive objects and reified, contribute to defining the intellectual history of the period. But the word “turn” connotes an abrupt diversion. It suggests a sharp detour from a straight path. The term is misleading: the role of language theory in architecture has a far more extended and nuanced history than this rudimentary deviation. 45 Architectural theory’s use of language models and linguistic analogues has a history that extends to antiquity. The textuality of architectural theory is self-evident: architecture, as opposed to building, is an intrinsically communicative phenomenon, based on shared cultural values and affects. The significance of architecture is what supports not only the material field, but the broader, culturally-defined industry, with all its various players. Architecture’s so-called “linguistic turn” is commonly dated from the late 1960s to the 1990s, sometimes stretching to the year 2000. According to Hays, Mallgrave, Nesbitt,

reshaped many disciplines, including literature, philosophy, anthropology and sociology, and critical activity at large” (32). 44. Attributed to “Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference” – quoted in the epigraph to K. Michael Hays, “Introduction,” in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1998), xvi. 45. Louis Martin, “The Search for a Theory in Architecture: Anglo-American Debates, 1957– 1976” (PhD Thesis, Princeton University, 2002) surveys so-called “Anglo-American Debates” from the years 1957 to 1976 in search for a unified theoretical ground. Linguistic theory in architecture is taken by Martin to be an aspect of the broader discursive formation of structuralism–post-structuralism. Martin argues “the history of French structuralism and the history of the search for an architectural theory intersect” (674). The degree to which Martin’s doctoral supervisor, 1960s London milieu participant Colquhoun, influenced this argument is moot.

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and Ockman, after taking a turn under the influence of linguistics or structuralism, architecture established a new standard. In his foreword to Ockman’s anthology, Bernard Tschumi states that the period produced “a concept of architecture as ‘theoretical project,’ as a critical project not so much aiming to be a model for future practice as meant to remain theoretical.” 46 Architecture saw a new type of “theory”, a new definition of “theory”. Felicity Scott calls it “architectural theory proper”. 47 This thesis investigates whether what might make it “proper” is not its ideological or intellectual grounds, but its formal textuality: its ability to establish proper names. Despite these historical and cultural relationships, architectural history, theory, and criticism after the year 2000 attends to discursive “meaning” in only a cursory way. Expressing a view common to recent commentators and to the general architectural community, Dianne Y. Ghirardo sums up the three decades after 1970 as “theoretical delirium in which poeticising reflection passed for theory […:] thirty years of trying on and discarding borrowed theories with all the rapidity of a commodified consumer at an outlet sale.” 48 The desire to put the prolonged intellectual episode behind us has found full voice through Michael Speaks and his focus on “intelligence”. 49 Again, architectural discourse can be seen to shadow intellectual attention in critical discourses focused on literature and philosophy. In 2004, Terry Eagleton proclaimed that intellectual history has reached a stage After Theory. 50 He refers to the so-called theory period as a boom. The implication is that it subsequently bust. In “Why has critique run out of steam?”, 51 Bruno Latour probes such opposition-based definitions. Rhetorically he asks, “[s]hould we be at war too, we … the intellectuals? … More iconoclasm to

46. Bernard Tschumi, “Foreword,” in Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (New York US: Columbia Graduate School of Architecture/Rizzoli: 1993), 11. 47. Felicity D. Scott, “On the Counter-Design of Institutions: Emilio Ambasz’s Universitas Project at MoMA,” Grey Room 14 (Winter, 2004): 49. 48. Diane Y. Ghirardo, “Manfredo Tafuri and Architectural Theory in the US, 1970–2000,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 45. Quoted in John Macarthur and Naomi Stead, “The Judge is not an Operator: Historiography, Criticality and Criticism,” OASE 69 (2004): 116. 49 . Michael Speaks, “Design Intelligence: Or Thinking After the End of Metaphysics,” Architectural Design 72:5 (September, 2002): 4–6; Michael Speaks, “Intelligence After Theory,” Perspecta 38 (2006): 102–107; Michael Speaks, “After Theory,” Architectural Record 193:6 (June, 2005): 72–75. 50.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London UK: Penguin Books, 2004).

51. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Enquiry 30 (Winter, 2004): 225–248.

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iconoclasm?” 52 The futility of such a position is apparent. This thesis aims at overcoming such antinomious frameworks. The term “theory moment” is terminally coloured by previous analyses. Furthermore, it is inherently emotive. The specificity of “moment” connotes fast-paced breathlessness and historical import. It suggests a fleeting time period filled with anticipation. It might be associated with the modern movement’s claim to have been continually at the point of the apotheosis of a new zeitgeist. This present study aims to go beyond characterizing kinds of theory based on historical comparisons or narratives. 53 Much recent architectural writing has distanced itself from the so-called “linguistic turn” or “theory moment”. 54 Concerns for “meaning” have become unfashionable. This thesis holds that such a position throws the baby out with the bath water. Simply delimiting “theory”, “the linguistic turn”, and discursive investigations of “meaning”, ignores the epistemological content at stake. Pigeonholing “theory” in a tragic narrative resists the lessons it can teach us about writing about architecture across history. Classifying texts as representative of the “linguistic turn” or “theory moment” provokes caricature. Such texts risk being taken as nothing more than a “tedious roundabout”. 55 Yet due to their reflexive relations to language forms and systems, the architectural texts representative of the “linguistic turn”, “theory moment”, or “discourse on meaning” allow a window into the discursive apparatus underlying architecture. Attempts to deal with the significant units of the discourse of architecture bring to the surface the formation upon which all relations are built.

52. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” 225. Schrijver uses Latour to support her own projective theory – see Schrijver, Radical Games, 39. The redefinitions implicitly negotiated over the course of this thesis align with her broader ambitions in Radical Games. 53. This goal echoes that of Burke, who writes: “The aim of this … project … is not to replace the death of the author by any ‘end’ or ‘death’ of theory … for it is precisely the ideas of ‘deaths’, ‘ends’, ‘closures’, ‘epistemological breaks’, ‘final ruptures’, etc., that have so often barred the way to meaningful and constructive debate” – Burke, The Death and Return of the Author, 18. 54 . See for example the journal special issue, Deborah Hauptmann and Andrej Radman eds., Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal 14 “Asignifying Semiotics: Or How to Paint Pink on Pink” (April, 2014). 55. This phrase is borrowed from Richard M. Rorty, who is himself quoting Gustav Bergmann – Richard M. Rorty, “Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy,” in The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. With Two Retrospective Essays (Chicago US: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 8.

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The aim of this work is to find an appropriate description of the theory underwriting architecture’s “linguistic turn” in its own terms and structures. Defining a theory of “meaning” is not the point of this thesis; rather the thesis focuses on analysing artefacts of this formation of theory.

1.5.

As mentioned above, language-based approaches to architecture pre-date the

linguistic turn. The communicable “meaning” of architecture was a concern well before the so-called theory moment. Leon Battista Alberti’s “Ten Books” (De re aedificatoria, CE

1485) helped characterize architecture as a humanist discipline. Adrian Forty, Sylvia

Lavin, and Thomas A. Markus and Deborah Cameron have all detailed how metaphors of language shape post-Renaissance architectural theory. 56 Architecture can easily be framed as grammatical or literary, and both strategies have seen common use over the past few centuries. Martin Krampen goes further back, suggesting Marcus Vitruvius Pollio produced “a kind of architectural semiology” in his original “Ten Books” (De Architectura, c. 15

BCE ).

57

Architecture and theories of communication are evidently compatible. But rigorous analysis of architecture as a structured language system has a far shorter history. It is nonetheless significant, and important to this thesis. This section will give a brief account. A large proportion of the scientific or at least doctrinaire approaches to signification within architecture can be cast in relation to a loose tradition of semiotics in architectural pedagogy linked to the Bauhaus. Semiotics as such was not a significant presence at the Bauhaus schools in Weimar, Dessau, or Berlin. However, after the closure of the school in the Third Reich and the migration of its ideals and key

56. Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London UK: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1992); Thomas A. Markus and Deborah Cameron, The Words Between the Spaces: Buildings and Language (London UK: Routledge, 2002). 57. For Krampen, Vitruvius writes of “the thing signified and that which gives it significance” – Martin Krampen, “Survey on Current Work in Semiology of Architecture,” in A Semiotic Landscape: Proceedings of the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Milan, June 1974 : Panorama Sémiotique: Actes Du Premier Congrès De L’association Internationale De Sémiotique. Milan, Juin 1974, edited by Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (Den Haag NL: Mouton, 1979), 169.

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protagonists to the United States, an underlying pragmatic and positivist tendency was formalized; and it became curricular. As Director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, Laszlo Maholy-Nagy engaged Charles W. Morris to teach the course “Intellectual Integration”. 58 Morris was a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, and a prominent advocate of the Unity of Science movement. 59 The base to “Intellectual Integration” was Morris’s semiotic system. He developed a theoretical framework based on the Anglo-American pragmatic tradition. 60 He published a full account of this project in Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938). While “Intellectual Integration” only ran from 1937 until around 1941, 61 the intellectual integration of Morris’s semiotics helped renovate the Bauhaus model. The legacy of the Bauhaus on architectural pedagogy in the United States is celebrated, 62 in large part due to narratives starring eminent émigré architects. But in the shadow of a war that indiscriminately tainted Weimar and Third Reich era German language units, the nominal link was dropped. Due to financial circumstance, the New Bauhaus became the School of Design in 1938; and the School of Design became the Institute of Design in 1944. In 1949, the Institute merged with Illinois Tech to form a new institution, the Illinois Institute of Technology. While the Bauhaus name was consigned to history books, the ideology re-surfaced in Germany after the war. The return is attributable to an overt political agenda. 63 Inge 58. Harry F. Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment: The Implications of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design (London UK: Routledge, 2013), 131. 59. Mallgrave, An Introduction to Architectural Theory 1968 to the Present, 38; The Unity of Science movement itself can be traced back to the Vienna Circle – see Peter Galison, “Aufbau / Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 16:4 (Summer, 1990): 709–752. For Morris’s mission statement, see Charles Morris, “The Contribution of Science to the Designer’s Task,” in Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, edited by Hans M. Wingler (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1969), 195. Richard Buchanan gives an interesting account in “Rhetoric, Humanism and Design,” in Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, edited by Richard Buchanan (Chicago US: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 60. Morris was a student of George Herbert Read — not to be confused with Sir Herbert Read of the ICA, referent for Reyner Banham, as discussed in chapter 6. 61. Victor Margalin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Maholy-Nagy, 1917–1946 (Chicago US: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 223. The date is strangely ambiguous. 62. See Andrew Phelan, “The Bauhaus and Studio Art Education,” Art Education 34:5 (September, 1981): 6. 63. Christoph Klütsch, “Information aesthetics and the Stuttgart School,” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early computing and the foundations of the digital arts, edited by Hannah B Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley US: University of California Press, 2012), 81.

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Aicher-Scholl’s siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl were resistance fighters with the Weisse Rose group. They were shot by Nazi soldiers in 1943. Inge Aicher-Scholl wanted to commemorate her siblings, and explicitly celebrate an institution that was denounced and eventually closed by Nazi officials. With her husband, Otl Aicher, Inge AicherScholl’s institutional formation was another act of resistance. Indeed, the working title of the institution at Ulm was the Scholl Sibling Institute. The more neutral name Hochschule für Gestaltung (School of Design) was arrived at after the Aicher-Scholls engaged Swiss artist and former Bauhaus student Max Bill as school rector. 64 Though classes had been run since 1953, the HfG Ulm was officially opened in 1955. The relation of the HfG to sign-based theories was tumultuous. Director Bill engaged Max Bense to teach “information”. 65 Bense’s theory of aesthetics was based on signs, language, and communication: it was, in short, semiotic. His theoretical position encouraged an intellectual climate to develop within the younger teaching staff. 66 In the mid 1950s, partially in response to the increasingly commercialized world in which the Ulm school found itself, Bense’s position was developed by a progressive faculty. 67 In 1956, the board of governors — Otl Aicher, Tomás Maldonado, Hans Gugelot, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart — began to re-direct the HfG towards science. Citing irreconcilable differences, Bill left in 1957. From 1958 to 1962, the school pursued abstract positivism supported by cybernetic information theory. 68 In 1962, under Aicher’s rectorship, a new constitution was installed. Largely under influence of Maldonado, whose “Basic Course” was developed around semiotics, the HfG was now committed to what was called “value-driven” design. 69 The school institutionalized an “ethically-based ‘critical semiotics’.” 70 Their

64. Paul Betts, “Science, Semiotics and Society: The Ulm Hochschule für Gesaltung in Retrospect,” Design Issues 14:2 (Summer, 1998): 69. 65.

Klütsch, “Information aesthetics and the Stuttgart School,” 81.

66.

Betts, “Science, Semiotics and Society,” 79

67.

Betts, “Science, Semiotics and Society,” 79

68. “Ulm School of Design,” in Design Dictionary: Perspectives on Design Terminology, edited by Michael Erlhoff and Timothy Marshall (Basel CH: Birkhäuser, 2008), 418. 69. www.hfg-archiv.ulm.de/english/the_hfg_ulm/timeline.html. See also Herbert Lindinger, “Ulm: Legend and Living Idea,” in Ulm Design: The Morality of Objects, edited by Herbert Lindinger and David Britt (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1991). 70.

Betts, “Science, Semiotics and Society,” 80.

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objective was “to develop a new science of everyday objects.” 71 This famed “Ulm model”, however, was not to have a long-term tenure. Under political and financial pressure, the doors of the HfG closed in 1968. 72 Temporally between Morris’s New Bauhaus and Maldonado’s HfG Ulm, an architectural semiotics developed in Italy. In his “Survey on Current Work in Semiology of Architecture”, Martin Krampen argues this movement grew from circumstance. The postwar Italian landscape underwent a “construction boom and urban expansion”. 73 According to Krampen, “reckless speculation” resulted in sprawl and an architecture characterized by uniformity, and criticized for its lack of “meaning”. 74 Architects and critics developed semiotics with hopes of redressing these issues: to control the morphological unruliness, and realize so-called meaningful environments. Italian semiotics flourished in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. The hub of activity was the architecture school of Florence. 75 In works spanning the 1950s, Italo Gamberini developed a semiotics based on “constituent units”. 76 This kind of approach responded to the terminological issues besetting Italian architects in the wake of rampant and monotonous building. 77 Classifying architecture through its smallest possible units, however, is inherently challenged: the fluidity of the interpretation of architecture and its basic conceptual malleability resist such classifications. As a result, this kind of simplistic elemental practice soon lost momentum. 78

71.

Betts, “Science, Semiotics and Society,” 79.

72. Ideological pressure was no doubt also a factor. As discussed in chapter 2, Meaning in Architecture contributors Joseph Rykwert and Reyner Banham both engage in a critical dialogue with the HfG. Note the proximity of the HfG’s closure, 1968, to the publication of Meaning in Architecture, 1969. 73.

Krampen, “A Survey on Current Work of Semiology in Architecture,” 171.

74.

Krampen, “A Survey on Current Work of Semiology in Architecture,” 171.

75.

Krampen, “A Survey on Current Work of Semiology in Architecture,” 171.

76. Italo Gamberini, Per una analisi degli elementi dell’architettura (1953); Gli elementi dell’architettura come “parole” del linguaggio architettonico (1959); Analisi degli elementi costitutivi dell’architettura (1961). 77.

Krampen, “A Survey on Current Work of Semiology in Architecture,” 171.

78. There are, nevertheless, echoes of this activity in Meaning in Architecture. Charles Jencks promotes a system isolating “formemes”, “funcemes”, and “techemes” in “Semiology and Architecture”, and in commenting on Gillo Dorfles’s “Structuralism and Semiology in Architecture”. This system is, however, never developed further by Jencks. In emphasizing semiosis, Umberto Eco, “A Componential Analysis of the Architectural Sign /Column/,” Semiotica 5:2 (1972): 97–117 parodies this smallest linguistic unit practice.

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According to Mallgrave’s account of architectural semiotics in Modern Architectural Theory, Sergio Bettini was “one of the first theorists to speak of architectural form in terms of ‘signs’.” 79 He was not the last. Semiotic theories continued to shun simple linguistic analogues in favour of more sophisticated sign-based structural applications during the mid 1960s. In 1964, Giovanni Klaus Koenig produced a Morris-inspired analysis of architectural language; while Neapolitans Renato del Fusco and Maria Luisa Scalvini produced important semiological works of a primarily historical nature in 1967 and 1968 respectively. 80 In 1968, renowned semiotician Umberto Eco published what Krampen asserts is the “first synthesis of architectural semiotics” in La Struttura assente: Introduzione all ricerca semiologica. The influence of Eco on the Englishlanguage architectural discourse began as early as 1967, when he wrote “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare” for the conference “Vision ’67 — Survival and Growth”, and presented it at the conference held at the Loeb Student Center, New York University, 19 to 21 October, 1967. 81 Eco began to dominate semiotics in general and architectural semiotics in particular in the early to mid 1970s.

1.6.

Meaning in Architecture is recognized as a significant book in architectural

theory history. 82 It is a landmark. Hays uses Meaning in Architecture to characterize structuralist tendencies in his late avant-garde. 83 More recently, Meaning in Architecture

79. Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory, 373: Sergio Bettini, “Semantic Criticism and the Historical Continuty of European Architecture,” Zodiac 2 (1958). 80. Giuseppina Dal Canton, “Art Criticism,” in Encyclopaedia of Italian Literary Studies, edited by Gaetana Marrone (New York US: Routledge, 2006), 101. The titles are: Giovanni Klaus Koenig, Analisi del linguaggio architettonico (Florence IT: Editrice Fiorentina, 1964); Renato del Fusco, Note per una semiologia architettonica (Bari IT: Edizioni Dedalo, 1967); Maria Luisa Scalvini, “Simbolo e significato nello spazio architettonico,” Casabella 328 (September, 1968). 81. “Vision ’67” attendees included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gillo Dorfles, Buckminster Fuller, Vittorio Gregotti, and Victor Vasarely, amongst many others – “Vision ’67: Survival and Growth,” Design and Southern Illinois University, accessed 18 May, 2012, siudesign.org/vision_67.htm. 82. The book is mentioned in Hays, Mallgrave, and Nesbitt. It is part of the established narrative of architectural theory. While Geoffrey Broadbent wrote of the artificiality and redundancy of bringing “Semiology into Architecture” in the volume, he soon thereafter said it was a “revelation” – Martin, “A Search for A Theory in Architecture,” 689. Four of the fifteen Meaning in Architecture authors presented at the symposium “Architecture and Theories of the Sign”, held at Castelldefels, Barcelona, between March 14 and 18, 1972. Martin suggests this “attests the importance given to this book at the time” (687). Meaning in Architecture constitutes a “milestone publication” for Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume II: A New Agenda for Architecture (Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 169. 83. Tahl Kaminer, Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation: The Reproduction of Post-Fordism in Late-Twentieth-Century Architecture (Abingdon UK: Routledge, 2011), 40–41; K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2010), 23; Richard Coyne, Derrida for Architects (Abingdon UK: Routledge, 2011), 8.

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has been employed as a marker of post-structuralism. Hilde Heynen and Gwendolyn Wright refer to the contribution of “Charles Jencks and George Baird (1969)” as a vehicle that tried to “reinvigorate architectural theory at the wane of modernism.” 84 While Meaning in Architecture thus rates a mention, its exact standing has not been established. In “The Search for a Theory in Architecture”, Louis Martin includes Meaning in Architecture as evidence of his “Anglo-American debates”. 85 His thesis goes into some detail historicizing Meaning in Architecture. But his historical account of the period does not take a strong theoretical position, nor give an original assessment of Meaning in Architecture. Much of Martin’s positioning of the volume is best understood as a relay of the opinions of Peter Eisenman. In the punnily titled “Building in Meaning”, Eisenman claims that Meaning in Architecture “can only be considered an epilogue” to another of Jencks’s texts, “Pop – Non Pop”. 86 This is a dubious assessment. Jencks’s chapters in Meaning in Architecture can indeed be related to “Pop – Non Pop”; 87 but characterizing the book as an epilogue to this article-cum-chapter ascribes a lot of authorship to co-editor Jencks. Meaning in Architecture may embody the so-called “battlefield” of the London milieu, but positioning it as Jencks’s epilogue is difficult to support. 88 Eisenman’s “Building in Meaning” does include more direct critiques of Meaning in Architecture. According to Eisenman, the volume presents itself as a discourse of abstract theory, but in fact constitutes a cultural debate: an expression of socio-cultural 84. Hilde Heynen and Gwendollyn Wright, “Introduction: Shifting Paradigms and Concerns,” in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (London UK: SAGE, 2012), 42. 85. See Martin, “The Search for a Theory in Architecture” for a history that spans the usual temporal division to promote an understanding of architectural theory — the dream of a grand and singular tool — as linked to French intellectual currents – i.e., as following the same path of structuralism–to–poststructuralism. 86. The original assertion is in Eisenman, “Building in Meaning,” 88. Eisenman mis-transcribes this title as “Pop and Non-Pop”. 87. “Pop – Non Pop” is a two-part article published in Arena in 1968–69, and a chapter in his 1970 PhD “Modern Architecture”, and Jencks’s 1973 book Modern Movements in Architecture. The connection between “Semiology and Architecture” and “Pop – Non Pop” features in Andrew P. Steen, “Jencks’s Semiological History: Pop – Non Pop,” Open: 30th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast AU: SAHANZ): 3–15. 88. Eisenman uses the phrase “battleground” to describe Meaning in Architecture; in “Pop – Non Pop” Jencks uses “scarred battlefield” to depict “recent British architecture”.

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anxiety. 89 Eisenman’s assessment suggests the volume translates the political heat of the crucible-like milieu of London rather than interrogating the intellectual potential of sign theories in architecture. The charge can be likened to this thesis’s criticism of the histories of the period written by Hays, Mallgrave, Nesbitt, Ockman, and Martin. Indeed, this charge can be levelled at Eisenman himself: by his own admission “Building in Meaning” gives a “somewhat gothic introduction, with [an] esoteric cast” featuring Jencks, Baird, Reyner Banham, Joseph Rykwert, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and James Gowan, “Bob” Maxwell, “Ken” Frampton, Colin Rowe, Alan Colquhoun, John Miller, Patrick Hodgkinson, James Madge, and Sam Stevens; and in declaring “[o]ne is not prepared to speculate on the infighting [within this group] which may or may not have been the reason for elaborating the original Arena issue,” he nonetheless makes his willingness to make vivid allusions very clear. 90 Eisenman also believes Meaning in Architecture fails to present architectural semiology appropriately. He argues that to talk about meaning in architecture is one thing; to then shift the ground to semiology is quite another issue. To further equate semiology with semantics, hence to return to the problem of meaning, seems an elision worthy of some mention. But then further to almost totally deny the existence of pragmatics and syntactics in a semiological framework must be considered more than an accidental oversight. 91 Eisenman here claims not only that Meaning in Architecture is inaccurate but also unfaithful, even dishonest. Yet Eisenman performs his own elisions, and produces his own unrepresentative account: he couples Baird and Jencks despite their contrastive approaches to sign theory in architecture; 92 and he supports his argument with his own

89.

Eisenman, “Building in Meaning,” 90.

90.

Eisenman, “Building in Meaning,” 90.

91.

Eisenman, “Building in Meaning,” 90.

92. Baird’s Saussurean theory is structured largely by the opposition of langue (the base language as an abstract system) and parole (speech acts as concrete events); Jencks’s roughly Ogden–Richardsian theory pivots on what he calls “the semiological triangle”, which relates thoughts, words, and things. “The Semiological Triangle” is central to chapter 3.

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intellectual bias, referencing Noam Chomsky, favouring syntax, and eventually producing post-functionalism. 93 Thus, in general, while Meaning in Architecture features in histories and anthologies of architecture, the discursive apparatuses resident within the texts of the edited volume have been neglected. When Meaning in Architecture has been included in theoretical discussions, its position has been corrupted by the influence, direct or once removed, of the London milieu, with its American migrations, felt years later. Eisenman’s “Building in Meaning” is a vehicle for Eisenman’s “syntactical” agenda. Martin’s “Search for a Theory in Architecture” is a vehicle for promoting Eisenman’s political agenda. Meaning in Architecture’s significance for theory understood outside of the personality-filled crucible formed in the United Kingdom but spilling over into the United States has not, to this point, been well assessed.

1.7.

Architectural writing in the period ostensibly “after theory” has become more

concerned with historiography and the history of theory. Prevailing architectural historians chart the rise of so-called theory through key concepts. Some authors use architects and architectural theorists as synecdoches, their names equivalent to concepts. Anthony Vidler charts the progression of architectural theory through Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham and Manfredo Tafuri. 94 Jorge Otero-Pailos charts the developments of Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. 95 Kaufmann, Rowe, Banham, Tafuri, Labatut, Moore, Norberg-Schulz, and Frampton are positioned as personifications of the development of intellectual history. Theory is thus positioned as the product of a milieu filled with cultural agents. Kaufman, Rowe, Banham, Tafuri, Labatut, Moore, Norberg-Schulz, and Frampton are cast as lead actors in a process by which discursive engagement in architecture increased its prestige

93. Eisenman, “Building in Meaning,” 90; Peter Eisenman, “Post-Functionalism,” Oppositions 6 (Fall, 1976): n.p. – republished in Hays ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968, 236–239. 94.

Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2008).

95. Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis US: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010). See also Jorge Otero-Pailos, “Theorizing the anti-avant-garde: Invocations of phenomenology in architectural discourse, 1945–1989” (PhD Thesis, MIT, 2002).

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over building. The “man and his work” theorist dominates the new architectural field, identified through his name. 96 Some authors trace what Banham calls banners. 97 Hays focuses on “the late avant-garde”. Hays uses “avant-garde” because of its history as “something of a leftist critical trope after Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde.” 98 In other words, for Hays, the choice of “avant-garde” contains a degree of irony. The term he uses for the time period is “Architecture in the Age of Discourse”. It is unclear whether this is ironic. Hays analyses Meaning in Architecture through the framing concept of “analogy”, and through the heavily loaded term “structuralism”. Hays’s analysis of Meaning in Architecture focuses on Baird’s chapter “‘La Dimension Amoureuse’ in Architecture”. 99 For Hays, Baird as a critical author is synecdochal, his standpoint representative, his ideology central. In “The Search for a Theory in Architecture”, Louis Martin ties his history of theory to the currents of French intellectualism. 100 His “Anglo-American debates” are determined by the relation of structuralism to poststructuralism. François Dosse compiled a history of French structuralism defined more broadly. Martin’s history follows Dosse in focusing on lineage and discourse as an object realized by biographically-described agents. Martin’s timeline, 1957–1976, gives a strict periodization. Historians such as Hays, Otero-Pailos, and Vidler have also noted the fall of theory. While their histories do not close off the period as explicitly as Martin’s, Hays, Otero-Pailos, and Vidler nevertheless contribute to a closure. In all these works, theory is narrativized. Like a classic saga — a chronicle of a family, empire, or civilization — theory experiences a rise and fall.

96.

See Michel Foucault, “What is an author?,” 115.

97. Banham uses this term “banner” while introducing his own examplar in Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review (December, 1955): 354–361. 98. K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2010), 4. 99.

Hays, Architecture’s Desire, 24–25

100.

Martin, “The Search for a Theory in Architecture,” 10–11.

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The characters Hays, Otero-Pailos, and Vidler describe play similar roles and follow familiar arcs. Like the myths of the artist outlined by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz in Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist, 101 the authors of architectural theory in these accounts become figures of a common storyline. They are filled with verve, integrity, and righteousness, and are fated to a tragic end. Vidler’s protagonist Tafuri delivers an “opening salvo in Teorie e storia”, and his “consistent focus … [is] to elucidate the complex filiations and deformations of an avant-garde tradition that was … at least six centuries old.” 102 The progenitor Kaufman is imbued by Vidler with the “pathos of the lonely explorer, the destitute scholar searching for his ‘California’.” 103 The Frampton in Otero-Pailos is celebrated as having “an enthusiasm fuelled by the sense that the authentic life, which he once searched for in farming, could be found in the manual labour of building.” 104 Otero-Pailos’s earlier hero, the “eucaristic” Labatut, is martyred: according to Otero-Pailos, the name of the pedagogue who preached “intentional forgetfulness” has itself “fallen into obscurity”. 105 Below these traits will be revealed as representative of the discursive position held by the figure of the Theorist. 106 Another notable mythical type, raised by Nigel Whiteley, is the Enfant terrible. 107 Whiteley finds this type in a recurrence: Banham relative to his doctoral supervisor Nikolaus Pevsner, and Jencks relative to his doctoral supervisor Banham. Recurrence is symptomatic of a mode that fits author figures into tragic stories: one that promotes legend. This thesis will argue this formation is better represented not as closures of an Oedipal cycle, but as constructs realized through an Oedipal structure. 108 The historical circumstances and biographical conditions for the Enfant terrible are considered in this thesis less important than the manner in which the functions associated with that mythical construct affect architectural theory discourse.

101. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (New Haven US: Yale University Press, 1979). Based on Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein Historischer Versuch (Wien AT: Krystall, 1934). 102.

Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present, 171.

103.

Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present, 51.

104.

Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, 195.

105.

Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn, 25.

106.

See chapter 2.

107. Nigel Whiteley constructs a history that casts an heroic Banham as a medium through which to chart the progress of architectural modernism. See Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2002). 108.

See chapter 6.

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The historians and textual custodians of the theory moment who focus on the milieu measure their figures of the period against a negative ground. This is evident in their preoccupation with “crisis”. 109 It can also be seen in their lionization of the avant-garde. Such a structural base encourages cyclical storylines. The material with which this thesis is concerned is implicated in such cycles. Banham claims the Picturesque took twenty years to have its “revenge”. 110 Jencks sees Pop architecture take a similarly long and circuitous route. 111 The histories of the neo-avant-garde covered in Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman’s edited volume foreground this recursivity. 112 Such intergenerational patterns are unquestionable. 113 They need not, however, be taken as generative; and their mythical undertones need not determine studies of the period. The discussions of so-called theory-moment theory undertaken by Hays, Nesbitt, Ockman, Frampton, Baird, Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, and Cynthia Davidson employ a set language. 114 Their texts are populated by the key words “criticality” and “opposition”. These terms were likely central to verbal discussions held by these NorthAmerica-based intellectuals, who themselves helped form another milieu. These intellectuals are not disinterested historian–theorists. Some, for example Baird, Frampton, and Eisenman, were involved in the 1960s London milieu. Others, like Hays, Nesbitt, Ockman, and Whiting, were inevitably drawn into discussions on criticality and

109. The conceptualization of crisis was adopted into English-language discourse from Manfredo Tafuri, “Towards a Critique of Architectural Ideology”. Eisenman and the IAUS helped promote this ideological trope. For an analysis of Tafuri, those he was influenced by and those he influenced, and a general overview of the relevance of “crisis” in contemporary architecture, see Marco Biraghi, Project of Crisis (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2013). See Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Gent BE: A&S Books, 2009) for a broader study. 110. Reyner Banham, “The Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics 1945– 1965,” in Concerning Architecture, edited by John Summerson (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1968): 265–273. Banham’s tragedy is particularly Shakespearean. 111. See Charles Jencks, “Recent British Architecture: Pop – Non Pop,” in Modern Movements in Architecture (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1973). 112. Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman eds., Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, (New Haven US: The Yale Center for British Art & The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2010). See also Sylvia Harrison, Pop Art and the Origins of PostModernism (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the NeoAvant-Garde?” October 70 “The Duchamp Effect” (Autumn, 1994): 5–32 provides an analysis related to art. 113. See Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1973) for an account that builds from this effect of trans-historical pressure. 114. Schrijver also challenges the freezing of the definitions of “critique”, “critical”, “radical” and “revolutionary” by the northeast American “Marxist/leftist” milieu – Schrijver, Radical Games, 32.

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opposition at the IAUS or in the office of Eisenman Architects. 115 The histories of theory and the historically-framed theories these writers produce are shaped by these terms. Each of their versions of critical resistance and historical transcendence is caught within a self-imposed Oedipal complex, determined by cycles dependent on defined roles. This thesis re-addresses architectural theory produced in the year 1969. It takes a single theoretical text as its quarry. It constitutes a Barthesian “rereading”. 116 The thesis does not approach the object under investigation with conceptual apparatuses of criticality, or opposition, or ideology, or radicalism. The hot London milieu is not central to investigations. No actor within the milieu is cast as an agent of change; no tragic narrative is assumed: the focus is on the text — on its textuality. Abandoned textual resources are mined for their conceptual usefulness. The analyses the chapters conduct scour the “topos” of these coded textual formations to reveal the loads they carry. 117 This thesis promotes the idea that “[t]he primary evaluation of all texts … can be linked only to a practice, and this practice is that of writing.” 118 The discursive structure of theory is thus unearthed.

1.8.

“Semiology and Architecture” is chapter one of Meaning in Architecture.

While Meaning in Architecture is widely recognized as a seminal book, “Semiology and Architecture” does not figure prominently in its status. Neither Hays, nor Mallgrave, nor Nesbitt, nor Ockman write about the chapter within Meaning and Architecture on which this present research centres. Rosemarie Bletter’s review of Meaning in Architecture for the Society of Architectural Historians in 1971 mentions “Semiology and Architecture” once as she lists the chapters of the volume, but does not otherwise cite Jencks’s text. 119 It is common practice to overlook “Semiology and Architecture”. While focused on theories of signs in architecture, Paul Walker’s doctoral thesis “Semiotics and the Discourse of Architecture” (1987) concentrates on Jencks’s more directly proto-Post115.

Again, Mallgrave was supervised by Anderson; and Martin was supervised by Colquhoun.

116. 15.

Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970), translated by Richard Miller (New York US: Hill & Wang, 1974),

117.

Barthes, S/Z, 20.

118.

Barthes, S/Z, 3–4.

119. Rosemarie Bletter, “Review. Meaning in Architecture, Charles Jencks, George Baird, Editors,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30:2 (May, 1971): 178–180.

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Modern concept of Radical Eclecticism. While specifically addressing Jencks and looking to find aspects of Post-Modernism in Jencks’s work previous to The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Elie Haddad entirely ignores “Semiology and Architecture”. 120 The text appears hidden in plain sight. The few discussions of “Semiology and Architecture” there are in architectural discourse are negative and arguably misleading. Its most significant appearance is depreciatory. Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas write a scathing and in-depth review of the chapter in “Critical Remarks on Semiology and Architecture”. 121 Agrest and Gandelsonas, who both studied under Barthes in Paris, question Jencks’s dismissal of structuralism’s commitment to the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified, and criticize the ideological content of Jencks’s theory. 122 In launching this critique, Agrest and Gandelsonas confront Anglo-American with French-Slavic theory. Arbitrariness is not a key premise of the former; and Jencks never claims to be an adherent of the latter. 123 According to Martin’s “A Search for a Theory in Architecture”, “Semiology and Architecture” is a “completely re-written version” of chapter two of Jencks’s thesis, “Modern Architecture: The Tradition Since 1945”. 124 Research conducted for this current thesis suggests this is an error. Chapter two of “Modern Architecture”, “A Theory of Value”, is far closer to Modern Movements in Architecture’s “Introduction”. The epigraphs of these two chapters are identical; and while large portions of the thesis chapter’s argument are absent — pages 31–41 and 49–54, which largely focus on the theories on poetry of I.A. Richards — the majority of the two chapters match. Indeed, the “Introduction” to Modern Movements is more accurately an edit of “A Theory of Value” than a re-write. Martin’s summary of the chapter focuses on the concepts of multivalence and univalence. These concepts are involved in “Semiology and Architecture”, as discussed in chapter 5 of this thesis; but they are far more critical to

120. Elie Haddad, “Charles Jencks and the Historiography of Post-Modernism,” Journal of Architecture 14:4 (2009): 493–510. Haddad tries to give a pre-history to Post-Modernism. Jencks does not use the term before The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. In 1975 he uses the term “Post Modern”. Jencks himself often tries to rewrite history by adding the hyphen post facto (this starts with the appendix to The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’s “Introduction” in 1978). 121. Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, “Critical Remarks on Semiology and Architecture,” Semiotica 9:3 (1973): 252–271. 122.

See Walker, “Semiotics and the Discourse of Architecture,” 158–161 for a discussion.

123.

See chapter 3.

124.

Martin, “A Search for a Theory in Architecture,” 503.

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Modern Movements, and even The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, than to Jencks’s less romantic, more structuralist, quasi-scientific text of 1969. “Semiology and Architecture” is thus ill defined in architectural discourse. In part this is a product of its original anthologization. Meaning in Architecture is unlike many architectural texts: as stated above, it resists representation as a coherent whole. This begins with Jencks’s highly rhetorical “Preface”. The content of these two pages is assimilable with Frampton’s energetic crucible formulation. It also matches the formation of Eisenman’s gothic battlefield. The “Preface” emphasizes the volume’s polemical spirit, highlighting the idiosyncratic device of publishing comments in the margins of each chapter. 125 Jencks’s “Preface” advertises Meaning in Architecture’s role as a provocateur and destabilizer of architectural culture. This current study maintains an analytical relation to these and all of Jencks’s other rhetorical gestures. During the course of the 1960s and 1970s, semiology and its relative semiotics were positioned by many as holding the potential to progress critical analysis and production of architecture. 126 Perhaps due to its inability to cohere into a recognizable theory, the overt legacy of these doctrines in the discipline is limited. 127 Yet theories of signs and of communication, and conceptualizations of semiosis underwrite most understandings of contemporary architecture. They can also be understood to be the base upon which postmodern architectural thought rests. Semiology has ongoing theoretical and historical implications. Regardless of its internal coherence or its intellectual integrity, as a key text in this complex, “Semiology and Architecture” gains value from these basic facts.

125. See Andrew P. Steen, “Operation Marginalia: Translations of Semiology and Architecture,” in Translations: 31st Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Christoph Schnoor (Auckland NZ: SAHANZ): 345–354. 126. e.g. “[I]n the whole world there is a growing interest in these affairs allowing us to hope that, in a very short time, a radical rearrangement of ideas will take place with regard to architecture and history. No doubt, semiology will play an important role in it” – Juan Bonta, “Notes for a Theory of Meaning in Design,” in Signs, Symbols, and Architecture, edited by Geoffery Broadbent, Richard Bunt and Charles Jencks (Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1980): 310. “[I]t is just some such framework of meaningfulness which our present functionalist–formalist schizophrenia might usefully make way for. […] And the tools of such an endeavour are already in the making. The theory of signs, semiology, provides several theoretical models of analysis” – George Baird, “Paradox in Regent’s Park,” Arena; The Architectural Association Journal 81 (April 1966): 276. 127. See Martin, “A Search for a Theory in Architecture,” for an expression of this lack of a singular theory. Note again here the supervision of Martin by Alan Colquhoun, and its possible effect.

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Within architectural historiography, semiology and semiotics are largely positioned as stepping-stones to other discursive lines and grids of attack. This thesis does not attempt to intervene in these narrative accounts. It will not chart the rise and fall of theory of signs doctrines within architectural circles. For the most part, its focus is synchronic. Its principal intention is to better account for its primary object. “Semiology and Architecture” is positioned within the following chapters as an embodiment of the strategic operations, and an exhibition of the structural characteristics, of the discursive apparatus of which it forms a significant part. As noted above, Jencks himself is not a concern of this thesis. The chapters do not focus on the person but rather on the functioning of “Semiology and Architecture”. The thesis does not seek to measure or judge Jencks’s argumentation. It presents its own argument.

1.9.

To recap, the images, diagrams, graphs, and objective signifiers of

“Semiology and Architecture” will be positioned throughout the following pages as figures through which to read aspects of discursive functioning. The word figure does not invoke the traditional framework of rhetoric. Figures of speech are related to authored content. These figures of theory writing are media for examining networks of information, and constitute objects capable of realizing complex significations. Positioning these formal constructs as figures of theory allows analysis of writing based not on an authorship but on function. It also helps reveal the rhetoricality in the text without succumbing to — or overtly resisting: “opposing” — the rhetoric of the author. These are the primary grounds upon which this thesis asserts its originality. Serendipitously, the chosen term is also the generic name for published images, and as such it is suggestive of the ostensible objectivity that is placed under examination.128 Employing the word figure also distances the objects of this thesis from the discourse within architecture on the “diagram”. This term is a very contentious one in architectural theory writing. It has been used by two sides of an ideological conflict over the definition of criticality based on autonomy and contingency. 129 It has been used by a 128. The term also establishes a subtextual dialogue with Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others (London UK: Verso, 2003), in particular the selfproclaimed critical “trenchancy” and the “combative tone” (ix) that pervades that author’s work. 129. The generative architectural diagrams of Eisenman and Koolhaas, and those of their followers like Daniel Libeskind and Bjarne Engels, respectively.

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third position that highlights diagrams’ post-representational potential, creating with their deliberate forms what might be called lines of flight out of iconicity that spur “asignification” and realize “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization”. 130 Diagrams are also an essential ingredient of modernity and high modern architecture.131 Like communication models, diagrams are discursive tools handy for controlling and disciplining information. Through an apparent neutrality that might be related to scientific reason and dated back to classical age encyclopaedia projects, diagrams present rational order. Ideologically modern diagrams — graphs, tables, charts, and networks — communicate facts and transparently promote denotations. The figures of “Semiology and Architecture” explored in this thesis do not fit such definitions of modernist diagrams. Visually, many approximate the examples of that intellectual paradigm; and their forms may indeed express the legacy of this tradition. But it is a basic premise to this thesis that, on closer examination, the figures do not conform to ideologically classic-modernist requirements. Their reference is neither transparent nor secured; their signification is not resolute; critical denotation is not achieved without strong connotational presence and noise; the sign-functioning is distinctly non-linear and non-productive; and the ideas presented do not add up to predictive or even controllable intellectual tools. They are opaque forms. The figures of “Semiology and Architecture” form a mixed collection. They reference different disciplines and reach different registers. Notably, all but one is given a minimal caption. 132 This helps promote multiple readings of each of their forms. Some of these

130. Deleuzian–Guattarian diagrams: Gilles Deleuze’s Foucault (1986), Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003) and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), and Guattari’s Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1995). See also Jakub Zdebik, Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization (London UK: Continuum, 2012); and Janell Watson, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thoughts: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze (London UK: Continuum, 2011). 131. See Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2002) for one historical account of diagrams before Eisenman, Koolhaas, and Deleuze and Guattari. 132. e.g., “The Sign Situation”, or “The Semiological Triangle”. This is in complete contradistinction to some captions in “Modern Architecture” and Modern Movements in Architecture – e.g., “James Stirling: Four axonometrics and a lunar spacecraft. Stirling’s work is rooted in his technique of draughting [sic]; the method leads to the form. Without such a technique, sophisticated constructions would be impossible. A whole aesthetic and way of life comes from the logic and articulation possible with such a method (incidentally, used by all the architects in British Building). Counter-clockwise from top left: Leicester Engineering Building, Cambridge University History Faculty, St Andrews University Hostel, Mariner 5, Dorman Long” – Jencks, Modern Meanings, 267. This difference in captioning practice

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readings are neutral, helping to naturalize or make “innocent” the accompanying text; 133 and others are loaded. It is the goal of this thesis to search beyond nominal naturalizations to unravel more involved “meanings”. The referential and poetic functions are two of six language functions theorized by Jakobson and investigated by generations of scholars thereafter. Their dual presence is not specific to “Semiology and Architecture”, or particular to Jencks, but rather universal. Due to its overt formal richness, however, “Semiology and Architecture” helps evidence the interplay of these two functions, and dramatize the domination of the referential by the poetic. Further, due to Jencks’s subsequent theorizations of PostModern architecture — particularly his conceptual apparatus of double-coding — the interplay of the two functions takes on special significance. In a sense, “Semiology and Architecture” realizes in writing and figuration that type of constitution Jencks celebrates and proselytizes in the language of Post-Modern architecture. In the chapters of this thesis, “Semiology and Architecture” is rearticulated and recalibrated: opened up as material for close analysis. Key elements of the text — the figures — are extracted from their discursive setting. These elements are positioned as communicating coded information. While not embodying neutrality, many of these figures affect a mode of neutrality — conventions expressive of scientific knowledge. While not presented as art, other figures approach the conceptual art of the period. The rhetoricality of all of the figures is of a different consistency to the argumentative prose. The figures stand out from the written body of the text. They are eye-catching. The focus of the hurried or casual readers of “Semiology and Architecture”, or of those using the text as a prompt for artistic production, trains itself on these elements. This thesis takes advantage of this reality. The figures that attract casual attention are here meticulously bled dry. These models of information become media through which the text gains resolution, and the intellectual condition under study is defined. “Semiology and Architecture” serves as a guide to the discursivity of architectural writing.

becomes significant when placed in the contexts of Jencks’s “changing the caption under the image” characterization as presented in “Pop – Non Pop”, and previously conceptualized relative to heroic Modernists by Banham. 133. Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message” (1961), in A Barthes Reader (New York US: Hill & Wang, 1983), 205.

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To reinforce the anatomized mode of its formal, textual engagement, this thesis will not end with a conclusion. In lieu of this convention, this introduction here offers some clear statements of intent, before moving on to introduce the five interrelated but discursively stand-alone body chapters to follow. Through its close analyses, this thesis will help renovate the discursive significance of Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”. It will distance the text from the referential information it presents, exposing the ostensible communicational transparency it assumes as illusion. The aggregated chapters will reposition the figures of the central object, promoting new semantic connections: new meanings in architecture. As a result, the rhetoricality of the text will be fundamentally revised. These text-specific actions allow extension: this study positions “Semiology and Architecture” as an exemplar that dramatizes the potentials of other architectural texts. In other words, while its focus is limited to a single text, this thesis suggests its textual and discursive findings extend to architectural discourse more broadly. It promotes the idea that concerns for “meaning” can productively attend to the message rather than the reference, the object rather than the concept. It argues “theory” — heretofore premised to rest on argument — is assessable on an entirely different plane. It promotes interrogations of architectural theory discourse based on text rather than on antagonistic authors wielding reified concepts. This thesis will show that architectural writing, rather than being merely a conduit of information, attains meaning through its own forms. This thesis has another discursive ambition: to use its own form to recondition architectural writing. The following chapters suggest architecture carries an inherent discursive bias towards the paradigmatic axis. This bias — which favours overt objective forms such as realized metaphors, reified concepts, and proper names, and overlooks the structurally poetic aspects of those forms 134 — leaves architecture vulnerable to the seductive effects of paradigmata: it sees architectural culture dominated by period names, stylistic banners, man-and-his-work depictions, intergenerational narratives, monumentality, iconicity — and ultimately starchitecture and starchitects. This thesis aims at reasserting the full dimensionality of architectural language, by maintaining a lukewarm relation to the referential function of the text, emphasising metonymy and 134. In the terms used by Barthes in S/Z, architectural discourse is a “classic language” and produces “classic texts” (45; 93). This thesis counters such classicism.

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synecdoche, and challenging metaphor and its prominent associate, naming. The five body chapters attempt a type of writing that approaches and produces opaque writing, with hopes of restructuring architectural language. 135 Each helps build the case.

1.10.

The focus of Chapter 2, “Bicycle Saddles”, is the figure “Three Uses of a

Bicycle Seat”. The chapter begins by characterizing the figure relative to the theoretical and ideological context of architectural discourse in 1969. This context contains two methods of constructing objects of theory that challenge the modern movement norm: a backwards-looking, origin-seeking, genetic model; and a forwards-looking, teleological, evolutionary model. The former hermeneutics-based practice was exemplified for Jencks, and is represented in “Bicycle Saddles”, by Joseph Rykwert; and the latter, reflective of technological determinism, by Reyner Banham. This chapter emphasizes how this pair can be made into a complementary, dichotomous system. They set up a dialectic, prominently offering “two uses of a bicycle seat”. Yet the chapter contends Jencks’s text evades and circumvents both Rykwert and Banham. Each element of his theoretical apparatus is shown to be idiosyncratic, each “use” novel. Underlying “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” is Jencks’s desire to invalidate both the denials of meaning (or claims to meaninglessness) of some modern movement avant-gardists, and the reliance on commonsense of those who might be labelled the derrière-garde. The chapter argues Jencks’s conceptualization of naming, with its questionable relation to motivation and its tacit acceptance of a literature-like necessity, jettisons rigorous theoretization in favour of the promotion of surpluses of information. Discussion establishes the characteristics of the personas of the Theorist and the Wit. It then uses “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” to articulate the obfuscation of the referential function and the promotion of the poetic function within the section of the text concerned. The chapter concludes that, as a result of the prevailing irony dominating the discursive message, all three “uses” of the bicycle saddle break down into unelaborated linguistic units, or semes. Chapter 3, “The Semiological Situation”, continues to interrogate Jencks’s method of confronting and confounding conceptual pairings with a disruptive third. It also establishes a dichotomous structure against which “Semiology and Architecture” can be read: the extra-architectural pairing of French-Slavic semiology and Anglo-American

135.

In technical terms, it looks to produce an “infinite thematics” – Barthes, S/Z, 93.

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semiotics. Jencks is shown to overlook this opposition in favour of installing within the discourse an intrinsically precarious theoretical apparatus under the proper name “semiology”. The chapter details the presentation of a theory that seems designed to realize a distinctive position within architectural discourse through referential functioning. The argument revolves around a triangular diagram that defies simple processing in favour of a complex model of interpretation. To break this material apart, the chapter closely addresses two figures: “The Semiological Triangle” and “The Sign Situation”. “The Semiological Triangle” brings into architectural discourse a relation to truth and naming articulated by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, members of the AngloAmerican pragmatist tradition. Jencks intends this action to disrupt commonsense conceptions of architectural form that assume natural relations between a thing and its name. “The Sign Situation” appears to elaborate this critique. Jencks’s layering of conceptualization in this figure is designed to leave architectural ideation on shifting ground. But the chapter argues the two figures do not work in concert. The rhetoricality of the two figures is dominated by the poetic function. Issues of blurred authorship, ideological vagueness, rhetorical overreach, and communicational obfuscation intrude on the transmission of information. “The Sign Situation” corrupts the relation of name and thing with wordplay and digression, introducing an overpowering volume of semiotic noise. The chapter argues that the figures’ formalities resolve into opaque socio-cultural meanings that contradict and effectively overshadow referential content. “Duck–Rabbit–Thingummybob”, Chapter 4, also investigates instability, this time of the visual kind. The chapter trains its attention on Jencks’s conception of a new and radical type of architecture that he introduces with the help of two figures, “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” and “Archigram Robot II, 1968”. Analysis begins with the strong, confident, but ambiguous figure, “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?”. Jencks derives the figure from perceptualpsychology informed art historian Ernst Gombrich. Gombrich’s duck–rabbit image helps illustrate bi-stability, a concept in which a form avoids a single stable reading, oscillating between two alternatives. It also dramatizes the role of schemas in perception. For Jencks, the bi-stable image embodies paradox. Chapter 4 describes how Jencks works with yet against Gombrich and his duck–rabbit. Similarly, it shows how Jencks challenges the avant-garde yet asserts their position, framed in terms of an “etc.” or “thingummybob”. For Jencks, “Archigram Robot II, 1968” represents this new, radical aspect: the extended caption for this figure demonstrably extracts and isolates “plausible meanings” from the complex montage. But Jencks’s argument unravels under 50

the weight of its own terms, concepts, and, most vividly, analogues. The chapter argues the text’s poetic functioning dominates the argument. Through the competing rhetoricality of conceptualism and textuality, both “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” and “Archigram Robot II, 1968” are ideologically corrupted: both lose resolution through denials and introductions of humour, dodging ambiguity in favour of palpable vagueness. The chapter finishes by stressing the significance of the second figure’s authorial moniker: “Archigram”. The conditions of the discourse, the institutionalized structural environment in which “Semiology and Architecture” was written, are here related to this proper name. The significance of proper names, and their place within the canon of architecture, becomes more central in Chapter 5, “Opposition and Association”. Investigation here addresses Jencks’s twin conceptualizations of value realization within discourse. His key terms, opposition and association, are well-established structuralist tools. They are relatable under the well-known Jakobsonian framework based on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, a framework that dovetails with the functional system underwriting this thesis. Yet Jencks avoids this secure structure. Instead he sets out yet another tension, this time between his versions of poetry and empirical science. The chapter follows Jencks’s idiosyncratic lead to theories of poetry promoted by Samuel T. Coleridge and I.A. Richards. It then follows his abrupt jump to the scientific field of psycholinguistics. It is from this field, and specifically the work of its practitioner Charles Osgood, that Jencks models his figure “The Semantic Space of Current Architects”. But the chapter reveals this figure to be less than scientific. The information that should be sustained by referential function is compromised by lax methodology and an urge to amplification and controversy. Discussion then proceeds to the second figure, “Degree of Surprise”. In this figure, Jencks ostensibly addresses a theory of poetry. But heavy-handed linguistic selection again confounds the presentation. While the contents of the figure unsubtly avoid scientific objectivity, they fail to conform to the type of poetry promoted by Coleridge and Richards. The figure does, however, succeed in drawing focus on the message itself as a formal object. A formal demonstration — expressed by cliché, dependent on proper names revealed as kinds of textual figures — takes shape as “Degree of Surprise” feeds back onto “Current Architects”. Jencks’s stated position is that architectural theory should be both scientific and poetic. This the chapter details how, within “Semiology and Architecture” at least, the referential loses out to the poetic, as both opposition and association lose value. 51

The final, concluding chapter, “6. Language Uses, Language Abuses”, makes another address to naming. The pattern and logic of focusing on the figures of “Semiology and Architecture” is here pushed to its limits. Rather than addressing an easily detached, graphic element of the text, this chapter finds its own figure from within the written body of “Semiology and Architecture”: the formally conspicuous single signifier, “LeviStrauss”. Discussion proceeds from Jencks’s argument: his use of Lévi-Strauss to illustrate the “power of signs”. While the renowned French structural anthropologist’s studies of shamanism bring a potent, visceral dimension to the conceptualization of sign functioning, his proper name is itself a powerful sign. It is a contraction: a vast area is brought into architectural discourse through this one hyphenated word. Through this form, another name, “structuralism”, is invoked. The chapter details Lévi-Strauss and his structuralist enterprise. It then describes the significance of these objects to architectural discourse in the mid- to late-1960s, involving Banham’s pejorative, “Lévistrology”. Jencks’s use of “Levi-Strauss” is characterized in this context as superficial; but through this process the practice of naming gains rhetorical significance. Aspects of poetic functioning, brought into relief by an unaccented transcription and Jencks’s allusion to the sign-like nature of “semiology” itself, complicate this significance for “Semiology and Architecture”. These complications lead the chapter into a final extension. The dominant historiographical tradition is tied to an expression of the Oedipal myth produced by inter-generational tension. Using a Lévi-Straussian apparatus, this chapter locates the myth structurally within author function Jencks. It sees in his writing a dramatization of the forces resident within architectural discourse. “Language Uses, Language Abuses” finishes with a concluding position characterizing “Semiology and Architecture” as both an exemplar of poetic functioning in architectural discourse, and a product expressive of its structural conditions. With these chapters sketched out and the work of the introduction thus complete, the thesis will now proceed with the first of its body chapters.

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2. BICYCLE SADDLES

Figure 2a: Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”, 12-13.

2.1.

The figure “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” can be found on pages 12 and 13 of

Meaning in Architecture, the third and fourth pages of “Semiology and Architecture” (Fig. 2a). 1 As with all the figures within Meaning in Architecture, it is greyscale. Some figures in the book are bordered; several are full-page; and a few are full-bleed. “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” is not bordered, and shares its two pages with written text. Atypically amongst the figures in the book, an Arabic numeral heads its caption. 2

1. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 10–25. 2. Baird is the only other author in Meaning in Architecture whose captions include numbers. “1”, “2”, and, curiously, “2a” sit with the descriptive captions of Baird’s first three figures in “‘La Dimension Amoureuse’ in Architecture”. His other half-dozen images contain no numbers.

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As seen in Figure 2b, “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” is a composite figure, made of three parts. Two of the parts are on page 12, the other on page 13. The two parts on page 12 have a field: a basic grey rectangle upon which darker and lighter zones are distinguishable. The part on page 13 has no such background, and is purely an object imposed onto the white of the book’s margin. 3

Figure 2b: “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat”.

The vast majority of figures in Meaning in Architecture are premised on a simple structure of reference. In other words, the images can be said to be of certain things. There are photographs of building interiors and exteriors; photographs of people, including portraits, and more documentarian shots of situations or of actions; drawings (e.g., axonometrics, plans, perspectives) of architectural projects; diagrams of settlement plans; images of vehicles of transportation, furniture, religious sculptures, and artefacts; reproductions of artworks, a film frame, a cartoon, and an x-ray; and a copy of a page 3. See Andrew P. Steen, “Operation Marginalia: Translating Semiology and Architecture,” in Translation: 31st Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Christoph Schnoor (Auckland NZ: SAHANZ, 2014): 345–354, for a discussion of the margins of Meaning in Architecture.

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from another architectural theory book. 4 Several images contain more than one element, but might be said to cohere to form a definition of one object — for example combining plans and a photograph of the same village; or combining plan and section; or compiling a visual list. Such practices are common to architecture’s visual communication culture. Two other figures combine imagery in a less direct manner. Martin Pawley’s “The individual as a functional element” on page 131 combines two images, both mixed media, which aim to conjure the impression the caption announces. 5 The “individual” of the title is evident in the higher of the two images. Joseph Rykwert’s composite figure, included within “The Sitting Position” on page 235, constitutes a mixed group. When viewed with the x-ray image across the spine, it can be visually related to the Independent Group’s “Parallel of Life and Art” exhibition (1953). But again, Rykwert’s theme is obvious: it relates to the ergonomics-based design of seats. The figure “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” has no ready signification. It combines a reproduction of a magazine front cover, a photograph of an abstract object whose function is not altogether clear, and a photograph of an adjustable and rollable chair. No premise is immediately evident. Its coding is obscure. It appears to be an intentionally difficult whole. The keen reader may assume its comprehension relies on transcending his or her normal practice of interpretation, graduating to reading “semiologically”. The title, however, helps any reader form a basic connection between the three parts and find a degree of meaning in each one. From the middle image, a narrow and unforgiving racing bicycle seat resolves itself as the base for a bent tube. Readers familiar with bicycles should recognize the bent tube as racing bicycle handlebars. The chair in the third image also breaks into constituent elements. Through this process the more generous seat of a cruising or town bicycle is perceivable. The other parts of the chair appear unrelated to bicycles: in fact, to a twenty-first century eye, the chair seems reasonably unremarkable, and could conceivably be in a furniture showroom. The “bicycle seat” in the part on the left, however, is not obvious. This part is the largest. It is also the most busy and arguably eye-catching. Its denotation is clear enough: it is a magazine cover. More specifically, it is the cover of Esquire’s December 4. Namely Le Corbusier’s Towards an Architecture chapter title page for chapter 3, “Automobiles”, on which rests the famous “ EYES WHICH DO NOT SEE ” aphorism. 5.

Pawley’s figure includes what are best described a montage and a collage.

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1966 issue. 6 As the catchphrase under the title relates, Esquire is intended to be “ THE MAGAZINE FOR MEN ”.

The prices on the cover show that it was sold in both the United

States and Great Britain. 7 The cover advertises a photographic essay from within the magazine: “The New 7 Deadly Sins”. 8 It states that in this article, “Claudia Cardinale shows you how to be a good girl today.” Italian film actress Cardinale’s name recognition for mid-1960s Esquire readers had been secured through roles in two films from 1963: playing a version of herself in Federico Fellini’s Academy Award-winning film 8½; and playing diamond owner and love interest Princess Dahla opposite David Niven in her first English-language film, The Pink Panther. “Claudia Cardinale” held currency in 1966. A photograph appears under the writing on the Esquire cover. A blank background surrounds an image comprised of two elements. Across the bottom of the page sits a black and chrome motorcycle. Research reveals it is a Triumph Tiger 100 pre-unit model, manufactured sometime prior to 1959, with modified front forks and petrol tank. Its surfaces are polished: a zone of white light gleams off the tank, and the distorted reflection of the photographer can be seen in the exhaust pipe and the tank cap. Towards the left edge of the frame, the contours of the leather seat are evident. Above and in front of the motorcycle a woman is positioned. She is perched above the seat, her right foot supported by a peg. Her two hands hold the grips. Research confirms what the text implies: this is Claudia Cardinale. While Cardinale’s face is partially obscured by writing, it is evident that she is carrying a joyous expression. Her mouth is smiling and opened; the parts of her eyes not masked by the “u” and the “i” of Esquire form squints within heavy mascara and eyeliner. While a helmet tops her head, its angle of repose and what appears to be its dangling, circular tag suggest the message it carries is one of aesthetic adornment rather than road safety. Cardinale’s right leg and foot wears a knee-high sandal. Its elemental design is composed of seven straps. One strap starts at the toes and travels up the centre of the

6.

Volume LXVI, No. 6, Whole No. 397: “Huge” December issue of 360 pages.

7.

The cost was 1 USD or 4/6 GBP.

8. Each of the “New 7 Deadly Sins” — Chastity, Poverty, Anonymity, Age, Failure, Ugliness and Constancy — is illustrated by a photograph taken by Carl Fischer.

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shin to the knee. It might be understood as a kind of spine. Another strap parallels this strap, defining the back of the heel. Two straps, each threaded through the spine and attaching to the sole of the sandal, contain the ball of the foot. These straps might be called ribs, the sole becoming a kind of sternum. Three other straps wrap the leg, just above the ankle, just below the knee, and just below the midway point of the shin. It is unclear whether the straps have buckles, or whether they are made of a flexible material. Cardinale also wears a dress. It reaches the mid-thigh. Using the terms of the mid 1960s, it is a minidress. The dress is made of a translucent fabric — probably vinyl. Spaghetti straps loosely loop the right shoulder. Circles are visible around the line of the hips. The materiality of these circles is unclear. They may be attached to the dress, or might join together — with fishing line or some other minimal material — to form a kind of decorative belt. Due to the translucent nature of the dress, Cardinale’s body is visible through the vinyl. The outline of her right thigh is clear, as is the curve of her right buttock cheek. While there is no explicit evidence to confirm the supposition, the impression is that she is not wearing anything beneath the dress. The significance of the photograph for the Esquire cover is evident: Cardinale’s congress with the motorcycle and the constitution of her dress is illustrating one of the so-called “new 7 deadly sins”. The significance of the cover for “Semiology and Architecture”, however, is less than clear. The meaning of the figure as a whole to “Semiology and Architecture” is — at first glance at least — puzzling. As the discussion below will detail, Charles Jencks uses “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” to conceptualize alternative models of signification: distinct ways of producing meaning. This chapter will argue the figure also formalizes relations to structures supporting architecture’s discursive formation. It will interrogate the figure in all its aspects and dimensions, and in so doing contextualize Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture” relative to architectural theory orthodoxies, and to names of great authority. The way into this territory is through a less scholarly, extra-architectural intermediary.

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2.2

In “A House is not a Home”, Dionne Warwick assures her listener: A chair is still a chair, even when there’s no one sitting there But a chair is not a house, and a house is not a home When there’s no one there to hold you tight And no one there you can kiss goodnight. 9

The work of Rykwert complicates these sentiments. In his Meaning in Architecture chapter “The Sitting Position: A Question of Method”, 10 he presents a divergent case. The Hardoy or BKF Chair, designed by Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy in 1938, became a popular phenomenon in the United States during the 1940s: it was added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1941; it inspired five million unauthorized units. 11 It achieved all this despite realizing, on Rykwert’s assessment, poor ergonomic performance. In fact, Rykwert suggests the BKF’s “concave sack” produces “physical discomfort” to its user. 12 To account for its success, according to Rykwert, “we must assume that … considerations of a symbolic nature — which are in conflict with ergonomic[,] or as some would say “functional” or even “rational” ones — must be unconscious.” 13 In other words, according to Rykwert, the BKF Chair attains its meaning regardless of its designed accommodation of the seated figure, and — importantly — regardless of its objective form. 14 Comfort comes from a different source. It is a “chair” even without 9. Dionne Warwick, “A House is Not a Home,” Make Way for Dionne Warwick (New York US: Scepter Records, 1964). These words, the song’s first verse, were written by Hal David, and accompany music arranged by Burt Bacharach. The song has been much covered, including by Bacharach himself. 10. Joseph Rykwert, “The Sitting Position – A Question of Method,” Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 232–243. Originally published in Italian in Edilizia Moderna 86 (1965); first published in English in the Arena special issue “Meaning in Architecture” (1967), edited by George Baird and Charles Jencks. 11. “Hardoy Butterfly Chair,” Weinbaum, accessed 24 February, 2014, www.weinbaum.eu/ epages/63212480.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/63212480/Categories/MAGAZIN/%22Die%20Moderne% 20im%20Blick%22. 12.

Rykwert, “The Sitting Position,” 239.

13.

Rykwert, “The Sitting Position,” 239.

14. Alfred North Whitehead provides another angle. He writes: “We look up and see a coloured shape in front of us, and we say, — there is a chair. But what we have seen is the mere coloured shape. Perhaps an artist might not have jumped to the notion of a chair. He might have stopped at the mere contemplation of a beautiful colour and a beautiful shape. But those of us who are not artists are very prone, especially if we are tired, to pass straight from the perception of the coloured shape to the enjoyment of the chair” – Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York US: MacMillan, 1927), 2–3.

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anyone sitting on it because its status, the very idea of its “chair”-ness, takes shape at a level far deeper than the artefact. While Rykwert may agree with Warwick that any given chair is indeed a chair even when empty, his “chair” is far more pervasive, existing in the socio-psychological projection of a body in a seated posture. 15 Parodying Warwick’s lyrics, Peter Reyner Banham makes a differently contrasting point in his Meaning in Architecture chapter, “A Home is not a House”. 16 The status of a chair is not specified in the chapter; but Banham does form a broader argument about the semantic status of cultural artefacts. Removed of its intertextualism, Banham’s title could be re-worded “A Home Does Not Need a House”, or “A Home Does Not Require That Objective Form That People Refer to as a ‘House’”. Using consistent logic, Banham should categorize the object “chair” with “house”, as opposed to “home”. A “chair” is a form of habitation, albeit smaller: it is a fixed article, as opposed to a functionally defined reality, a servicing infrastructure, or an interactive phenomenon without any formal body. For Banham, a home is “[a] properly set-up standard-of-living package, breathing out warm air …, radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo.” 17 Such a home would make referents such as the “house” redundant. Banham’s “un-house” would provide a thirty-foot hemisphere of warm dry Lebensraum [within which] you could have spectacular ringside views of the wind felling trees, snow swirling through the glade, the forest fire coming over the hillside or Constance Chatterley running swiftly to you know who through the downpour. 18

15. Rykwert’s theorizations of architecture were based on the body. Christopher Hight argues that for Rykwert, “the metaphorical projection of the body into architecture is a primal condition for constructing a meaningful world. [For Rykwert, t]he body metaphor does not simply allow a meaningful architecture; the identification between the body and the building is also the necessary condition of being human, for making a home for humanity in a hostile world” – Christopher Hight, Measuring Vortices (Abingdon UK: Routledge, 2007), 21. 16. Peter Reyner Banham, “A Home is Not a House,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969): 109–118. Originally published in Art in America 2 (1965): 70–79. Notably, Banham was not included in the Arena special issue, “Meaning in Architecture”, for which Baird, not Jencks, took the primary editorial role. 17.

Banham, “A Home is not a House,” 113.

18. Banham, “A Home is not a House,” 114. Note here the suggestion of nudity, and an underlying tone of what might be characterized as sexualization.

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As an inflated “polythene bag”, the form of the un-house morphs to the contours of whatever posture — seating, standing, lying — the inhabitant desires. The un-house is naked function. By extension, the “un-chair” becomes that which provides a supporting structure allowing one to sit and realize other social functions, but has no material presence or physicality that registers these performatives before, during, or after the lived actions. In “A House is not a Home”, Warwick goes on, pleading: Darling, have a heart, don’t let one mistake keep us apart I’m not meant to live alone, turn this house into a home When I climb the stair and turn the key Please be there. It is a plaintive request that, if intoned by the ageing body commonly referred to as the modern movement in architecture, would be perfectly pitched to elicit equal disregard from Rykwert and Banham. By 1969, both critics had fully committed to an antagonistic relation to the failed mainstream. The figurative “one mistake” each reacted against, however, differed markedly. An academic visit at the Hochschule für Getaltung at Ulm over 1957–1958 encouraged Rykwert to develop an opposition to the school’s prevailing “rationalist neofunctionalism”. 19 As noted in chapter 1 of this dissertation, the HfG’s curriculum attempted to extend the legacy of the Bauhaus. It was designed to produce minimalist examples of Gute Form. 20 Rykwert did not share this goal. In George Baird’s assessment, Rykwert’s manifesto-like text “Meaning in Building” “attack[ed] what he saw as architects’ [undue] preoccupation with rational criteria [in] the design process.” 21 For Rykwert this preoccupation was fundamentally wrong. He believed architects needed to 19. George Baird, “A Promise as Well as a Memory: Toward an Intellectual Biography of Joseph Rykwert,” in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, edited by George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge US: MIT Press), 4. 20.

Baird, “Introduction,” 4.

21. Baird, “Introduction,” 4. See Joseph Rykwert, “Meaning in Building,” in The Necessity of Artifice (New York US: Rizzoli, 1982), 9–16. The nearness of “Meaning in Building” to Meaning in Architecture (and, previously, “Meaning in Architecture”) should not be lost. Indeed, this nearness seems to have led to what could be called a Freudian slip in Harry Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: An Historical Survey, 1673–1968 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 372. For Mallgrave at least, the two had an affinity constituting formal equivalence.

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“acknowledge the emotional power of their work”; and that their process should include “investigation of a content, even of a referential content in architecture.” 22 With the help of his “friend and ally” Aldo van Eyck, Rykwert saw his concerns for the symbolic aspect of architecture published in such articles as “The Idea of a Town”. 23 According to Baird, “like most of his contemporaries, [Rykwert] ha[d] lost confidence in the efficacy or legitimacy of grand intellectual systems or systematic social or historical projects,” and had “abandoned teleological notions of progress in history and … eschewed any interest in the once apparently potent forms of instrumentality in human affairs.” 24 Rykwert’s “critique of functionalism” sought to build theory upon cultural ideals brought back to their origins. He developed a hermeneutic method framed around the inhabitation of space by the human body. 25 This concern for genesis is perhaps best seen in his Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, first published in 1971, which starts with the fateful words “The Lord made Adam”, and proceeds to “stalk” memory and ritual. 26 In “The Sitting Position”, Rykwert claims that despite the technological advances leading up to 1969, “[t]he dream of certain Utopian designers who thought that the time would come when the anthropometric and technical data would simply be fed into a computer to be processed into a complete specification for a chair is turning out to be chimera.” 27 In response, “The Sitting Position” traces comfort from the womb to the tomb. 28

22. Rykwert quoted in Baird, “Introduction,” 4; 4. In the terms of this thesis, this so-called “referential” content might better be termed “connotational”, “intertextual”, or “symbolic”. 23. Baird, “Introduction,” 16; Joseph Rykwert, “The Idea of a Town” was originally published in a special issue of Forum (1963) edited by van Eyck. Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of the Town was later published as a book (London UK: Faber & Faber, 1976). 24.

Baird, “Introduction,” 20. With hindsight, Baird labels this position “Foucauldian”.

25. Hight characterizes the body’s significance for Rykwert in writing that, for him, “body metaphors are at the origin not simply of architecture as a body of knowledge but at the core of being human” – Hight, Measuring Vortices, 21. For a famous example of the metaphor in action, see Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1996). For a jaunty biographical background to Rykwert’s hermeneutic method, see Joseph Rykwert, “On First Hearing about Hermeneutics,” October 29 (Summer, 1984): 117–119. 26. Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York US: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 1. 27.

Rykwert, “The Sitting Position,” 234.

28. Notably, years later Ulm Rector Tomas Maldonado wrote on “On the Idea of Comfort” (translated by John Cullars, Design Issues 8:1 (Autumn, 1991): 35–43) largely focusing on the order that comes from a bourgeois fixation on hygiene.

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Such empathy is anathema to Banham. For him, the mistake of heroic modernism was not its commitment to rationality, but its faulty translation of that ideology and practice into the discourse of rationalism. Banham positions procedures commonly attributed to rationalization as based not in the domain of ideas, but merely aesthetics. According to Banham, the underlying error of heroic modernism is that movement’s chronic misrepresentation of the functional aspect of design. In a position at odds with Rykwert’s concerns for reflection on previous cultural understandings, Banham criticizes modern architecture for its inappropriate attachment to set forms: to idealizations, or in the terms of this thesis, reifications. In an argument developed for his doctorate and later presented in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Banham frames the omission of important figures from the received history of the modern movement as the result of a preoccupation with a certain type of form. 29 In Banham’s critique, rationalism was erroneously established as a sign of functionality. Banham’s own visit to the HfG in early 1959 encouraged in him a resistance of a markedly different type to Rykwert. 30 In his 1960 article “Stocktaking”, written for the Architectural Review, Banham asserts that the research and teaching being undertaken by the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm, while it asks some searching questions and produces some truly radical answers, does so within a mental concept that substantially accepts the limits that the architectural profession has set itself. 31 Banham’s texts articulate the errors of historiography and the errors of architectural theory that underpinned the postwar design school often related to the Bauhaus. 29. Peter Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London UK: The Architectural Press, 1960). PhD completed at the Warburg Institute under supervision from Nikolaus Pevsner. Banham also studied under Rudolf Wittkower at the Courtauld Institute. Banham’s focus is the missing Futurists. The Futurists became a key medium for Banham. 30. Banham gave two lectures at Ulm in March of 1959: “The Influence of Expendability on Product Design” and “Democratic Taste” – see Jeremy Aynsley, Designing Modern Germany (London UK: Reaktion, 2009), 184; and also Reyner Banham, “Lecturing at Ulm,” The Architects’ Journal (16 April, 1959): 587. 31. Peter Reyner Banham, “Stocktaking,” in A Critic Writes (Berkeley US: University of California Press, 1996), 53. Originally published in Architectural Review 127 (February, 1960): 93–100.

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Banham’s position can nevertheless be seen to extend the established position of the modern movement’s avant-garde. 32 Functionalist ideology, in Banham’s view, should be rearticulated around the so-called second machine age. For him, architecture should be increasingly technological: more rational, less rationalized; more gadget purr, less visually pure. Banham asserts that the machine metaphor should be supplanted by a design culture that integrates present-day electronic components and circuits. Banham seeks to exaggerate architecture’s engagement with gizmos. Far from expressing disaffection with the basic instrumental regime of modernity, his goal is to progress its historical project, to encourage its insatiable teleological drive. Banham wants to reestablish the connection between architectural design and the historical forces that are ongoing yet, for him, retarded by an aesthetic bias. It is to this end that he proposes unhouses that manage resources without requiring stable form. While perhaps a fantastic image, for Banham in 1969, the un-house was far from fantasy. In “A Home is not a House”, he stresses that the dreams of un-houses and other “nonrigid structures” were becoming more and more realizable. In his presentation, they had “come within the experience and creative capacity of a whole generation of students and younger architects.” 33 Indeed, in his typically combative manner, Banham contends: In the open-fronted society, with its social and personal mobility, its interchangeability of components and personnel, its gadgetry and almost universal expendability, the persistence of architecture-as-monumental-space must appear as evidence of the sentimentality of the tough. 34 Banham’s technological commitment, sometimes characterized as technofetishism, 35 can thus be seen as the logical extension, or hyper version, of modernity. His preferred mode

32. Banham might be said to “radically” extend this position. The use of the word “radical” will be avoided in this thesis. No term conflates a position with an attitude and reifies more wilfully. 33. Peter Reyner Banham, “The Architecture of Wampanoag,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 102. Cedric Price, Archigram, Superstudio, Ugo La Pietra and Ettore Sottsass Jr., are possible examples. 34.

Banham, “A Home is not a House,” 118.

35. See for example William J. Mitchell, Me ++: The cyborg self and the networked city (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2003), or Anthony Vidler, “Troubles in Theory Part IV: The Social Side,” AR (10 April, 2013), accessed 25 May, 2015, www.architectural-review.com/essays/troubles-in-theory-part-ivthe-social-side/8644614.article.

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of interacting with the world represents an avant-gardism based on rational objectivity: an unaffected, unelaborated presentation of phenomena; a kind of literal architecture-aslife. Generations of modern-movement avant-gardists positioned themselves as strident but honest critics of a society that, due to an acritical subservience to its inherited traditions, lacked frankness and integrity. Adolf Loos’s famous depiction of architectural ornament as “criminal” is perhaps the most vigorous and acute example of this ascetic moral code. 36 In the context of the HfG, the case might be rested on Max Bill’s unpadded Ulmer Hocker stools, which furnished the workshops in Ulm from their design in 1954 until the school’s closure in 1968. 37 And so within the London milieu, and significantly within the pages of Meaning in Architecture, two strong positions are sited. Each is made relative to — indeed, in reaction to — the threatened but still-presiding mainstream architectural hegemony. Each is “critical” of, or antagonistic towards, so-called modernism. Modern architecture in the late 1960s, the tragic cultural object epitomized by the lamenting Warwick, holds on desperately, regretful of its preoccupations with rationalism or monumentalism respectively. Adamant, Rykwert and Banham seek home and comfort elsewhere. The positions of Rykwert and Banham are not harmonious. They might indeed be cast in an antinomy. Due to their fundamental differences, the ideologies can share neither home, nor chair, nor stool. Oppositions are available between the two critics: symbolism/literalism; value/function; sitting position/un-chair. History suggests postures and spaces formed around these lines within the late 1960s London scene, filled by willing milieu participants. But this is a setting within which Jencks rejects all seats.

2.3.

In the body of “Semiology and Architecture”, Jencks straddles the critical

positions of Rykwert and Banham with the help of “bicycle seats”. He stresses both the “metaphorical” aspect — that which carries the symbolic dimension — and the “functional” aspect — that which expresses the neutral and calculable facts — of

36. “Ornament” is in this view the legacy of a tradition that masks actualities as it obscures building construction by adding layers of unnecessary material. It is important to note the connection here to the Theorist persona construct: the assumption of an ascetic position in relation to the existing state of excess or extravagance gains prestige for its tough and partially martyred stand. 37.

This subject might be better framed under the broader umbrella of “design”.

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objects, illustrating his argument for their multiplication with this one example. 38 The bicycle has an almost two-hundred-year history. 39 Jencks makes no reference to this history. Instead he develops a position relatable to the “found object” of Marcel Duchamp, and the “as found” as developed by Independent Group members Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Peter Smithson. His “bicycle seat” is a sign, slipped into culture and discourse in syntagmatic chains. Clues to Rykwert and Banham’s likely approaches to the “bicycle seat” can be found in their Meaning in Architecture chapters. In Rykwert’s “The Sitting Position”, a man, “[t]he French cyclist F. Lecocq” 40 — in fact, André Leducq 41 — cradles his head in his elbow while he sits on a stone by the side of the road with his knee bleeding. This cyclist’s “seat”, for Rykwert, symbolizes the degree of comfort one can find after crashing in le Tour de France. The “Environment Bubble” — a “[t]ransparent plastic bubble inflated by air-conditioning output” 42 — that helps illustrate Banham’s un-house ideal is itself perched on a geographical outcrop. But its seated inhabitants, including three copies of the famous mini-cyclist himself, 43 sit on a smooth surface separated from the outer skin by a volume of wadding. The illustration suggests an inner membrane fits to the skin of the multiple, naked, cross-legged Banhams and François Dallegrets, the “seats” thus merely a function of sitting. Rykwert’s cyclist’s seat is rocky, but due to his

38.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

39. The history of two-wheeled, person-powered vehicles extends back to 1818, the year in which Baron Karl Drais patented his invention propelled not by cranked pedals but by running legs. Drais named his creation the Laufmaschine (“running machine”); but it is also known as the Draisine or Draisienne, and the Dandy Horse. The Laufmaschine’s seat was limited to some padding attached to the curved wooden crossbar. Images suggest that some seats were saddled, in keeping with practice established with its genetic ancestor, the horse. In the same year, the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce patented an improved design called the Vélocipède (“fast foot”), which featured an adjustable seat. Niépce was also a leader in heliography and photogravure, predecessors to Daguerréotype, ancestor to photography; and, with his brother Claude, is said to have invented the world’s first internal combustion engine. The name “bicycle” was first used in 1868 – “bicycle, n.,” OED Online, March 2015, Oxford University Press, accessed 25 May, 2015, www.oed.com/view/Entry/18720?rskey=9wEHT0&result=1&isAdvanced=false. 40.

Rykwert, “The Sitting Position,” 233.

41. The story of André “Dédé” Leducq’s 1930 Tour was remarkable. In the sixteenth stage, he fell and lost consciousness. He regained consciousness, and continued riding, only to have his pedal break. With the help of his French teammates (the race was contested that year (and all years to 1961) by national or regional, rather than trade teams), Leducq managed to win stage sixteen’s sprint finish, and go on to win the Tour – “The Tour: Year 1930,” Le Tour de France, accessed 16 May, 2015, www.letour.fr/HISTO/us/TDF/1930/histoire.html. 42 .

Banham, “A Home is not a House,” 115.

43. See Reyner Banham, “The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini-Cyclist,” Living Arts 3 (1964): 91–97. Banham famously rides a Moulton. The Moulton, designed by Alex Moulton with revolutionary frame design and suspension technology, was released in 1962. It has been afforded the laudatory cliché, “the bicycle of the future”.

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impromptu foetal position, gives psychological comfort; Banham the cyclist sits unemotionally on an amorphous membrane, ideal, by his account, for resting sit bones. Rykwert and Banham constitute the symbolic and the rational, the empathetic and the techno-minimal. Jencks evades both as he crystallizes his “uses of a bicycle seat”. The first use of the seat Jencks describes in his text can be related to Rykwert’s “critique of functionalism”. The use is realized through Pablo Picasso’s work, the “Bull’s Head” or “Tête de taureau”. Picasso uses the seat of a bicycle to form the face of a bull; and the handlebars to form the horns. 44 For Jencks this demonstrates how a signification can be arrived at against the prevailing literal recognition of its components. The seat and handlebars are both parts of a bicycle, yet the combination can approximate a bull’s head. The seat, as a sign, is heightened through this linguistic duplicity. But while denying the without-rhetoric functionalist position — that a seat is for sitting on — this use is not quite symbolic in Rykwert’s sense. The reference entailed is not processed in the psyche, or in the collective consciousness or memory, but is rather linguistic. Jencks channels the Saussurean division between philology and semiology. His system or structure of language duly resists the diachronic influence that forms the crux to Rykwert’s hermeneutics. Jencks’s focus is rather on the synchronic dimension of connotation that privileges no meaning absolutely. Rykwert’s reference may also be said to be connotational, but his connotation is one of depth, of significant psychological association, rather than breadth, signification. Similar in its indirect approach, then, Jencks’s first use is nonetheless on a different plane to Rykwert. The second use of the bicycle seat Jencks isolates in his written elaboration can be seen in the contexts of Banham’s rationalism. In contradistinction to the first use, this aspect focuses on the primary functionality of the seat: the housing of buttocks. Jencks describes the “Operating Chair-Stool”, constructed by “surgeons … out of pre-existing parts: an architect’s chair back, a bar-rail, an hydraulic pump, bed castors, car springs”, 45 and the seat of a bicycle. It is, in Jencks’s analysis, “for stability during … operation[s]” that the surgeons rely on this seat. The surgeons are motivated by strict, practical, physiological concerns. They give no thought to the appropriateness of the form in that 44. The seat, apparently derived from a racing bike, is less like the head of a “bull” and more like that of a deer. The “bull”-like quality of the sculpture comes from the curved, singular handlebars. 45 .

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

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context. For Jencks, ergonomic preoccupations allow a monstrous form into an otherwise sanitized environment. The seated posture extends scientific logic without the sentimentality of operating theatre propriety intruding. This use of the bicycle seat may rest on physical functionality, but it is not entirely literal. Using the seat for sitting on does not satisfy the strict meaning of the sign. Its transplantation from the frame of a bicycle to the arm of a hydraulic pump again estranges the found object from its commonsense identity. Banham’s seating ideals reject any stable signified. Despite his use of the “un-” form, this includes signifieds contrary to denotative signification. In short, Banham’s position resists signs. The second use Jencks finds for the bicycle seat thus approaches Banham’s rationalist and pragmatic attitude, but through its adoption of a significant form, challenges the world that Banham theorizes. 46 Banham demands an un-seat; Jencks celebrates the “bicycle seat” in inverted commas. Both of these two uses are related by Jencks to the “striking” effect that results from “an ad hoc joining of parts”. 47 Jencks asserts that as a result of the “multivalence of any object”, the uses of a bicycle’s seat “are hardly exhausted” by the two alternatives, bull’s head and surgeon’s stool. Due to the nature of the closed universe of existing forms the uses of any object are “finite and non-arbitrary”. 48 Despite this rule, Jencks does not elaborate the third use implied in his figure in the accompanying written text.

2.4.

According to Jencks’s argumentation, a bicycle’s seat is not limited to its

dictionary definition as a contoured surface upon which to sit whilst cycling. The significance of the bicycle seat resides in its physical dimensionality; and, importantly, this is found through uses that are realized in language. Jencks frames the bicycle seat as an example of a general rule, which he claims constitutes “perhaps the most fundamental idea of semiology and meaning in architecture: … that any form in the environment, or

46. In 1976, Banham and Jencks were to have a very public falling out over this basic issue, as discussed in chapter 6. 47. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11. These two images are used by Jencks in “Adhocism on the South Bank: Review of the Hayward Gallery,” Architectural Review 14 (July, 1968): 27–30. Jencks’s introduction of “ad hoc” presages Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (New York US: Doubleday, 1972). 48.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

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sign in language, is motivated, or capable of being motivated.” 49 According to Jencks’s proposition, every sign or object can proliferate a multiplicity of significations based directly on the confluence of its inherent dimensions and the social world. Jencks’s understanding of motivation is problematic. 50 His assertion that “a form may be initially arbitrary or un-motivated as Saussure points out” 51 is a misrepresentation of the process of naming. The “initially arbitrary” relation of signifier to signified is the base upon which Saussurean scholars understand and analyse signs in language. 52 A new language form must be undetermined by the object to which it becomes attached. The connection of word to thing is purely contingent on history. This is not to say that the sign itself is arbitrary. Émile Benveniste stresses the location of arbitrariness in the process of signification rather that the sign formation itself when he writes: “[t]he choice that invokes a certain sound slice for a certain idea is not at all arbitrary; this sound slice would not exist without the corresponding idea and vice versa.” 53 Linguistic conventions intervene on sign formation. Jencks’s conceptualization of motivation attends to signification rather than signs. It follows that Jencks’s architectural field should be filled not with signs but significations. Signification includes the orders of denotation and connotation. Jencks’s bull’s head and surgeon’s stool focus attention on the connotative order, the second level that plays off denotative conventionality: the seat as that object allowing for sitting on a bicycle.

49.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

50. There is something of the psychoanalytic aspect of “motivation” in Jencks’s approach. Émile Benvensite, “Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory” (1956), in Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables US: University of Miami Press, 1971), 65– 75, interrogates the relation of motivation with cause. The cause of Jencks’s theory of motivation seems itself to be motivated by his desire to destabilize the signs upon which architectural discourse is based. 51.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

52. Benveniste states that the characteristic arbitrariness of a sign “ought to explain the very fact by which it is verified: namely, that expressions of a given notion vary in time and space and in consequence have no necessary relationship with it” – Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 43. He goes on, however, to question the reach of this rule, finding that Saussure’s “argument is falsified by an unconscious and surreptitious recourse to a third term which was not included in the initial definition. This third term is the thing itself, the reality” (44). This standpoint can be likened to Jencks’s application of Ogden and Richards. 53. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 47. He also writes that “[b]etween the signifier and the signified, the connection is not arbitrary; on the contrary, it is necessary. The concept (the ‘signified’) bœuf is perforce identical in my consciousness with the sound sequence (the ‘signifier’) böf. How could it be otherwise? … The mind does not contain empty forms, concepts without names” (45).

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Constructing a theory around signification rather than signs has practical advantages. Almost all architectural objects respond to set functional requirements. Very few situations allow for novel relations of signifier and signified to develop. Unlike establishing a new word for a new thing, or installing a unique signifier–signified relation, each form develops out of pre-existent meanings. A theory of signs demanding an arbitrary relation between signifier and signified runs counter to the idea of design in general, and the design of a bicycle’s seat in particular. 54 Even the minimal padding on the Laufmaschine was non-arbitrary: it was motivated by the desire to protect the ischium, the pubis, and their more sensitive neighbours from the frame’s presence, felt under the weight of the upper body. The shape of the seat, too, was motivated by the design goal to allow the legs to cycle the drivetrain. Unlike a sign, in which word and thing mutely reflect history, a design speaks of its motivations. From Jencks’s perspective, all architectural forms approach architecture parlante. However, in distancing himself from arbitrariness, Jencks partially negates the central goal of Saussurean linguistics. In a sense, he supports the understanding of language as natural. 55 His system, which focuses on the second and subsequent “uses” of an object, implicitly takes the “initial” bicycle seat as a given. It naturalizes naming. This is one of the ways Jencks takes advantage of language. To “fasten a name” in a text is a contingent act: “the seme is only a departure, an avenue of meaning”. 56 Building secondary and tertiary “uses” secures the initial, primary myth. In complicating the sign, Jencks subtly reinforces the initial codification, fixing its departure point, its identity. Jencks’s argumentation here is vulnerable. It is from this aspect of “Semiology and Architecture” that Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas launch their critique, and their subsequent autonomy-focused theorization. In invoking the latent connotative network residing below denotation, Jencks loosens the grip words have on things. Yet in insisting the “bicycle seat” has a “finite and non-arbitrary” potential 57 — that its “uses” cannot be a purely subject-driven constructions, but must develop from objective physicality — he

54. Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas would likely disagree with this statement, or contest its ideological grounding. For a discussion of the conflict between Agrest–Gandelsonas and Jencks, see Paul Walker, “Semiotics and the Discourse of Architecture” (PhD, University of Auckland, 1987), 157–167. 55.

Discussions return to the natural, “Adamic”, or “Edenic” language myth in Chapter 3.

56 . 190–191.

Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970), translated by Richard Miller (New York US: Hill & Wang, 1974),

57.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

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effectively reasserts commonsense, securing the denotative base to connotative extension. He frames the process of reference as direct and uncomplicated. Jencks’s argument suggests there are set potentials residing within each object. People can see or “invent” these new meanings when new aspects of the object arise, and these meanings then mingle with or displace established ones. But the base to this presentation of socially-realized objecthood — the foundation on which, according to Jencks, “all of a sudden forms come alive or fall into bits” 58 — is not a physical but a linguistic object. Jencks’s “bicycle seat” resolves around its name.

2.5.

In an article on Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, French critic

and semiologist Roland Barthes discusses the issue of names, endorsing literature’s reliance on these semic units. 59 Joseph F. Graham interprets Barthes as effectively asking “whether it is possible to be a writer … without believing, somehow, in the natural relation of names and essences,” 60 and answering “the answer is surely … no, it is not possible to be a writer without believing in that natural relation between names and essences.” 61 For Barthes, names may be undesirable, but they are a necessary precondition to writing. 62 In “Semiology and Architecture”, Jencks appears in tacit agreement. He sets aside the arbitrary principle of structural linguistics and promotes the so-conceived “natural” reference necessity of a literature-like theory. Jencks’s reliance on names does not, in itself, displace the referential function from textual ascendancy. This section of his argument is not affected by their presence, but their faulty use. The primary issue here — the sticking point in this part of Jencks’s presentation of theory — is that the correct name for the element of a bicycle on which a rider sits is not “bicycle seat”, but “bicycle saddle”. The non-technical, commonsense term estranges the denotative referent, and unsettles the process of communication.

58.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

59. Roland Barthes, “Proust et les noms,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson (Den Haag NL: Mouton, 1967), 150–158. 60. Joseph F. Graham, “Of Poetry and Names, Science and Things,” in The Current in Criticism: Essays on the Present and Future of Literary Theory, edited by Clayton Koelb and Virgil Llewellyn Lokke (West Lafayette US: Purdue University Press, 1982), 123. 61.

Graham, “Of Poetry and Names,” 123.

62.

Barthes, S/Z, 95.

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Jencks’s conspicuous “seat” is shaped by rhetorical motivation, the analysis coloured by artificial distortion. It is on this opaque linguistic selection that the rhetoricality of the text shifts. Again, Barthes provides a constructive reference. In S/Z, he argues that as “instruments of exchange”, names allude to a surplus of information: each name brings to the text a “precious remainder”. 63 In redistributing the weight of the text away from the argument and towards the message, the poetic aspect of this section of the text becomes pronounced. The referential function gives way to the basic linguistic determinant: this central — and with the formalization of “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat”, figural — improper name. Two subsequent names further emphasize the poetic function of the text, bolstering “seat” and questioning Jencks’s motivation. As noted above, the referentially tenuous presentation of arbitrariness is presented with the authority of “Saussure”, dropped into the syntagm without first name, nobiliary particle, nationality, or discipline. 64 This laxity is representative of the Swiss linguist’s limited and superficial contribution to Jencks’s argument: he is a mention, nothing more. The second name is treated in an entirely different manner: as an absence. The noninclusion emerges in the contexts of a quotation. Jencks makes the reasonably commonsensical assertion that “the minute a new form is invented it will acquire, inevitably, a meaning.” 65 To elaborate, he writes: “This semanticization is inevitable; as soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself; the use of a raincoat is to give protection from the rain, but this cannot be dissociated from the very signs of an atmospheric situation.” 66

63.

Barthes, S/Z, 95; 11.

64. The endnote — “Course in General Linguistics, Saussure, McGraw-Hill, 1966, pp. 67–9” — also fails to give his full name. It also fails to credit Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, who compiled the book — or, to be pedantic, translator Wade Baskin. 65. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11. The ellipsis covers “inevitably”. Baird makes an important comment in the margins of the same page: “It need not even be ‘invented’; all it has to do is get noticed.” Jencks sees meaning as the result of purposeful action. 66.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

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The lines are decidedly murky: the meaning is vague; and the language seems inelegant, like the result of poor translation. In an attempt to clarify the opaque quotation, Jencks adds: “to be more exact, the use of a raincoat can be dissociated from its shared meanings if we avoid its social use or explicitly decide to deny it further meaning.” 67 If anything, this qualification makes things worse. The relevance of the “raincoat”, and the quality of the “atmospheric situation” remain a curiosity: foreign objects of language. More glaring than the communicative indistinctness is the mismanagement of voice: the failure to include in the written body an acknowledgement of where the lines are from, whose words they are. The reference is not concealed: the inverted commas display the lines’ appropriation. The source is not hidden: an endnote reveals the lines are from Barthes’s Elements of Semiology. Yet, in a paragraph that prominently includes the name “Saussure”, Barthes’s assertion is smuggled into the syntagm in its own heavily punctuated sentence. The omission of “Barthes” from the written body of Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture” is as communicative as the inclusion of “Saussure”. The name “Barthes” does appear on the page adjacent to “Saussure”. It is included not by Jencks, but by Baird. As mentioned previously in this thesis, in a feature of Meaning in Architecture, the margins of the pages contain the views of other authors. 68 Baird’s comments attend to reasonably trivial details of semiological theory, and Jencks does not bother to reply. The more interesting aspect of the note is the rendering of the French theorist then amongst the vanguard of that semiological practice. After claiming that “[m]eanings are not ‘voted down’, or controlled by elites”, Baird adds: “(Barthes is wrong about that, I feel, even for the elite world of haute couture).” 69 Not only is Barthes mentioned as casually as Saussure, he is compressed within parentheses. Baird’s offhand “(Barthes)” exacerbates the power of the absence of “Barthes” from Jencks’s writing. Through the use and non-use of the names of Saussure and Barthes, the material quality of the text becomes palpable. The transfer of ideational or intellectual information is

67.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

68.

See Steen, “Operation Marginalia” for a close study of some of this material.

69.

Baird, in Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 11.

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retarded, clearing the way for the construction of objects of discourse. From the text, an authorial figure begins to gain resolution.

2.6.

Jencks’s stated goal is to expose the habitual pattern he labels “ MEANING ,

INEVITABLE YET DENIED ”.

He wishes to invalidate those who say, “my building means

nothing”; 70 who employ the kind of without-rhetoric ideology that underwrites much of the discourse of the modern movement of architecture, and many histories of modernity more broadly. This is not a complicated argument. The inevitability of meaning is basic to signs. A signified requires a signifier, and a signifier entails a signified. As Holger Steen Sørensen writes, “no one is prepared to say that a sound is a sign unless it is the bearer of a meaning: only meaning-bearing sounds are called signs, a sound with which no meaning is associated being just a sound.” 71 The same applies to forms. Jencks, however, chooses not to present this simple theoretical position. On the contrary, he takes measures to make it complicated. Rather than bringing to light the simple denial of the inevitable by the avant-garde of the modern movement, Jencks introduces further denials, additional layers of content. He denies the validity of the historical avantgarde’s rhetoric, and the legitimacy of their discursive formation, insisting “[i]n their denial of meaning, they create it.” 72 He quotes “the architect Hannes Meyer” as saying “‘Our League of Nations symbolizes nothing’”, and follows that with an uncited stream of ostensibly avant-gardist testimony: “‘My poem means nothing: it just is. My painting is meaningless. Against Interpretation: The Literature of Silence. Entirely radical.’” 73 The lines are patent wordiness. The opacity of Jencks’s language casts a different light on his argument in relation to the “bicycle seat”. The “uses” of this sign owe less to the work of Rykwert and Banham, and more to the range of options within the broader system. Jencks looks to degrade all 70.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 12.

71. Holger Steen Sørensen, “Meaning,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Den Haag NL: Mouton, 1967), 1876. Sørensen states this is the same for the Saussurean “biplane view” and the “traditional monoplane view, which is still the predominant one, according to which signs are identified with meaning-bearers” (1876). 72.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 12.

73. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 12. The sources for these quotations are not given. Attribution — to Tristan Tzara, to Kazimir Malevich or Mark Rothko, to Susan Sontag and Ihab Hassan, to Banham — dilutes Jencks’s point, which is not specific but generic; and, for him, chronic.

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established positions: to critique hermeneutic value, avant-gardist attitude, and the mutually exclusive relation characteristically set up between the two. Formal complexity, emphasizing the material quality of language, is a destructive tool. Jencks appears to destroy in order to realize “the goal of semiology, [which,] even if ultimately in vain, is to bring the intuitive up to the conscious level, in order to increase [architects’] area of responsible choice.” 74 The objective is transcendence; yet this objective is weighed down from the outset with the likelihood of failure. From this overwrought condition, “Semiology and Architecture” constructs a persona.

2.7.

In his article “History of Theory”, historian Ian Hunter presents an intellectual

character that is central to the so-called theory moment. 75 Hunter designates this “virtuoso” character the “persona of the theorist”. 76 This role, assumed most vividly for Hunter by Jacques Derrida, is “characterized by the desire to interrupt ordinary life and knowledge in order to rise above it, to look down on it, to be someone for whom and to whom the world declares itself in all its purity.” 77 According to Hunter’s description, the persona characteristically “subordinates all of the regions of knowledge to the contemplation of a single irruptive source of meaning and structure.” 78 The “theorist” outlined by Hunter has a history. The character is “an improvisation on the figure of the Christian university metaphysician”: 79 a monkish scholar concerned with the nature of reality and of being in the world. In Hunter’s account, the asceticism of the role gains for its denizen cultural prestige. Denying oneself of “the natural pleasures of bourgeois realist narrative” is repaid with glorious intellectual standing. 80 For society as a whole, there is something saintly about refusing to accept the conditions as seen and as understood by the general populace as “reality”. At times this recognition is more pronounced than at others. James Smith’s argument focused on the critic Terry

74.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 13.

75.

Ian Hunter, “History of Theory,” Critical Enquiry 33:1 (Autumn, 2006): 87.

76.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 97, 103.

77.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 87.

78.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 87.

79.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 87.

80.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 104.

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Eagleton suggests that due to structural preconditions, the “theory moment” period between 1965 and 1980 was particularly receptive to such intellectual practices. 81 Hunter’s “persona of the theorist” resolves itself around a familiar process. Each example is born following “an existential act of self-forbidding or abstention from the ‘world at hand’.” 82 The “theorist” first becomes “convinced of a fundamental ethical shortcoming — their closure within the dead ‘natural’ forms of understanding”; before recognizing that this shortcoming “can only be overcome by performing the inner work that will turn them into a certain kind of philosopher or theorist.” 83 The process is thus not period specific, but rather a recurring response to a general state. The prestige the process has afforded since the time of the Christian metaphysician ensures it is quite commonly adopted despite its social drawbacks — its hardships; its isolation. The significance of Hunter’s “persona of the theorist” is not individual but rather structural. The intellectual position taken is not an essential aspect of the role: the “theorist” is not determined by his or her theory. The character is fundamentally defined by the adoption of “an intellectual attitude or deportment.” 84 This attitude manifests scepticism for experience and abstraction, empiricism and a priori. Each “theorist” nurtures “a certain inner distrust of available knowledge,” and, concomitantly, “an openness to breakthrough phenomena of certain kinds.” 85 The forms and mechanisms of meaning upon which the “theorist” focuses are moot. 86 For Hunter, the “persona of the theorist” is a conceptual device. Departing from Hunter, this thesis frames his object as a character that becomes evident as a textual presence: one constructed in the text as an authorial figure. Specifically, the thesis contends that opaque elements of the text of “Semiology and Architecture”, led by the dominant pictorial figures of the text, resolve aspects of the author function Jencks into this persona: that formal elements can be extracted from the syntagm that constitute a

81. See James Smith, Terry Eagleton: A Critical Introduction (Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 151. 82.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 85.

83.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 85; 85.

84.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 81.

85.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 84; 81.

86.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 104.

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Theorist, and that this character contributes to the discursive identity of Jencks. Each chapter will find examples of this operation. A case can be made for a Theorist persona construct within Jencks’s argumentation around the “three uses of a bicycle seat”. The theory of signs he promotes might be seen as a paradigmatic “irruptive source”; 87 his semiology could be understood as a vehicle for finding meanings different from those that a layperson, using commonsense, would find. From this perspective, Jencks — like Baird 88 — raises himself up from the common ground through the implantation of semiology within English-language architectural discourse. This thesis, however, argues that such a case suffers from a reading bias towards the referential function of language. It substantiates its position by demonstrating the failures of Jencks’s argument can be separated from the text’s effect. Throughout the chapters of this thesis, the Theorist persona will be located within the poetic function of “Semiology and Architecture”. This chapter’s construction depends on the proper and improper naming and non-naming detailed above: the unrepresentative bicycle “seat”, the mention of “Saussure”, and the presence-yet-absence of “Barthes”. Like Hunter’s Anglo-American literary theory examples Eagleton, Jonathan Culler, and Fredric Jameson, Jencks mounts an ostensible challenge to “knowledges declared to occlude [his] own emergence from the appositive relations of language or the mode of production”; 89 but he does so not through deft argumentation, but a rhetoricality relying on opacity of form, both pictorial and linguistic. The Theorist persona, however, is not the only construct to be generated from these textual resources. The other, more glaring authorial figure produced in this section of the text is most evident in the pictorial figure “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” — specifically in its as yet unexplained “use”.

87.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 87.

88. Interestingly, Martin Pawley picks up on and attacks the metaphysician within Baird’s argument: “[w]ho is this once and future architect who will design within user experience with neither arrogance nor indifference? He swims, priest, analyst, folksinger, into the mind’s eye like some little known outside lecturer at the A.A. Preaching a practice shorn of objects, contracts, functions and decisions he treads a narrow tightrope, arrogance on the one hand, indifference on the other … If Baird catches him with the stuff on him he’s done for” – Martin Pawley, in George Baird, “‘La Dimension Amoureuse’ in Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 98. Baird is indeed a neater fit for the mythical “theorist” than Jencks. 89.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 104.

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2.8.

Discussion above detailed Jencks’s argument in relation to what he contends

are the two “uses” of any object. What he classifies as the “metaphorical” and the “functional” aspects of a “common” or everyday form were related to the discursive positions of Rykwert and Banham, respectively. While its formal opacity contributes to the effect of the semic elements dominating the functionality of this section of the text, the pictorial figure referred to in the writing — “(Fig. 1)”: “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” — is not a major factor determining these two aspects. The images supporting Jencks’s so-called first and second “uses of a bicycle seat” are reasonably transparent representations of the descriptions given in text. They are, in fact, illustrations of the specific objects to which he refers: “Picasso’s ‘Bull’s Head’” and “the surgeons[’] … ‘Operating Chair-Stool’”. They can be taken as neutral accounts. Both are photographs showing three-quarter views — the respective three-quarters favouring the spine of the page spread. While the “Bull’s Head” sits over a tightly cropped grey background and the “Operating Chair-Stool” hovers over white space, as stated above, both objects are clear and unambiguous figures in relation to their grounds. These two “use” illustrations are augmented by a third image (see Fig. 2c). As detailed above, it is the cover of December 1966’s edition of Esquire magazine. It is not referred to in the writing, and forms no tangible part of the argument. Indeed, like the absent “Barthes” above, the omission of a written reference to the image — representing what the reader might thus assume is the “third” of “three” uses, despite the visual order in which it is most logically the first — from the writing is glaring. But this effect pales in comparison to the impact of the image itself. It dominates the other two stated “uses” in terms of size and in terms of visual complexity. More than merely being unconcealed, the image’s identity as a magazine cover is celebrated. The title is clear; the cost is prominent; and its material substance is conveyed not only through the dictum “ THE

MAGAZINE FOR MEN ”,

but also through the

page reference given for “The New 7 Deadly Sins” article — “see page 190”. Its identity as an object of popular culture is exaggerated through its juxtaposition with both Picasso’s elite art object, and the restricted, institutionalized medical apparatus.

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Figure 2c: Detail from “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat”.

The referential function of the image conveys information: the photograph represents Claudia Cardinale, the title brands the publication, the prices set a monetary value, and so on. In the contexts of the figure “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat”, however, these pieces of information are incidental. If the reader did not know, for example, that the woman in the photograph was Cardinale, or that the issue contained the article “The New 7 Deadly Sins”, the communicative effect of the cover to the figure would be unaffected. The image functions on the metalinguistic and poetic levels: it draws attention to its own

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coding as an image, and to the material quality of the message itself. Both of these functions rely heavily on a knowing, sardonic irony. 90 In using the image, Jencks puts on show a naive relation to disciplinary standards. He actively ignores a contradiction, a discursive conflict: while popular magazines for men are not traditionally considered suitable references for scholarly argumentation, magazines were at the time acceptable components of architectural texts, both written and drawn. Popular culture was an important resource and tool for the Independent Group. This includes its architectural practitioner members. Alison and Peter Smithson’s “But Today We Collect Ads” 91 is thus evoked through the crass commercialism and pop sensibility of Esquire’s December 1966 issue: the magazine cover is a synecdoche of this larger and more multifaceted whole, a sign of a discourse that goes beyond the hierarchy of high and low culture. In the contexts of “Semiology and Architecture”, the cover of Esquire is a commentary on the intellectual history of the period preceding publication: its juxtaposition with high-culture art and medicine at once adopts and criticizes the flattening of the cultural field onto a “tackboard”. 92 What is true of the cover as a whole is perhaps even more evident in the photograph that is its largest element. Female sex-symbol celebrities were a common theme in architectural presentations in England post World War Two. Beginning with the Golden Lane competition entry of 1952, the Smithsons focused their gaze — and the gaze of their audience — on Marilyn Monroe. A full seventeen years later, in “Instant City” (1969), Archigram was employing the image of Sharon Tate. 93 The irony of the Esquire cover is thickly framed in relation to a “girlie” magazine. 94

90 . “From the point of view of the interpreter, irony is an interpretive and intentional move: it is the making or inferring of meaning in addition to and different from what is stated, together with an attitude toward both the said and the unsaid” – Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London UK: Routledge, 1995), 11. 91 . Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “But Today We Collect Ads,” Ark: The Journal of the Royal College of Art, 18 (November, 1956): 49–50. 92 .

See Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959): 25–26.

93. It is noteworthy that Sharon Tate died on August 9, 1969: murdered, with her unborn foetus, by members of the Manson Family. Whether Archigram finalized Instant City prior to her murder is not known. That it continued to be published after her murder suggests a level of black humour was at play in Archigram’s productions, and was acceptable in architectural discourse at the time. 94. Irin Carmon quotes George Lois, the art director behind the shot, as saying: “Can we get a hot looking woman and get her on a bike sticking her ass out, almost like a parody of a girlie cover[?]” – Irin Cameron, “Selling Sex and Ax Murderesses: George Lois’ Esquire Covers,” Jezebel, accessed 20 May, 2015, http://jezebel.com/5484534/selling-sex-and-ax-murderesses-george-lois-esquire-lady-covers.

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Within the figure “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat”, Cardinale literally embodies the sexualization of culture broadly, and architectural culture more specifically. This sexualizing process is especially pertinent when viewed in the full contexts of the article, “The New 7 Deadly Sins”. Esquire replaces the Biblical list — in their words, the “quaint” acts of “Lust, Pride, Avarice and all the rest of them” 95 — with the heavily tongue in cheek chastity, poverty, anonymity, age, failure, ugliness, and constancy. The satirical foundation to this substitution is palpable: the magazine criticizes the celebrity culture that it, in part, contributes to creating. The italicized “New” highlights the irony of the position, which for an architectural theory audience draws associations with Banham’s seminal article, “The New Brutalism”. The article brings quotation marks into “Semiology and Architecture” — for some readers, given the imagery, “shudder quotes”. Through these means, the argumentation becomes a secondary matter. The formal, figural objects dominating the page displace the commonsense voice of Jencks — that presumed source of transparent communication — promoting in its place a cartoonish textual construct. While in a sense self-effacing, the irony behind Esquire and Cardinale does not offer the reader the authorial figure of the Theorist. The magazine cover cannot be even remotely associated with a Derrida-esque “virgin glance”: 96 quite the contrary. From this discursive frisson an entirely different authorial construct comes into view.

2.9.

Hunter requires of his theorist persona a “certain inner discipline”. 97 The best

example of such a disciplined practice within architectural writing is Manfredo Tafuri. It is this discipline that allows Tafuri to take on distinct historiographical and historiological projects. 98 “Semiology and Architecture” does not manifest such severity. There is a kind of “laxism” that pervades aspects of the text. 99 Jencks is characterized by a knowing attitude: a propensity to hold onto meanings, both astute and absurd. The text

95.

“The New 7 Deadly Sins,” Esquire (December, 1966): 190.

96.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 86.

97.

Hunter, “History of Theory,” 81.

98. See Andrew Leach and John Macarthur, “Tafuri as Theorist,” ARQ 10:3/4 (September, 2006): 235–240. Leach and Macarthur write of the widespread “conflation” of Tafuri’s persona with his writings, particularly Progetto e utopia. This has had an obvious and long-term effect on understandings of theory in architecture. 99.

Barthes, S/Z, 10.

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is also more operative, allowing Jencks occasions of self-interest. 100 The sensibility behind such writing is less abstention, and more affectation. The persona constituted by such characteristics is less ascetic, more aesthetic; less claustral, more casual. From such textual elements is formed the authorial figure of the Wit. The concept of wit is informed by a number of significant determinants. D.W. Jefferson constructs a “tradition” referred to as “learned wit” back from Ancient Romans Polonius and Lucian, through such writers of the Augustan period as Miguel de Cervantes, Desiderius Erasmus, and François Rabelais, and finally, amongst others, to Lawrence Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). 101 Northrop Frye celebrates the work of Sterne, Jonathan Swift, and some of their contemporaries as realizing the pinnacle of this kind of writing, which he asserts “expresses itself through information and ideas rather than through study or plot.” 102 Learned wit is related to a command of language and information often deemed “eloquence” as well as “erudition”. 103 As with Hunter’s “theorist”, the individual demonstrating these traits is a kind of virtuoso. Another type of wit more closely aligns with the philosophical grounding of Hunter’s “theorist persona”. According to S.L. Bethell, “metaphysical wit” demonstrates the complexity and intricacy of the universe. 104 A.J. Smith presents Bethell as positioning “witty conceits” as “in essence logical sophistries [that] deliberately flout the decorum of the established categories of matter in the service of a higher truth”; and characterizing wit as “a sacramental agent in that it works to offer us a double view of events in the world, at once historical and timeless.” 105 For Smith, “metaphysical wit seeks to hold in a tense equilibrium two orders of being which are irremediably distinct yet indissolubly bound together.” 106 Metaphysical wit is thus “not merely mental 100.

Evidence of this appears in chapter 2’s “table”.

101 . D.W. Jefferson, “Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit,” in Tristram Shandy, edited by Howard Anderson (New York US: W.W. Norton, 1980), 516. 102 . Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 24:2 (Winter, 1990–91): 157. 103. Richard McCabe, “Wit, Eloquence, and Wisdom in Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit,” Studies in Philology 81:3 (Summer, 1984): 299. 104 . S.L. Bethell, “The Nature of Metaphysical Wit,” in Discussions of John Donne, edited by Frank Kermode (Boston US: D.C. Heath, 1962), 136–149. 105.

A.J. Smith, Metaphysical Wit (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5; 5.

106.

Smith, Metaphysical Wit, 6.

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gymnastics, verbal tours de force, or virtuoso play — though it may be all of these — but a sensibility rooted in the religious and literary culture of late Renaissance Europe.” 107 Such a tension and significance underwrites the conception of wit within later German Romanticism, as evidenced by the notebook assertions of Friedrich Schlegel: “[a]ll poetic wit is universal … [and c]ombinatory wit is truly prophetic”; “[t]he ground of wit in philosophy is the imperative [of the synthetic]: philosophy should become poetry”; “the allegorical, the religion of the new, holds together the wit of the romantics.” 108 On a mundane level, commonsense associates wit with a “conversational” writing tone. 109 Technically, however, it relies on discrete usage patterns. Wit is read in the functioning of allusion: in meta-level demonstrations of the association of ideas. 110 It is recognized when connections realized in-text are unexpected: when links in an elaborate metonymic chain are removed, estranging semantics; 111 or when linguistic units not according with standard relations are inserted into a context, estranging syntactics. Wit takes advantage of the reader’s “blind spot”, 112 drawing attention to naive understandings, disturbing the tacit contracts that exist between the text and its referential content, and the reader and his or her assumptions of textuality. It thus runs contrary to so-called serious intellection and scholarship, disrupting rationalizing “judgment” — that disinterested practice that supports theoretical argumentation. 113

107 . Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, “Introduction,” in The Wit of SeventeenthCentury Poetry, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia US: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 2. 108 .

Quoted in Duncan Smith, “Schlegel on Wit,” BOMB 1:2 (1982): 17.

109. Eugene Hnatko, “Tristram Shandy’s Wit,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65:1 (January, 1966): 47. 110 . Sigmund Freud associates wit with obscenity: he claims wit is usually achieved through “allusion, i.e., substitution through a trifle, something which is only remotely related, which the listener reconstructs in his imagination as a full fledged and direct obscenity. The greater the disproportion between what is directly offered in the obscenity and what is necessarily aroused by it in the mind of the listener, the finer is the witticism and the higher it may venture in good society” – Freud, quoted in Hnatko, “Tristram Shandy’s Wit,” 59. 111 . Following Umberto Eco, “The Semantics of Metaphor,” this could be characterized as metaphor – see Andrew P. Steen, “Guerrilla in the Midst: The Universitas Project and a New Kind of Institution,” in Architecture, Institutions, and Change: Proceedings of the 32 nd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (Sydney AU: SAHANZ): forthcoming. 112.

Hnatko, “Tristram Shandy’s Wit,” 47.

113. “Discussing Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit [: The anatomy of wit very pleasant for all Gentlemen to read, and most necessary to remember: wherein are contains the delights that Wit followeth in his youth by the pleasantness of love, and the happiness he reapeth in age, by the perfectness of wisdom], C.S. Lewis remarks that ‘it is no kindness to [the author, John] Lyly to treat him as a serious novelist; the more seriously we take its action and characters the mode odious his work will appear’” –

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An acritical conception of wit is common within architectural discourse. The term is invariably applied to Jencks’s doctoral supervisor: as Romy Golan writes in her review of Nigel Whiteley’s Historian of the Immediate Future: Reyner Banham, “anyone who has had anything to say about Reyner Banham will agree, it is impossible not to fall under the spell of the wit and intelligence of his writing.” 114 While idiosyncratic and celebrated, Banham’s writing practice was influenced by his senior AR colleagues, particularly Hubert de Croning Hastings (most acutely when writing under the pseudonym Ivor de Wolfe) and John Betjeman, who, with Paul Nash, John Piper and others, were in turn influenced by Surrealism and English nonsense verse. 115 Jencks himself refers to wit in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. He asserts “Wit” has been defined as “the unlikely copulation of ideas together”, and the more unlikely but successful the union, the more it will strike the viewer and stay in his mind. A witty building is one which permits us to make extraordinary but convincing associations. 116 Adjacent to this written description, Jencks himself engages a witticism: his reproduction of an image by Australian architectural students depicting the Sydney Opera House as a kind of turtle orgy plays with the textuality of his quotation’s choice of words. He puns on “copulation”. This example shows Jencks’s knowledge of and concern for wit as a tradition and as a technique. It shows his desire to affect the style and communicate the manner of wit in his writing. Within “Semiology and Architecture”, the discordant Esquire cover featuring the salacious image of Cardinale achieves this function without any overt linguistic device.

McCabe, “Wit, Eloquence, and Wisdom in Euphues,” 299. Jencks’s architectural theory brings similar risks. Melvyn New, “Sterne, Warburton, and the Burden of Exuberant Wit,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15:3 (Spring, 1982): 247. 114. Romy Golan, “Review. Historian of the Immediate Future: Reyner Banham, by Nigel Whiteley,” The Art Bulletin 85:2 (June, 2003): 401. 115 . For a background, see John Macarthur, “Strange Encounters in Mid-Century British Urbanism: Townscape, Anti-Scrape and Surrealism,” in Panorama to Paradise: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (Adelaide AU: SAHANZ, 2007): 1–13. 116.

Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 44.

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Much architectural theory might be said to focus on the ethical issues brought forth by Hunter’s “theorist”. Within Meaning in Architecture, Frampton and Colquhoun are pertinent examples. 117 But the ethically driven Theorist persona in “Semiology and Architecture” struggles with the contrarian persona of the Wit, attuned to the play of language, and sensitive to textual suggestion and displacement. 118 It should be noted that this latter authorial figure need not achieve the results Jencks projects for wit: the discursive significance of the persona of the Wit in this thesis does not come from his rhetorical “success” felt across time, but from the synchronic shifting of the function of the text from the referential to the poetic. Assessments of the “wittiness” of “Semiology and Architecture” will not be included in these chapters. The authorial figure of the Wit derives from affective disruption, not necessarily good humour.

2.10.

The rhetoricality forming around “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” is thus multi-

faceted. The written argument surrounding the figure is byzantine and highly wrought; but its referential function is undermined by a conspicuous and poorly chosen seme, and as a result, the poetic function gains a command over the section of the text that barely slackens. The use and non-use of proper names and of obtrusive quotation realize opaque forms that help construct in the text the authorial figure of the Theorist. The pictorial figure itself establishes referents from cultural sources of some esteem, but also introduces an unexplained and intentionally provocative object redolent with irony. From the loosely controlled textuality of the commercializing and sexualizing cover of Esquire — the so-implied but never articulated “third use” of the bicycle saddle — the authorial figure of the Wit gains shape. The unexpected conjunction of the three images within “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” focuses attention on the unsettling role of language in the transmission and communication of information. The display of the matter of communication overshadows the knowledge purportedly embedded in Jencks’s chapter. Pictorial and linguistic fragments of the text intrude on the presentation of “theory”. The authorial figures of the Theorist and Wit subvert argumentation. Architectural theory writing as a serious pursuit is corrupted by the language in which it is written. 117 Agrest and Gandelsonas might constitute the best examples in later and more strictly defined (and strictly restrained, i.e., ascetic) architectural semiotics. 118.

Hnatko, “Tristram Shandy’s Wit,” 59, 61.

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The overwhelming presence of reified culture individuates the three images within this chapter’s key figure, resolving it into semic units: Esquire’s Claudia Cardinale; “Picasso’s ‘Bull’s Head’”; the “surgeons[’] … ‘Operating Chair-Stool’”. As a result, the significance of the three-part, potentially triptychal figure to the coupling of “semiology and architecture” remains unsettled and incoherent. Paradigmatic selections ensure associations with established discursive positions such as those occupied by Rykwert and Banham are estranged. Without historical, conceptual, or even logical grounding, “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat” floats in a space of irony. It leaves “Semiology and Architecture” textually suspended; and the author Jencks estranged from his discursive setting. Such estrangements will be exacerbated in the next chapter, as the central object, “semiology”, comes under greater pressure.

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3. THE SEMIOLOGICAL SITUATION

Figure 3a: Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”, 14-15.

3.1.

The page 14–15 spread of “Semiology and Architecture” (Fig. 3a) is

dominated by two pictorial figures. 1 The first, “The Sign Situation” (Fig. 3b), fills the full width of page 14 and covers just less than a third of its height midway up the page. It presents a grey rectangular box ground over which lies a complex composition of finely detailed black writing and images. The writing is very small and cramped, bordering on unreadable. It is rendered in a font resembling Isocpeur. This fact and the slightly irregular spacing and linework surrounding the text suggests the figure was composed by hand, with technical pens, lettering stencil, set squares, and found objects realizing forms on tracing paper.

1. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 10–25.

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Figure 3b: “The Sign Situation”.

“The Sign Situation” is divided laterally into three rough parts. The slightly-larger-thanthird on the left, bordered on its right side by a heavy black vertical line, contains a line drawing of a thin horizontal plane, rendered in single-point perspective. The plane recedes to a central vanishing point. The horizontal plane seems to be resting on a collection of human legs cut mid-shin. Each leg terminates at partially pointed feet. The feet are arranged in groups of three, triangulating around points located along the midline of the long axis of the horizontal plane, and around one quarter in at each end. The remainder of the figure, the just-less-than-two-thirds on the right, is bound on the left by the same black vertical line. On the left of this section of the frame, in line with the line drawing described above and roughly mirroring it, is an image that appears to be the photograph from which the line drawing was traced. The horizontal plane carries a streaked pattern associated with stone. The plane is divided into two by light: the larger section towards the left is in shadow; the smaller right end is brightly illuminated. The six lower legs are black: those under the shaded end of the plane are a flat, matte black; those under the illuminated end reflect light off rounded contours. A hard, smooth, shiny surface is implied — most likely black plastic or fibreglass covered in gloss paint. On top of the horizontal surface, in the shaded section, sits what appears to be a bunch of flowers in a wide-mouthed vase. In the section obscured by glare, the feint outline of a circular object, possibly an ashtray, can be construed. With the assistance of these added objects, the materiality of the components, and the unexplained contrastive lighting, the photographic image appears to be of some kind of table. While there is no ground 87

beneath the feet, it seems the table stands on the six tiptoes. The hypothesis based on linework and font that the figure is hand-made is corroborated by the jagged outline of the flowers: this table-like element presents itself as a photograph cut by hand with scissors or a scalpel. From the table’s right-hand side, a series of thin black lines extend towards the right. The lines help to define the right-hand edge of the horizontal plane, which, without these lines, is lost under strong illumination. The lines converge to point at a human head adjacent to the location of the eye. The head is largely in silhouette. Within its blackness, however, some anatomical features that appear to be the folds of a brain are visible, as well as some unreadable writing that seems to label parts of the cranial anatomy. While the aforementioned lines, viewed from left to right, appear to emanate from the table and concentrate adjacent to the head’s eye, viewed from the right, the eye can be understood as directing lines of sight onto the edges of the table, thus seeing it. Across the top and the bottom of its filled frame, “The Sign Situation” contains writing. In barely legible type at the bottom, Charles Jencks includes a series of labels joined together by a branching structure. The structure has four levels, organized hierarchically. The uppermost level sits underneath the profiled human head. It is a compressed triangle — the obtuse angle pointing upwards — comprised of three solid-point vertices, and incomplete connections. The top vertex is labelled “semantics”, the left vertex, “phonetics”, and the right vertex is unlabelled. Between the top vertex and the left and right vertices, a two-headed arrow, broken in the middle, denotes a relationship. A dashed line without arrowheads stretches between “phonetics” and the unlabelled point. A bracket stretches between “semantics” and “phonetics” and meets at “linguistics”. This is the first discipline of the second level. The other disciplines of the level terminate branches and effectively label the two renditions of the table: “science” sits under the line drawing of the table; and “pragmatics” sits under the collaged photographic image. These are joined by a bracket — dashed on the left-hand side of the division and solid on the right-hand side — that points to “epistemology”. Alongside “epistemology” is “optics” — which brackets the fanning lines extending from the silhouette’s eye to the table — and “psycholinguistics” — which is the contraction of “linguistics” and the unlabelled point at the right hand side of the triangle. These three form the members of the third level; which feeds into a single branch labelled “semiology”, ostensibly the ultimate object. From the other direction, “semiology” is 88

represented as the common branch of “epistemology” (itself the reduction of “science” and “pragmatics”), “optics”, and “psycholinguistics” (the reduction of “linguistics”, “phonetics”, and “semantics”). The figure implies “semiology” is thus the formal ideal, concrete actuality, and psycholinguistic perception of physical “things”. Across the top of the composite image sit a series of numbers in brackets. The numbers recall a scientific diagram, a flowchart, or a proof of a logical argument. (1) is separated from (2)-through-(8) by the aforementioned thick black vertical line. The primacy of the line drawing of the apparent table seems assured by its horizontal separation from the remainder of the bracketed digits, as well as its earliest number.

Figure 3c: “The Semiological Triangle”.

The second figure of the page 14–15 spread is “The Semiological Triangle” (Fig. 3c). In contradistinction to “The Sign Situation”, it is a clearly articulated and strongly defined form. It occupies a third of page 15 of “Semiology and Architecture”, again filling the width from margin to edge, and occupying the centre of the page. “The Semiological Triangle” is a collection of symbolic forms sitting on the plain white background. The forms of the words that dominate the figure again offer a stark contrast to those in the figure across the binding: they are large and highly legible, rendered in capitals in a 89

combination of sans serif fonts in the general vein of Helvetica. The dots and arrows that give shape to the triangle are clean and even, and do not appear hand drawn. The overall impression of the figure suggests it was produced with the assistance of machines. In the corners of the “The Semiological Triangle”, three bold points are established. Starting at the top and reading clockwise, they are “THOUGHT”, “REFERENT”, and “SYMBOL”. Each of these bold terms is underwritten by three words that read as synonyms: “ CONTENT ”, “ CONCEPT ”, “ SIGNIFIED ”; “ PERCEPT ”, “ DENOTATUM ”, “ THING ”; and “ FORM ”, “ WORD ”, “ SIGNIFIER ,” respectively. Double-headed arrows connect the three vertices of the triangle. None of these arrows are completely continuous. “THOUGHT” and “REFERENT”, and “SYMBOL” and “THOUGHT” are linked by a bold arrow shaft with a small gap in the middle. “REFERENT” and “SYMBOL” are linked by a less bold, dotted shaft. Thanks to its mathematical and logical appearance, the figure appears conclusive. In the wake of the previous page spread’s and this thesis’s previous chapter’s figure “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat”, “The Sign Situation” and “The Semiological Triangle” appear serious and scholarly. The inclusion of the terms “Sign” and “Semiological” in their titles imply these figures perform an important role in the argument. The role they play in Jencks’s text, however, is less transparent than their diagrammatic forms imply. This chapter will reveal how the referential function of this section of the text is undermined by fundamental elements related to the consistency of graphic and linguistic forms. Obfuscation and connotation introduce deformations to the text — opacity and parody, respectively — that again result in the construction of the twin authorial figures introduced in the previous chapters: the personas of the Theorist and the Wit. While the formal aspects of the figures will be the focus of this chapter, much of this undermining can be seen to stem from the broader framework of Jencks’s text.

3.2.

The title “Semiology-and-Architecture” implies Jencks’s chapter will

establish a basic and far-reaching epistemological coupling. The final paragraph of the introductory section of the chapter suggests that “[s]ome of the main ideas of semiology will be outlined” in the chapter, with a view to “showing their relevance to meaning in

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architecture.” 2 Jencks assumes a large degree of authority here: a non-specialist, scholarly reader may assume the chapter will provide a summary survey of the field, highlighting the most pertinent works and theories undertaken to that point in time. Through its placement as chapter one within Meaning-in-Architecture and through its implied scope, “Semiology-and-Architecture” takes an imperial position. But such an ambition was compromised at the outset by unsteady intellectual grounds. The sign-based theory landscape in the late 1960s was experiencing significant flux. Two distinct intellectual traditions were converging: the Slavic- and Romance-language school grown from formalism and structural linguistics, and studying “semiology”; and the Anglo-American pragmatic tradition, founded on logic and investigating the “semiotic”. As attempts to bridge the gap with hybrid theories were being developed, 3 the distinction between the linguistic and logical schools was being eroded. But “semiology” and “semiotics” were not natural assimilants. “Semiology” was born from the work of Swiss Professor, Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure’s legacy developed from the time of his premature death from cancer in 1913. His seminal work Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) was edited and first published by his students Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger in 1916. 4 The Course tells its reader: “[i]t is … possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek sēmeîon, ‘sign’).” 5 It later adds, “[s]ince it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance.” 6 Soon thereafter, scholars exercised this right. Many began to develop Saussure’s dyadic theories, investigating the relation of langue and parole, the opposition of signifier and signified, and differentiating the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of language to focus on the former.

2.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 13.

3.

By Roman Jakobson, Thomas Sebeok, and Umberto Eco, amongst others.

4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, edited by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Rieldlinger (Paris FR: Payot, 1916). First translated into English in 1959 by Wade Baskin (New York US: Philosophical Library, 1961). 5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Rieldlinger (New York US: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 16. Italics in original. 6.

Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 16.

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The father of modern “semiotics” was the Massachusettsan, Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce lived out his 74 years in comparative intellectual obscurity, 7 developing a theory of signs referring to the works of, amongst others, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant. He appropriated the term “semiosis” from Philodemus of Gadara, a Greek Epicurean philosopher working in the last century BC ;

and the term “semeiotic” from John Locke, whose work An Essay Concerning

Human Understanding was published in 1689. 8 Peirce defined the “semeiotic” or “semiotic” by writing: “Logic, in its general sense, is … only another name for semiotic (sémeiötiké), the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.” 9 He goes on to explicate that By describing the doctrine as “quasi-necessary” … I mean that we observe the characters of such signs as we know, and from such an observation, by a process I will not object to naming Abstraction, we are led to statements, eminently fallible, and therefore in one sense by no means necessary, as to what must be the characters of all signs used by a “scientific” intelligence, that is to say by an intelligence capable of learning by experience. 10 Such a laboured, technical qualification is representative of his body of work.

7. The Charles S. Peirce Society was founded as late as 1946, a full 32 years post mortem. Charles obtained a Master of Arts degree and a Bachelor of Science awarded Summa cum Laude from Harvard University; and held posts at Harvard Observatory, Johns Hopkins University, and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. But his career was blighted by his personal weakness and poor judgment. He married well — to Harriet Melusina Fay, “a feminist campaigner of good Cambridge patrician stock” — but was unfaithful to his wife. The two separated, and, in full public view, Charles began living with his French mistress, Juliette Froisy Pourtalais, sometimes referred to as a ‘gypsy’. Several years later, his wife eventually divorced him. A mere seven days later, he married Juliette. The conservative establishment was collectively ‘appalled’: he was shunned, his reputation in tatters. See the entry for Charles Sanders Peirce on the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy – www.iep.utm.edu/peircebi/. 8. Interestingly, Locke was a major referent for Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, is linked to the learned tradition of wit. 9.

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London UK: Routledge, 2002), 3.

10. Quoted in John F. Fitzgerald, “Peirce’s Doctrine of Symbol,” in Peirce’s Doctrine of Signs: Theory, Applications, and Connections, edited by Vincent Michael Colapietro and Thomas M. Olshewsky (Berlin DE: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 161.

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Peirce’s texts on signs were not published during his lifetime. The key texts through which Peirce owes his reputation are the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, the publication of which began seventeen years post-mortem, in 1931. 11 Rather than Saussurean dyads, Peirce’s theories are based upon triads. His definition of “sign” is given through a triadic model constituted by: (1) a representamen, (2) an object, and (3) an interpretant. 12 Peirce also nominates “the three constituents of semiosis or sign-action”, each of which are “sign-representamens”, that are in a similar triadic relation: (1) subject, (2) immediate object, and (3) interpretant. 13 These trichotomies are themselves broken into threes. Indeed, Peirce’s semiotic thought rests on three typological categories developed as a critique of Kantian phenomenology — “firstness”, “secondness”, and “thirdness” — which relate through semiosis, “the triadic process by which a first determines a third to refer to a second to which itself refers.” 14 According to Daniel Chandler, triadic models of the sign were also used “by Plato (c. 400

BC ),

Aristotle (c. 350

BC ),

the Stoics (c. 250

BC ),

Boethius (c. 500), Francis Bacon

(1650)[,] Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (c. 1700), … Edmund Husserl (1900), Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards (1923) and Charles W. Morris (1938).” 15 These thinkers form an extended, though ragged tradition. “Semiology” and the “semiotic” began to morph together in post-war intellectual contexts. In the 1950s, Roman Jakobson — linguist and Saussurean scholar; member of the Moscow, Prague, and Copenhagen Linguistic Circles; and, as discussed in chapter 6 of this thesis, key influence to Claude Lévi-Strauss — is credited as uncovering the works of Peirce. 16 Jakobson sought to combine Saussurean semiology and Peircean semiotics into one theoretical apparatus. Thomas A. Sebeok, Anglo-American pragmatist

11. 1931 saw Volume 1, Principles of Philosophy, published. Subsequent volumes were published in 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935 and 1958. The entire Collected Papers was published in 1958. In the same year, Arthur W. Burks complied a bibliography of Peirce’s works. Harvard University, who held the papers from around the time of Peirce’s death, committed the works to microfilm in 1967; and in the same year, Richard Robin constructed a catalogue of Peirce’s works. Peirce’s Chance, Love and Logic: Philosophical Essays (1923) predates Volume 1 of the Collected Papers. 12. Gerard Deledalle, Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs (Bloomington US: Indiana University Press, 2000), 55. 13.

Deledalle, Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs, 19.

14.

Deledalle, Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs, 15; 18.

15.

Chandler, Semiotics, 33.

16.

Deledalle, Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs, 121.

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and student of Charles W. Morris, was, at a similar time, also working towards “unifying” Saussure and Peirce, semiology and semiotics, “into a single paradigm”. 17 During the 1960s, activity in sign-based scholarship increased significantly. The first international conference of “semiotics” was held in 1966 behind the iron curtain in Warsaw, Poland. Then, over 21 and 22 January 1969, the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS) was established in a meeting in Paris. 18 The society’s journal Semiotica was also launched in 1969, with Sebeok installed as Editor-in-Chief. Nominally at least, it was a fully “semiotic landscape” by 1974’s First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, or IASS. 19 The institutional consolidation under the name “semiotics” obscured significant philosophical, methodological, epistemological, and even ontological divisions, reifying a new discipline.

3.3.

Both of the traditions of sign-theory were imported into English-language

architectural discourse in the 1960s; and both feature in Meaning in Architecture. George Baird and Françoise Choay are the main proponents of French-Slavic structuralism. Baird uses the opposition of langue (language system) and parole (speech acts) to support his “romantic dimension in architecture”; and Choay frames her semiological presentation of urbanism around synchronic analysis, and the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. As discussion below reveals, while Jencks refers to Saussure, he is mainly an advocate for Anglo-American pragmatism within the book. Geoffrey Broadbent includes both Saussure and Peirce in his chapter “Semiology into Architecture”, but his overall tone is certainly not one of support. As his title implies, Broadbent positions “semiology” as an unwelcome foreign body. He is particularly disparaging of semiologists, declaring “like so many other people in the philosophy of communications, [Saussure] and his successors were fascinated by the whole business

17. Julia S. Falk, “Saussure and American linguistics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, edited by Carol Sanders (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 120. This goal of unification was later taken up by Umberto Eco, and arguably realized in A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington US: Indiana University Press, 1976). 18.

For more see the official IASS website, iass-ais.org/.

19. See A Semiotic Landscape: Proceedings of the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Milan, June 1974 : Panorama Sémiotique: Actes Du Premier Congrès De L'association Internationale De Sémiotique. Milan, Juin 1974, edited by Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (Den Haag: Mouton, 1979).

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because personally they could not do it very well.” 20 His concerns extend to terminology, claiming though “[Peirce] called [his] science of signs ‘semiotic’ … it is typical of the confusion in this field that the Saussureans now call it ‘semiology’.” 21 While with increased historical perspective the significance of the defeat of “semiology” by “semiotics” detailed above is far more significant, Broadbent’s indictment reveals that territoriality over names within sign-theory discourse was prevalent at the time. Editing a volume appropriating aspects of this fluxing intellectual and institutional territory was likely to bring issues of clarity in terms of framework and terminology. Writing the first and in many respects introductory chapter of this book directly confronted these knotty problems. Even so, Jencks’s promotion of the Anglo-American school in the context of his union of “semiology and architecture” — given graphic strength in “The Semiological Triangle”, as discussed above and below — appears particularly awkward, particularly explicit. 22 His failure to reference Peirce, as even the critical Broadbent had done, further attenuates his problematic theoretical base. 23 The opacity of the strategy to promote a single theoretical object at the expense of terminological accuracy is a telling element of the text and its discursive functioning. Manifestly in spite of the rocky foundations of the theory-of-signs landscape and his own insecure footing, Jencks introduces his reader to the simple couple of “Semiology and Architecture”. There is some hesitancy in his positioning: he tempers the imperialism of the project with the judgment that “at this primitive stage of the subject [i.e., in 1969], the scope should be broad and inclusive,” and asserts that combining “semiology and architecture” can only provide “very general positions”. 24 All the same,

20. Geoffrey Broadbent, “Meaning into Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 51. 21.

Geoffrey Broadbent, “Meaning into Architecture,” 53.

22. Ogden and Richards were highly critical of Saussure for “neglecting entirely the things for which signs stand” – C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (San Diego US: Harvest/HBJ, 1989), 6. 23. Arthur W. Burks’s bibliography and the commitment of Peirce’s works onto microfilm at Harvard University both occurred in 1967, a mere two years before “Semiology and Architecture”. While Peircean studies had thus not progressed far in 1969, it was on a swift rise, and has since far exceeded Ogden–Richards scholarship in both quantity and quality. Ogden and Richards were already in 1969 vulnerable to attack, such as that made by Geoffrey Broadbent in the margin of “Semiology and Architecture,” as discussed below. 24.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 13.

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Jencks boldly assumes authority over a subject matter of which there is little consensus and much debate. He develops his argument in the section “ THE

SIGN SITUATION ”.

For Jencks, “semiology” is characterized by a plurality of positions within a vast intellectual frame — one that “by necessity rang[es] from epistemology to physiology.” 25 This claim is formalized in the bracketing tree-like structure of “The Sign Situation”, described above. When Jencks asserts that the critical thing to avoid is “fall[ing] victim to one limited orthodoxy or another”, 26 he is promoting this eclectic perspective. Yet the grounds of this eclecticism are inherently vulnerable. According to his stated position, architectural writers should use sources within the single parent discipline, “semiology”; and his title advertises the possibility of uniting this “semiology” with the familiar “architecture”. Jencks thus concretizes this name, naturalizing the body of work external to architecture as a single entity. Yet despite the title and Jencks’s position statement advocating for ideological eclecticism, “Semiology-and-Architecture” does not affect a far-reaching study. It does not include a wide array of theories from sign-theory thinkers. As the chapter unfolds it becomes clear that while Jencks calls for an inclusive and un-doctrinaire approach to a vast discursive environment, the actual disputation is limited. The text mentions many names — “Braque”, “Picasso”, “Saussure” (notably the only name with strong links to “semiology”), “Hannes Meyer”, “Reyner Banham”, “Ogden and Richards”, “Samuel Johnson”, “Yeats”, “Plato”, “Kant”, “Levi-Strauss”, “Panofsky”, “Durandus”, “Arnheim”, “Rousseau”, “Freud”, “Jung”, “Corbusier”, “Gombrich”, “Whorf”, “Lewis Mumford”, “Craik and Koestler”, “Marx”, “Gropius”, “Karl Popper”, “Wölfflin”, “Cocteau”, “Charles Osgood”, and “Coleridge” — but the sign-theory argument is in fact largely structured around one “limited orthodoxy”. In his introductory paragraph to the second section of the chapter, “ THE

SIGN SITUATION ”,

Jencks reveals his “semiology” is

based on a book by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards titled The Meaning of Meaning, first published in 1923. 27

25.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 13.

26.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 13. He adds “(behaviourism for instance)”.

27. Subsequent editions were published in 1926, 1930, 1936, 1938, 1943, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1949, 1956, and 1989. After a period of relevance, the gap after 1956 suggests a sharp decline in popularity. The use of this book becomes less surprising when viewed in the contexts of the biographical Jencks’s educational career: I.A. Richards was an English Professor at Harvard in 1961 when Jencks graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in English Literature. Richards’s books may have been required reading.

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The difference between the purported and the actual grounds of Jencks’s joining of “semiology and architecture” is significant. His discursive construct of theory is compromised from the outset. The foundation upon which architectural semiology is to be built is under threat at two distinct levels: at the coarse level, by unsettled and unsettling historical formulations, built in relation to epistemic structure and history; and at a finer level, by the rhetorical and political ambitions of Jencks as cultural agent, designed to attain station within architectural discourse. While the gap between the author’s purported claims and textual product is marked, these fundamental gaps in the fabric of architectural semiology discourse will not determine this current analysis. Rather than critiquing the failings of Jencks’s theory, the focus of this thesis is the functioning of the text. To further the argument of this present chapter, discussion returns to the figures “The Sign Situation” and “The Semiological Triangle”, and their relation to Jencks’s adjacent writing in “ THE

SIGN SITUATION ”.

The figures’ physical interruption of the flow of words

on the page 14–15 spread — their appearance as foreign objects — makes the textuality of this section of “Semiology and Architecture” highly conspicuous. Their forms dominate the pages — particularly the aforementioned bold, mathematical diagram with its large-scale typography, which Jencks plainly states is “a model developed by Ogden and Richards.” 28

3.4.

Arguably the most attention-grabbing element within the generally heavy and

muscular figure of “The Semiological Triangle” detailed above is the delicate dotted line connecting the arrowheads that point to “SYMBOL” and “REFERENT”. The line brings to the figure connotations of ellipsis: of mental work. The line is a graphic representation of a key aspect of the triangle that Jencks in his written argument refers to as Ogden and Richards’s “first point”. 29 Jencks paraphrases Ogden and Richards as holding that “in most cases there is no direct relation between a word and a thing.” 30 The

28.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 15.

29.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 15. Whether this is intended as a pun is ambiguous.

30.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 15.

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indirectness of the relation suggests no definitive link: a continuous, heavy line would be inconsistent with this disconnection. Ogden and Richards, and indeed Saussure, and Peirce, all stress the idea that links between words and things are not “natural” but rather conventional. In this these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers follow countless sign-theory predecessors dating back to Ancient Greece. 31 In fact all those who study the process of semiosis hold this “natural” or commonsense belief to be an endemic error to be overcome. The belief that language can have a “natural” connection to the world of things has deep roots. As a documented story within Western culture, it can be traced back The Book of Genesis: this source suggests language was formed as either the product of Adam’s creativity, or as a by-product of the need for God to communicate with Adam in the Garden of Eden. As such, this natural language formulation is referred to as Adamic or Edenic. 32 The Book of Genesis suggests this divine naturalness continued until a city was formed that wanted to make a name for itself by building a great tower. On seeing this construction, God acted to retard the collective’s potential by confusing communication, introducing a diversity of languages, and naming the city Babel. These fables formalize long-held conceptualizations of language: they try to make sense of the fundamental perplexity of its workings, its coordinated clarity and arbitrariness. The repeated attacks directed at the “naturalness” of Edenic language carried out over the years by advocates of semiosis from Aristotle to Umberto Eco indicate the strength of myths with great metaphysical and cultural significance. Jencks’s chapter section “ THE

SIGN SITUATION ”

confronts this basic problematic. He

states that “The Semiological Triangle” models the simple, opposing idea “that there are simply relations between language, thought and reality”: “[o]ne area does not determine the other, … and all one can really claim with conviction is that there are simply

31. The concern continued: for example, in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things : Les Mots et les choses (“Words and things”). 32. See Umberto Eco, “On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (London UK: Hutchinson, 1981), 90–104 for an investigation of Edenic language.

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connections, or correlations.” 33 In other words, “THOUGHT” and “REFERENT”, “SYMBOL” and “THOUGHT”, and “REFERENT” and “SYMBOL” all relate to one another, and all contribute to the definition of a sign; but none of these points or relations on its own can explain the workings of a sign. Language, thought, and reality are contingent on each other in the process of signification. 34 But, in short, Jencks argues that the existing intellectual landscape does not reflect this basic ontological truth. He presents all established ideological positions as beset by an inherent bias. He claims that “behaviourists” — following Burrhus F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov — present “reality” or the “REFERENT” as prevailing over “THOUGHT” and “SYMBOL”; that “Whorfians” — those following the linguistic theories of Benjamin Lee Whorf — see “language” or “SYMBOL” as determinate; and that “Platonists” — those indebted in some way to the work of Plato — train their focus on “THOUGHT”. 35 Jencks extends the basic triangular model towards a dynamic, historical application. He asserts that, according to the diagram, “the relations are always two-way and never absolute.” 36 In doing so, he opens up language — and particularly naming — to contingency and paradox. His logical thesis holds that a “SYMBOL” or “ SIGNIFIER ” can corrupt the so-thought “natural” linkage between a “REFERENT” and a “THOUGHT”: that convention can play an indirect but formative role in conceptualization. The manner in which Jencks supports his thesis, however, complicates this premise.

33. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16; 16. The ellipsis in this quotation covers “except in rare cases”. 34. This rendition of the triangle’s unweightedness is lauded by George Baird. For more detail on this point, see Andrew P. Steen, “Operation Marginalia: Translations of Semiology and Architecture,” in Translations: 31st Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Christoph Schnoor (Auckland NZ: SAHANZ): 345–354. 35. The focus of this attack is likely the followers of Warburg Institute guru Rudolf Wittkower, including Colin Rowe (“The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa”, 1947, amongst other works) and Alan Colquhoun (whose work “Typology and Design Method” is included in Meaning in Architecture), many of whom Jencks details in his sections on “THE NEW PALLADIANS” and “THE ACADEMIC PLATONISTS” in “Pop – Non Pop”. These “Non–Pop” critics and theorists were not, by 1969, the undisputed hegemony in architectural circles, even in London. Already when promoting the 1953 Independent Group exhibition “Parallel of Life and Art”, Allison and Peter Smithson — whose Miesianreferencing and, to some, Platonism-conforming Hunstanton School (designed 1949; completed 1954) shot them to prominence — were stressing that “WE ARE NOT HERE TO TALK ABOUT SYMMETRY AND PROPORTION”; and by the completion of the St. James’ Economist Buildings (1964), they had moved further away from Wittkower and Plato towards the English empirical tradition of the “picturesque”. 36.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

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3.5.

The strength of the argument against Edenic or natural language is quite clear.

The referential function of the section of the text titled “ THE

SIGN SITUATION ”

— its

ability to communicate transparently the intrinsically un-natural, mythical state of language — is greatly assisted by the solid geometry of the figural triangle. In essence, “The Semiological Triangle” is a firm fulcrum on which to gain theoretical leverage. But “Semiology and Architecture” does not develop this embryonic rhetoricality. It is rather broken by a series of linguistic objects. The most simple and conspicuous of these objects is overtly formal. At the top of page 14, Jencks includes a quotation: “But as Yeats pointed out: ‘… this preposterous pragmatical pig of a world, Its farrow that so solid seem, Must vanish on the instant did the mind but change its theme’.” 37 The ineffectuality of this excerpt’s contribution to Jencks’s position is all but admitted by Jencks, who can only sum up with the statement, “[t]his is of course a debatable point of epistemology.” 38 The inclusion of the quotation does, however, draw attention to the consistency of the message, slowing down reading and delaying ready interpretation. Less obvious but more impactful and diffuse is the role inaccurate terminology plays in the functioning of the argument. When Jencks states that “[e]ach semiologist points the arrows in the direction he believes in,” he categorizes behaviourists, Whorfians, and Platonists as semiologists. This is a unique and unfounded claim. 39 Jencks is expanding the category of semiologists beyond its natural boundary. Perhaps more damning, Jencks’s key referents Ogden and Richards do not claim at any point to be semiologists. Indeed Ogden and Richards are critical of the works from that field: in The Meaning of Meaning they attack Saussure, writing “[u]nfortunately this theory of signs [i.e., semiology], by neglecting entirely the things for which [signs] stand, was from the beginning cut off from any contact with scientific methods of verification.” 40 Jencks’s argument rests on poorly categorized names: the referential function is corrupted.

37.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

38.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

39. Behaviourism is correctly located within psychology; the Whorf or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a rather discredited object of linguistics; and while he covered ideas important to semiotics, Plato’s body of work is wide ranging, and is best labelled philosophy. 40.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 6.

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In addition to referentially insubstantial quotes and poorly categorized names, the argumentation suffers from over-amplified demonstrations. The most striking is at the bottom of page 15. While stating Edenic assumptions characterize commonsense understandings of language, Jencks nevertheless claims that “everyone … would question the adage that a rose ‘by any other name would smell as sweet’,” asserting “[i]t would not smell as sweet if called garlic.” 41 The relation to the Shakespearean exploration of the system of language is clear. What is less clear is the demonstration. Under a Saussurean model, the contribution of the sound-image to signification seems secure. The signified reflects the signifier. As Hermogenes tells Plato in Cratylus, “whatever name you give to a thing is its right name.” 42 Under a pragmatic model such as that formalized in “The Semiological Triangle”, the thought resulting from the interaction with the rose/garlic is influenced by the symbol used — “rose” or “garlic” — but also by the referent involved and the percept generated. Presumably any rose or garlic has some referentiality, including an olfactory dimension; and, if this conflicts with the symbol — the name “rose” or “garlic” — the overall concept generated for the interpretant would be of ambiguous, perhaps ambivalent status. 43 The surety with which Jencks confronts the Shakespearean adage weakens his argument. Juliet’s rhetorical question “what’s in a name?” is answered definitively by Jencks. In effect he tells his reader that “Romeo Montague” would not hold the same meaning for Juliet if represented by a different symbol: that his family name constitutes his sweetness for Juliet; and that if he were part of a non-feuding family, Romeo would not be attractive for Juliet. In short, Jencks argues that it is thought of a star-crossed lover that Juliet is enamoured with. Jencks’s provides an interpretation of Romeo and Juliet that entirely replaces any romantic connection between the two lovers with a basic obstinacy based on familial nonconformity. 44 More significantly for this thesis, however, is the fact that he presents this uncorroborated interpretation in the context of developing his theory.

41.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 15.

42 .

Chandler, Semiotics, 28.

43.

Ambivalence and “bi-stability” return in chapter 3.

44. Whether Shakespeare was indeed making a simple, crude joke as opposed to metaphysical contention is open to debate. The phrase may largely have been a jibe at The Globe’s main competitor, the Rose Theatre, whose poor sanitation was reputed as giving off a less-than-rosy odour. See “The meaning and origin of the phrase: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” The Phrase Finder, accessed 24 January, 2014, www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/305250.html.

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From these rhetorical acts, the significance of the text shifts. The referential function — that aspect supporting the argument — becomes marginal, secondary; and the poetic function — that aspect focusing attention on the formal make-up of the message — becomes dominant. The language becomes opaque; communication is impeded; and as a result, the author function is caricatured. From the contrived, inaccurate, and amplified text, an authorial figure is constructed: fittingly, in the contexts of Shakespeare, the poetic prose resolves into the persona of the Wit. But the Wit is not the only authorial figure to be constructed in “ THE

SIGN SITUATION ”.

Just below the Yeats quotation, the textual flow is again interrupted, here by a series of numbers in brackets. These forms bring connotations of positivism and logic into the presentation of theory. They allude to a distance and separation of the author from the commonsense discursive landscape far from characteristic of the Wit. The numbers aggregate into a list that helps to bring about the Theorist persona. The dimensions of this textual figuration reflect less on “The Semiological Triangle” and more on the section’s other pictorial figure, “The Sign Situation”.

3.6.

As detailed above, “The Sign Situation” precedes “The Semiological

Triangle” in “Semiology and Architecture”. Even so, it is best read as Jencks’s attempt to extend Ogden and Richards’s diagram into an empirical scenario relevant to architecture. Formally contrastive to “The Semiological Triangle”, “The Sign Situation” is complex and richly cryptic. On first appraisal, it appears to promote transparent communication, and hence referential functioning. This quality rests largely on the contribution of the bracketed numbers distributed across the top of the frame. The numbers (1) to (8) are largely in order from left to right. But the significance of the numbers within the figure is not entirely clear. Jencks elaborates with a written description that unfolds through the medium of an objective form — a “table” — and is based on his interpretation of Platonism — which conceptualizes the “table” “as a copy of some ideal, absolute table which itself existed in some absolute realm of ideas.” 45 Jencks places the number (1) above the line drawing of the table to present this aspect of

45.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

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the figure as representative of idealism or idealization, stressing that, according to Platonic theory, the object “table” exists thus “at one remove from the ideal table.” 46 Jencks’s presentation exaggerates this theme of removal. His stated objective is to detail “how many more times the word ‘table’ is removed from the ideal.” 47 Jencks tells his reader that in any interaction with a “table”, [t]here is (1) the ideal table of Plato, or the “thing in itself” of Kant, or “the concrete set of events” of the scientist — particles in motion at a certain moment in time and space, (2) the “phenomenon” of the table made up of light waves, (3) of a certain spectrum which man can see, (4) coming at a certain angle (5) just from the surface of the table (not the set of events), (6) which make an image on the retina, (7) which is more or less adequate to out thought or expectation of a table, (8) which is called by an arbitrary convention, the word, table. 48 Through this succession of steps, Jencks claims that “the word table is at least eight times removed from the thing itself.” 49 The role of the numbers now becomes evident: they introduce layers into the association of object and word. Saussurean oppositions are focused on dislodging the nomenclaturist system collected in the mythical Edenic language; the “triangle” of Ogden and Richards looks to isolate “naming” within a more nuanced tripartite system of relations. Jencks, too, intends to de-couple the physical from the linguistic. But dyadic or triadic tools are not sufficient: Jencks adds numbers, increasing complexity. The mechanism used for separation in “Semiology and Architecture” amplifies Ogden-Richards’s thirding logic

46. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14. In Baudrillardesque fashion, Jencks claims here that “the painter who drew the table was copying a copy or creating a double lie (of sorts).” 47. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14. Deleuze make the distinction between the “image and the copy”, stressing that simulacra “false copies”, mere “semblances”, whereas “iconic copies” are “good” copies, “modelled on the Idea” – Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” translated by Rosalind Krauss, October 27 (Winter, 1983): 47–48. Apparently Jencks does not make this distinction, lumping all “images” in the same “false” basket. It is notable in this sense that Jencks does not number the steps from the table as a “phenomenon” (i.e., from (2)), a choice that would reduce his steps by one. 48.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

49. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14. The validity of these divisions on several counts might be questioned: does an ideal have “particles in motion”?; is a “phenomenon … made up of light waves”? is an “image” made on the retina? Again, the goal here is not to dismantle Jencks’s argument, but to analyse the rhetoricality of the text.

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into an eight-step process involving a highly compartmentalized psycho-physiological system. With such amplification from three to eight, the function of the numbers transforms. The weight of the numbers shifts the functioning of the text: what was a tool of clarification becomes obfuscatory; what once enacted precision becomes an embodiment of parody. Numbering items of information makes palpable their pre-existence: it helps to “deoriginate” the components of the text, characterizing that for which they stand as already written. 50 Irony is indeed present in The Meaning of Meaning: it is symbolized in Ogden and Richards’s repeated key term. 51 That irony doubles as “Semiology and Architecture” as makes its reference to “The Meaning of Meaning, [by] Ogden and Richards”.

3.7.

Jencks names The Meaning of Meaning in introducing “The Semiological

Triangle”. He states his figure is derived from the “triangle of reference” that appears on page 11 of Ogden and Richards’s book. 52 As mentioned above, Ogden and Richards did not invent triangles in sign-based theoretical inquiries. 53 In De interpretatione, Aristotle sets out “words” or “symbols”, in relation to “concepts” or “passions of the soul”, and “things”. Dark Age scholars Augustine of Hippo and Boethius related “Signa”, “Intellectus” and “Res”, and “Voces”, “Intellectus” and “Res”, respectively. Middle Ages sage William of Ockham made a triangle with “Term”, “Concept” and “Res”. Ogden and Richards do not pitch their triangle as the product of their own intellection; nor do they present it as the key to their ideological enterprise; nor even as a tool with which to classify other instances of theorization. Their triangle has a restricted application concerning the logic of the relation between “Thoughts, Words and

50 . 45, 21.

Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970), translated by Richard Miller (New York US: Hill & Wang, 1974),

51 .

That editors Jencks and Baird also took “meaning” as their motif compounds this irony.

52. index.

Ogden and Richards’s figure is not named in a caption: the term can only be found in the

53. A long line of triangles stretching back to Aristotle is detailed in Umberto Eco, “Denotation,” in On the Medieval Theory of Signs, edited by Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam NL: John Benjamins, 1989), 47–64.

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Things”. 54 Their accompanying text introduces the diagram as helpful in positioning “the senses of ‘meaning’” that they are addressing: as a kind of key. 55 The “triangle of reference” is very similar to “The Semiological Triangle”. The basic points are replicated; the names for those points re-used; and the connections between the two points are similar, especially the dotted line that connects “referent” with “symbol”. There are small differences in the linguistic forms: unlike Jencks’s figure, Ogden and Richards’s triangle does not contain synonyms for “referent” or “symbol”; and it does include the term “reference” as an equivalent for “thought”. More significant and important, however, is the rendering the “triangle of reference” gives the “relations” between these three points. Rather than arrows, Ogden and Richards use lines to represent their triangle’s relations. The lines connecting “symbol” and “thought or reference”, and “thought or reference” and “referent” are solid. The former, the authors tell us, has a “causal relation”: “when we hear what is said, the symbols … cause us to perform an act of reference.” 56 The “triangle” labels this symbolization a “correct” relation: the “meaning” is directly gained. The latter line, running between “thought or reference” and “referent”, can be “more or less direct (as when we think about … a coloured surface we see), or indirect (as when we ‘think of’ or ‘refer to’ Napoleon).” 57 This relation, according to Ogden and Richards, is “adequate”: “there may be a very long chain of sign-situations intervening between the act and its referent [e.g.,] word—historian—contemporary record—eyewitness—referent (Napoleon),” but these combine to attain an appropriate-enough “meaning”. 58 The third line, the one running across the bottom of the triangle, is dotted as per Jencks’s arrow shaft. But Ogden and Richards’s line type is far more significant: they stress that “the base of the triangle is quite different in composition from either of the other sides”: between “referent” and “symbol” “there is no relevant relation other than 54.

This is the title of the chapter within which the figure can be found.

55.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 10.

56. Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 11. Ogden and Richards also assert this causal relation makes us “assume an attitude which will, according to circumstances, be more or less similar to the act and the attitude of the speaker” (11). 57.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 11.

58.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 11.

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the indirect one, which consists in its being used by someone to stand for a referent” or some thing. 59 There is no “direct” connection; but, nevertheless, the relation between the two, while described as “imputed”, is labelled “true”. Later in The Meaning of Meaning, Ogden and Richards explain that “[t]o have described [the relation between symbol and referent] as ... indirect … would have omitted the important difference between indirect relations recognized as such, and those wrongly treated as direct.” 60 “A true symbol”, according to Ogden and Richards’s equation, is “one which correctly records an adequate reference.” 61 The act involved in this relation between “symbol” and “referent”, that which is represented in the dotted line, is “naming”. 62 This is the crux of Ogden and Richards’s “triangle”. They write: It might appear unnecessary to insist that there is no direct connection between say “dog” the word, and certain common objects in the streets and that the only connection which holds is that which consists in our using the word when we refer to the animal. We shall find, however, that this once universal theory of direct meaning between words and things is the source of almost all the difficulties which thought encounters. 63 In short, Ogden and Richards’s “triangle of reference” has a simple but essential function: it is a figure primarily intended to separate the commonsense connection of name and thing; to ensure the taken-for-granted, “natural” relation between form and percept is taken as an imputation and nothing more. The significance of conventions is hereby affirmed, as is the mythological status of Edenic language, mentioned above. Jencks refers to Ogden and Richards and appropriates their triangle, but his “Triangle” is quite a departure from its predecessor. Though he retains the dotted relation between referent and symbol, Jencks does not follow Ogden and Richards in using the triangle to distinguish what “stands for” from what “refers to” or “symbolizes”. Indeed, despite the line types, the relations between the three sides of “The Semiological Triangle” are 59.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 10; 11.

60.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 116.

61.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 102.

62.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 117.

63.

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 12.

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positioned as being equivalent. For Ogden and Richards such equivalency would diminish the exposure of the natural language myth. The “Semiological Triangle” thus distorts Ogden and Richards’s “triangle of reference”. It reduces some theoretical complexity — the adequate, correct, and true relation definitions — while adding other information — the synonyms, symbols indirectly connected to referents, or, effectively, semes — to the figure. Jencks does not use “The Semiological Triangle” to conceptualize “reference” or “truth”, but hides the relevance of the process central to the text: “naming”. This is symptomatic of Jencks’s leveraging of texts not for referential support but for the poetic potential they afford. This broader practice can again be seen as indebted to the forms of The Meaning of Meaning.

3.8.

In Ogden and Richards’s ninth chapter’s epigraph, Melmoth the Wanderer

exclaims: “Father! these are terrible words, but I have no time now but for Meanings.” 64 The address seems aimed at Plato: for Ogden and Richards, philosophers “hypostatize their definiendum … either by inventing a particular stuff [or] intrinsic property, … or by inventing a special unanalysable relation.” 65 The authors of The Meaning of Meaning claim none of the previous theories of meaning — from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, right through to their present in the 1920s — adequately accounts for the relations between particular things and the words by which they are known. In the terms of this thesis, they effectively accuse all preceding and respectable scholars of reification. Though they deem previous acts of scholarship defective, Ogden and Richards provide their reader with “a representative list of the main definitions which reputable students of Meaning have favoured.” 66 Classifications of meaning, according to this list, can be divided into types A, B, and C. Type A is split into two: meaning understood as being “[a]n intrinsic property” of things; and as “[a] unique and untranslatable Relation to other things.” Type B compiles nine sub-classifications, representing meaning understood by reference to: “[t]he other words annexed to a word in a Dictionary” — 64. Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 185. “The Meaning of Meaning” is chapter IX of the book. The quotation draws strong associations with the Oedipal myth, to return in chapter 6. 65. Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 185. Ogden and Richards tell their reader that “Philosophers are not to be trusted in their dealings with Meaning” (185). The capital letter at the beginning of “Philosophy” denotes that venerated tradition dating back to antiquity. 66.

Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 186.

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i.e., a word’s synonyms; “[t]he Connotation of a word”; “[a]n Essence”; “[a]n activity projected into an object”; either “[a]n event intended” or “[a] volition”; “[t]he place of anything in a system”; “[t]he practical consequences of a thing in our future experience”; “[t]he Theoretical consequences involved in or implied by a statement”; and “Emotion aroused by anything.” Type C constitutes meanings seen as “[t]hat which is Actually related to a sign by a chosen relation”; either “[t]he Mnemic effects of a stimulus,” “[s]ome other occurrence to which the mnemic effects of any occurrence are Appropriate,” “[t]hat which a sign is Interpreted as being of,” “[w]hat anything Suggests,” or, “[i]n the case of Symbols,” “[t]hat to which the User of a Symbol actually refers”; “[t]hat to which the user of a symbol Ought to be referring”; and “[t]hat to which the Interpreter of a symbol” either “(a) Refers,” “(b) Believes himself to be referring,” or “(c) Believes the User to be referring.” 67 Ogden and Richards spend twenty-one pages detailing the parties involved in these reputed but fallacious ideas, and elaborating their flawed arguments. 68 The overarching goal of Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning is stated as the installation of “[a] new Science, the Science of Symbolism.” 69 They claim that “there is no longer any excuse for vague talk about Meaning, and ignorance of the ways in which words deceive us.” 70 They wish is to clear up “misunderstandings” that come from vague, ambiguous, and imprecise speech. 71 With their work on meaning, Ogden and Richards wish to alleviate “the symptoms of nonsense-speech, verbiage, psittacism or whatever we may elect to call the devastating disease from which so much of the communicative activity of man suffers.” 72 This is the direction in which the referential function of their text acts.

67.

Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 186–187.

68. The erroneous ideas are promoted by individuals including Dr Friedrich Schiller and Professor Hugo Münsterberg, and schools such as “the Critical Realists” and the “Croceans”. 69.

Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 242.

70.

Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 8.

71.

Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 208.

72. Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 217. In a later book, I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1936), Richards reprograms an ancient discipline to aid in this task: “Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (3). Richards’s updated Rhetoric “will make us expect ambiguity to the widest extent and of the subtlest kinds nearly everywhere”, and frame ambiguity “as an inevitable consequence of the powers of language and as the indispensable means of most of our most important utterances – especially in Poetry and Religion” (40). He also returns to the key term “meaning” through the elaboration of his “context theory”, which acts to “discourage […] our habit of behaving as though, if a passage means one thing it cannot at the same time mean another and incompatible thing” (38). “The theorem”, Richards continues,

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But given Jencks’s mistranslation of Ogden and Richards’s theory, it is clear his use of their text is not overly concerned with their text’s referential function. It is the poetic function that provides him with greater apparatuses of rhetoricality. Under a reading favouring the poetic function of The Meaning of Meaning, the finer points of Ogden and Richards’s argument are eclipsed by the structural significance of the list. Through what becomes formalized as careful differentiation, the field of knowledge under scrutiny is portioned out: controlled into manageable units. It becomes a collection of concise linguistic forms. The details of Ogden and Richards’s articulation of meaning are subsumed within a discursive consistency that owes much to the object of the diagrammatic table. 73 While it helped shape modern science and the modern mind, tabulation’s effect is not restricted to the intellect: tables also have a significant affective dimension, shaping states of mind and points of view.

3.9.

According to Umberto Eco, one of the keys to the impact of Ogden and

Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning is its “abundant missionary fervour”. 74 It communicates an “attitude” that Eco characterizes as being “therapeutic”. 75 The socalled “Science” that Ogden and Richards propose ultimately rests on the assumption that, in Eco’s words, a science of language that could extend … criteria [used in the exact sciences, in the legal world, in the drawing up of contracts, in economy and in military life] into ordinary language would make social life, individual relationships, and ethical problems less ambiguous and more precise. 76 “regards all discourse … as having multiplicities of meaning” (39). In the contexts of their extensive coverage of previous theories of “meaning”, it is notable that Ogden and Richards criticize verbiage. This resistance extended to the construction and development of Basic English, a vocabulary of 850 words published by Ogden in 1929, that would cover the whole of the English language — further condensed in I.A. Richards, How to Read a Page: A Course in Effective Reading with an Introduction to a Hundred Great Words (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1943), 123. Richards list ran to 103 words — “to incite the reader to the task of cutting out those he sees no point in and adding any he pleases, and to discourage the notion that there is anything sacrosanct about a hundred, or any other number” (22–23). 73. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London UK: Routledge, 1989), 69–70, 81, and throughout. 74. 1989), vii.

Umberto Eco, “Introduction,” in The-Meaning-of-Meaning (San Diego US: Harvest/HBJ,

75.

Eco, “Introduction,” vii. Eco describes the authors as succumbing to the “therapeutic fallacy”.

76.

Eco, “Introduction,” vii.

109

Eco criticizes this naive position; but regardless of the failings of their argument, he asserts that Ogden and Richards’s way of thinking plays a valuable social role. While it “proves inadequate in suggesting remedies, it is still dramatically exact in its diagnoses.” 77 For Eco, it is the rhetorical strength of The Meaning of Meaning that is effective, rather than its conceptual or philosophical clarity. This emphasis arguably gets stronger the more dated the book becomes. In a marginal comment in his Meaning in Architecture chapter “Meaning into Architecture”, Geoffrey Broadbent chastises “the hair-splitting definitions which Ogden, Richards and others apply to the word ‘meaning’.” 78 He claims they “simply reinforce the point about incestuous private speech” in developing architectural discourse. 79 No doubt this point was made vociferously by certain parties within the London architectural milieu of the 1960s that were outside the circle of “incestuous” relations. This type of analysis, however, is made more easily and more elegantly with the help of perspective. As an historical artefact in 1969, The Meaning of Meaning was separated from its original social context. 80 The distinctions that might have seemed pressing for Ogden and Richards in 1923 had by then waned in importance. Jencks’s rhetorical reliance on Ogden and Richards is anachronistic. When Broadbent ends his comment with the claim that “few modern linguists would support [Ogden and Richards]” in their fussy activities, he presents a strong case. 81 Yet while only “few modern linguists”, in 1969 or now, might support the full Scientific program of Ogden and Richards, many would follow Eco in being impressed, or even seduced, by the rhetorical strength of their symbol-focused presentations. In other words, while the referential function has diminished in its effectiveness, the poetic function remains powerful. “Semiology and Architecture” presents an attitude similar to that held by Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning: a zealous, missionary mode invades the text. The

77.

Eco, “Introduction,” viii.

78. Broadbent, “Meaning-into-Architecture,” 55. The comment is made in response to a criticism aired by Jencks over, perhaps ironically, Broadbent’s use of “‘meaning’ in inverted commas”. 79.

Broadbent, “Meaning-into-Architecture,” 55.

80.

For Eco, 1989.

81.

Broadbent, “Meaning-into-Architecture,” 55.

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language becomes opaque around this poetic operation. Jencks and his text are framed by a prevailing “attitude” marked by pedantry and properness. The evangelistic tone helps construct in the text the authorial figure of the Theorist. His persona resolves around the explicit incorporation of science, pragmatics, epistemology, optics, linguistics, phonetics, semantics, psycholinguistics, and semiology within “The Sign Situation”. 82 This branching mass is analogous to Ogden and Richards’s account of the then-existing literature: Historical research shows that since the lost work of Antisthenes and Plato’s Cratylus there have been seven chief methods of attack — the Grammatical (Aristotle, Dionysius Thrax), the Metaphysical (The Nominalists, Meinong), the Philological (Horne Tooke, Max Müller), the Psychological (Locke, Stout), the Logical (Leibniz, Russell), the Sociological (Steinthal, Wundt) and the Terminological (Baldwin, Husserl). 83 From all these, as well as such independent studies as those of Lady Welby, Marty, and C.S. Peirce, from Mauthner’s Kritic Der Sprache, Erdmann’s Die Bedeutung des Wortes, and Taine’s De l’Intelligence, the writers have derived much instruction and occasionally amusement. 84 For Ogden and Richards, their Science of Symbolism fills the position at the apex of the tree of knowledge; for Jencks, “semiology” is the named utopia. A Theorist model is evident within Ogden and Richards. It is articulated as they depict their Science of Symbolism as “an undertaking which has been abandoned in despair by so many enterprising but isolated inquirers [that have felt] the suspicion of eccentricity which the subject has so often evoked.” 85 The self-sacrificial and self-righteous trait characteristic of the persona of the Theorist here gains strong articulation: they resist “despair”; they ignore the “suspicion” of their peers. Jencks’s positioning of “the goal of semiology, even if ultimately in vain” mentioned in the previous chapter of this thesis can be linked to this textual referent. 86 That portion of the authorial persona related to 82. The name itself a possible result of bootlegging or of cryptomnesia: compare with The Meaning of Meaning’s final chapter, “The Symbol Situation”. Compare also to this chapter’s title. 83.

Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, xvi–xvii.

84.

Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, xvii.

85. Ogden-and-Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, xvi. Recall Peirce, who died in 1914 having lived out his days marginalized and in poverty. 86.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 13.

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the organization of the world of things suffers from an existential condition that is demonstratively constructed and unmistakably self-inflicted. As stressed above, Jencks does not follow any established, then-current schools of semiological or semiotic inquiry, but rather reflects upon an outdated text that conducts a pains-taking study of symbolism. The two figures of “ THE

SIGN SITUATION ”

take on the

religiosity of the persona of the Theorist that lies within The Meaning of Meaning. Like God with Babel, Jencks looks to assert the very name of semiology in architectural discourse. And he also seeks to rearticulate architecture’s internal relations through the medium of discourse. This thesis looks to show architectural theory a figurative path out of his theoretical Garden of Eden. Jencks does not correctly apply the pragmatic position of Ogden and Richards. He is not interested in clearing up misunderstandings in the processes of perception and judgment of architecture. On the contrary, he uses semiology as a tool to complicate these operations. He writes: “[r]eturning to the semiological triangle, we can see that if an over-all interpretation is to be at all correct it will have to coordinate these multiple relations (which is by no means easy).” 87 Jencks’s objective is obfuscation. Again like God confronted with the city constructing a great tower, he confuses communication, introducing multiple languages, isolating people from each other. Jencks stresses the complications of his theory. As a result, the textuality of “Semiology and Architecture” is made conspicuous. The Theorist is

87. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16. This does, arguably, follow the broader tenets and methodologies of the critical movement that Richards was associated, New Criticism. According to Hawkes: “New Criticism was itself conceived in opposition to an ‘older’ criticism which, in Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had largely concerned itself with material extraneous to the work under discussion: with the biography and psychology of its author, or with the works’ relationship to ‘literary history’. The general principles of New Criticism can be simply formulated. The work of art … should be regarded as autonomous, and so should not be judged by reference to criteria or considerations beyond itself. … A poem consists, less of a series of referential and verifiable statements about the ‘real’ world beyond it, than of the presentation and sophisticated organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form. The critic’s quarry is that complexity. It yields itself to close analytic reading without overt reference to any acknowledged ‘method’ or ‘system’ and without drawing on any corpus of information, biographical, social, psychological or historical, outside the work. ‘There is no method’ said T. S. Eliot (a poet and critic much favoured by New Criticism), ‘except to be very intelligent.’ As a result, an apparently ‘free-floating’ uncommitted critical intelligence directly confronts the unmediated ‘word on the page’: its reading proves sensitive to those devices concerned with the expansion or disintegration of referential meaning (e.g., ambiguity, paradox, irony, punning, ‘wit’) and is accordingly disposed to applaud stylistic qualities which foster them (e.g., ‘intellectual toughness’, ‘tension’). It never goes beyond the work to validate its arguments” – Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London UK: Routledge, 2003), 125–126.

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constructed with this movement. If theory were easy, it would not be a suitable vehicle for creating intellectual notoriety, for becoming a virtuoso: it would not raise the authorial figure above common knowledge. Obfuscation rhetorically instantiates difficulty: the Theorist controls language and knowledge. But this written strategy within “Semiology and Architecture” is countered by a pictorial formalism within “The Sign Situation”. This figure presents two opaque and curious objects. Visually, they dominate the undersized and overworked text within the grey field; and with striking intertexuality and abrupt juxtaposition, they help again to present the text’s other characteristic construct: the persona of the Wit. The first pictorial element constructing the Wit within the figure is the “table”. The accompanying text promotes the interpretation of the figural image as a “table”: a “table” is introduced into Jencks’s prose as the object at which “a literalist” might point to convey the “meaning of ‘table’”. 88 It is his example of the “apparently simple kind of meaning which is the bastion of common sense and the tough-minded”: 89 the referent of the anti-idealist. The “table” is one of the “natural” objects that dupe individuals who tacitly accept the Edenic language myth. Yet the “table” depicted does not have a simple relation to this argument. While the text relates the “table” to Plato — as “a copy of some ideal” 90 — the figure does not contain a conventional example of this reference. The “table” is no standard or generic table. In fact — ostensibly to avoid being a “literalist” — Jencks uses one of his own idiosyncratic creations, a piece of ad hoc furniture, to stand for a “table”: the “Marble slab held by table ‘legs’”. 91 A mistranslation interrupts the argument: the referentiality

88.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 13.

89.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

90. The demonstration of theory requires that the “thing” in question would, more or less, be rectilinear and comprised of a flat top that meets four legs at each of its corners. 91. The “table” in “The Sign Situation” features in Jencks’s chapter “Consumer Democracy” in Adhocism (1972). The chapter includes the original photograph of “Marble slab held by table ‘legs’”. It reveals the table is Jencks’s own design. Adhocism shows the artefact in situ: probably in Jencks’s own living room. The table is conceptually related by Jencks to Surrealist Kurt Seligmann’s “Ultra-furniture” (1938), which connects a velvety seat to three hosiery- and high-heel clad bent legs. See Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (New York US: Doubleday, 1972), 60.

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of Jencks’s object becomes ambiguous. The supposed item of cultural coding, based on “the discourse of others” or “endoxal truth”, 92 is corrupted by a clashing symbolic code. The “Marble slab held by table ‘legs’” detaches the reader’s assumptions from the habitual or unexamined. It disrupts the argument, the figurative legs upon which it stands. Ironically, while he secures a reference in Richards, 93 Jencks’s predilection for wit is anathema to Richards’s and Ogden’s position, and promotion of Basic English. The second pictorial element within “The Sign Situation” that contributes to the construction of the persona of the Wit within the text is the profiled head. The form draws strong connotations. With its brain folds and faint labels, it recalls diagrams of nineteenth-century phrenology. But more pertinent is its reminiscence of the famous diagram of communication included in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Saussure’s diagram shows two heads facing each other. Rather than focusing on a visual interaction with external physical stimuli, Saussure’s figure tries to represent the manner in which words are emitted, heard, and processed: the processes of audition and phonation. It represents a scenario in which individual speech acts are heard by a listening addressee and correctly interpreted — in other words, how a receiver, through communication, thinks the same thoughts as a sender. The diagram is the clearest elaboration of what Roy Harris describes as the “language myth” that pervades Western linguistic thought, promoting the idea that two people share the same thoughts as a result of the workings of language. 94 The head of “The Sign Situation” thus connotes in two ways simplistic and fallacious formulations of knowledge: it caricatures the mind.

92 .

Barthes, S/Z, 184.

93. “Let us go back to leg for a moment. We notice that even there the boundary between literal and metaphoric uses is not quite fixed or constant. To what do we apply it literally? A horse has legs literally, so has a spider, but how about a chimpanzee? Has it two legs or four? And how about a star-fish? Has it arms or legs or neither? And, when a man has a wooden leg, is it a metaphoric or a literal leg? The answer to this last [question] is that it is both. It is literal in one set of respects, metaphoric in another. A word may be simultaneously both literal and metaphoric, just as it may simultaneously support many different metaphors, may serve to focus into one meaning many different meanings. This point is of some importance, since so much misinterpretation comes from supposing that if a word works one way it cannot simultaneously work in another and have simultaneously another meaning” – Richards, The-Philosophy-ofRhetoric, 118–119. Jencks’s relation to this position is loaded and ironic. 94. Roy Harris, The Language Myth (London UK: Duckworth, 1981), 9. Harris presents twin errors: the “telementational fallacy”, which relates to how language functions, and the “determinacy fallacy”, which relates to the mechanics of communication.

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The “table” and the head interrupt the theoretical presentation with the powerful and incompatible device, parody. The objects advertise their own reproduction. Their forms help generate an overarching definition of intellectual adhocism that pervades the text. The source of this parody is retrospectively attributed to the authorial persona of the Wit.

3.10.

“The Semiological Triangle” and “The Sign Situation” are far removed from

the coded mix of references — from pop culture, to high art, to institutionalized Western medicine — evident in “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat”. The argument is nevertheless similarly compromised by figural dissonance. The role of irony within this chapter’s two figures may be less blatant that the previous chapter, but nevertheless the disaggregation of information into constituent units of meaning evident in their forms progresses the thesis’s argument. The two figures make palpable the discursivity of the text, thus supporting this thesis’s claims for the domination of the referential function by the poetic within “Semiology and Architecture”. The next chapter will continue the trajectory through cultural and conventional codes towards a territory of semes. The referential grounds will shift from the vast list covering the Science of Symbols and Platonic idealism, to the more disciplinary objects of art history and avant-garde architecture. This will not, however, lead to surer footing.

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4. DUCK–RABBIT–THINGUMMYBOB

Figure 4a: Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”, 18-19.

4.1.

A pair of figures populates the fifth page spread of “Semiology and

Architecture” (Fig. 4a). 1 The first — in the margins of page 18, introduced in the adjacent text as a “proof of the influence of schemata in perception” 2 — is titled “Duck– Rabbit – etc.?”. The second — its looming presence filling page 19, presented by Charles Jencks as the product of a “successful movement” within architectural culture that promotes “new, plausible meanings” into its discourse 3 — is titled “Archigram Robot II, 1968”.

1. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 10–25. 2.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

3.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

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“Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” and “Archigram Robot II, 1968” face each other across the binding. 4 They also construct an argument. The foundation to the argument is the first figure’s deceptive base image, the duck–rabbit. At stake in the argument is the rhetorical question Jencks prominently includes the first figure’s name: the “– etc.?”, the tentative possibility of a new percept that he calls “a thingummybob, neither duck nor rabbit”. 5 The adjacency of the two figures and the attendant written argumentation presents Archigram — represented by the second figure — as an effective other to the metaphorical duck–rabbit supporting architectural schematization: a proof to support Jencks’s renovation of signification. This chapter will interrogate the grounds to Jencks’s “thingummybob” contention. It will analyse the bases upon which a form might defy established frameworks and definitions, and consider the mechanisms through which new definitions might arise. The following pages will position the figures of the “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” and “Archigram Robot II, 1968” in relation to established elements of language and objects of intellection: they will contextualize the figures, and probe their significance for “Semiology and Architecture”. The poetic function of the text — dramatized by the two contrasting pictorial figures — will help reveal two other figures present in the text itself: authorial constructs, the Theorist and Wit personas. The key is the generative duck–rabbit.

Figure 4b: “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?”.

4.

Strictly speaking, the duck faces away from the central robot, discussed below.

5.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

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4.2.

“Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” (Fig. 4b) is a small freehand line drawing comprised of

two closed shapes. The larger shape is roughly based on a cruciform. Its top, bottom, and right-hand sides are rounded-off bumps. The left-hand side is extended and split into two limbs diverging from the main body of the shape that each terminate in angular ends. The smaller shape — found inside the larger shape towards the top bump and slightly off to the right — is a misshapen, flattened oval. The line-work of the drawing shows signs of imprecision. The ends of the lines overlap as they close their respective shapes. The straight lines of the two limbs carry telltale slight wobbles indicative of slow and deliberate drawing, or even tracing. It is nevertheless a bold, confident-looking figure, with a seemingly assured identity. Many readers first encountering the figure may nevertheless have some difficulty naming the abstract composition of gnarly shapes. Many others would recognize in the figure a similar image, the history of which dates back at least to 1892. Those unaware of this history are spared the potentially difficult struggle of identification by the caption Jencks provides immediately above the figure that foregrounds the “Duck–Rabbit”. Jencks cites the duck–rabbit as coming from Ernst (E.H.) Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. 6 This book — first published in 1960, based on Gombrich’s A.W. Mellon Lecture in the Fine Arts, delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. in 1956 — is widely considered seminal to the discipline that Jencks designates “art history” in inverted commas. 7 The book’s position within architectural discourse is suggested by the absence of a footnote: Art and Illusion is presented as established common knowledge. 8 In his introduction of the duck–rabbit, Jencks openly declares it is “well known”. 9 The figure as an historical artefact is thus separated from the voice of the text. It is established as an artefact that delineates the analogues with which he makes his case. This control is highlighted by the addition of “– etc.?” to the caption: a textual construction solely attributable to Jencks.

6. E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London UK: Phaidon, 1960). 7. “A very convincing example of the way [schemata] work to create different styles (and thus ‘art history’) is outlined in Gombrich’s Art and Illusion” – Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18. 8. Gombrich’s reputation within the London architectural theory circle was established when Reyner Banham invited him to speak to the Independent Group in 1956, and he delivered the lecture, “Aspects of Communication Through Painting”. 9.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

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Despite the positioning of the duck–rabbit as an artefact and the novel act of captioning, Jencks’s voice does not wholly delimit the effect of the figure on “Semiology and Architecture”. Contextual and historical factors relatable to the duck–rabbit impose themselves on the referential function of the text. “Archigram Robot II, 1968”, the second figure on the page spread, contributes to this significance. “Archigram Robot II, 1968”, to be described below, supposedly asks a question of architectural conceptualization: should its form be understood as a duck or a rabbit; or, rather, as evidence of original coding, of invention not reliant on convention: radical architecture? For Jencks, “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is the positive answer to the question posed by the “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?”: it is an effective architectural thingummybob. In this discussion, “Archigram Robot II, 1968” and “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” will help articulate the structural issues underlying Jencks’s discursive position, helping to consider where he fits within the landscape of theory. This chapter indirectly inspects architectural discourse’s institutional mental set: its predisposition to perceive a territory of signs in fixed ways. Positioned in the context of “Archigram Robot II, 1968” and the discursive significance of Archigram more broadly, “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” reveals the discursive agenda of Jencks. The two figures in dialogue expose rhetorical aspects of the text formed around an unrealized, radical, even revolutionary potential. To gain traction on the material, this interrogation looks to an historical foothold. Far from the previous chapter’s concerns with tabulation, this discussion proceeds from resemblance. 10

4.3.

A figure titled “Rabbit or duck?” can be found on page 4 in the “Introduction”

to Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. 11 It is inset in the surrounding text. It is also quite small: about postage-stamp size. Gombrich claims the figure is from a general field of “baffling

10. According to Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London UK: Routledge Classics, 2002), 19, resemblance is the base upon which knowledge was based prior to the seventeenth century installation of the table. 11. “Art and Illusion rapidly became a scholarly and scientific classic, cited across an enormous spectrum of research. It was followed by a volume of studies on the theory of art, Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963). [These two books] led to [Gombrich’s] recognition as one of [England’s] leading theorists of art” – Richard Woodfield, The Essential Gombrich (London UK: Phaidon, 1996), 11.

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examples” that can be found in “[a]ny psychology textbook” of the time. 12 It is, for him, a demonstration common to mid-century perceptual psychology theory. The birth of the image, however, can be traced back almost seven decades. 13 The duck–rabbit image first appeared in print on October 23, 1892, in the popular German publication, Die Fliegende Blätter (“the flying leaves”). The lithograph was copied in Harper’s Weekly on November 19, 1892, less than a month later. The image is comprised of finely detailed ink. It is rendered with an irregular and somewhat patchy mass of hatching. In these two magazines — both weeklies for popular entertainment — the accompanying caption, transcribed in their respective languages, reads: “[w]hich animals resemble one another most? Rabbit and Duck.” 14 Seven years later, in 1899, American psychophysicist Joseph Jastrow used an almost identical image in Popular Science Monthly. Jastrow’s duck–rabbit fits into a markedly different context. While still for popular consumption, the Popular Science Monthly was a magazine less focused on entertainment, and more concerned with propagating scientific and technological knowledge. 15 The contents of Popular Science Monthly were not a laughing matter. Jastrow was a fellow at Johns Hopkins University specializing in experimental psychology. 16 His use of the duck–rabbit was no illusionistic gimmick or

12.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4.

13 . See the section “Dialectical Images” in W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago US: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 45–57 for another treatment of this material. 14. The German is somewhat illegible due to its gothic, Fraktur font. The ornate script reads: “Welche Thiere gleichen einander am meisten? Kaninchen und Ente.” Before moving beyond 1892, four important notes should be made. One, as noted by Mitchell (Picture Theory, 53) the original image in Die Fliegende Blätter shares a page with another drawing containing cartoon rabbits. The reader of the duck– rabbit would thus have rabbits in his or her visual field when perceiving the figure. His or her interpretation would tend towards rabbit. The significance of context will be returned to below. Two, the question as it is framed in the two journals is misleading. The two animals do not resemble each other; rather, their heads do. In fact, to be more precise, these rendered profiles resemble each other. Three, the significance of the hatching that sits outside the outline of the rabbit-duck is unclear. It constitutes a disguising and distracting part of the image that does not contribute to the representation of either animal. Four, perhaps most easily overlooked yet arguably most crucial, the “Rabbit and Duck” is presented as a humorous, if somewhat forced serendipity: the visual trick is presented as absurdist comedy. 15. According to Peter J. Bowler, “[a] generation of well-meaning scientists put a great deal of effort into trying to educate a wider public through … popular writing” – Peter J. Bowler, “Experts and Publishers: Writing popular science in early twentieth-century Britain, writing popular history of science now,” British Society for the History of Science 39:2 (June, 2006): 165. 16. It is fascinating to note that in his early years, Jastrow was C.S. Peirce’s assistant at Johns Hopkins University: in 1885 the two co-authored “On small differences in sensation”. See Alfred H Fuchs, Rand B. Evans and Christopher D. Green, “History of Psychology: Johns Hopkins’s First Professorship in Psychology: A critical pivot point in the history of American psychology,” The American Journal of Psychology 120:2 (Summer, 2007): 303–323, and Joseph Jastrow, “Autobiography,” in History of

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joke, but rather part of a considered theoretical proposition. Jastrow’s caption reads: “[d]o you see a duck or a rabbit, or either?” The tone and the register of the caption have shifted: rather than a riddle presented by a casual acquaintance, in Jastrow’s text it sounds like an analyst’s question. The duck–rabbit used by Gombrich in Art and Illusion is akin to Jastrow’s figure. Gombrich’s version, however, presents some notable differences. Its appearance has been modified: the hatching is thicker, and as a result, the image is more heavily contrasted; and there is also far less hatch bleed outside the bounds of the outlined shape. Further, Gombrich has altered the caption to the figure, his version simply reading “Rabbit or duck?” The sentence is reduced to its core: Jastrow’s question is retained, but the choice of “either” has been removed; and the tone is now neutral — more like a questionnaire than an analyst’s probe, or the set-up to a punchline. While Jastrow brought about a register shift, Gombrich’s caption drains all hint of humour. Gombrich cites the original use of the duck–rabbit in the Blätter when introducing his “Rabbit or duck?” figure into Art and Illusion. He describes it as a “simple trick drawing” that has become the subject of philosophical debate. 17 The broader philosophical contexts in which the image was used are not divulged. 18 Even so, it is clear from Gombrich’s introduction that, while he does not deny its popular culture roots, his use of the figure is not intended for its entertainment value. It is rather the basis for a far-reaching, scholarly, art theory argument. The writing adjacent to “Rabbit or duck?” provides an overview of the figure’s purported significance. Gombrich tells his reader that “[w]e can see the picture as either a rabbit or a duck”, and asserts that “[i]t is easy to discover both readings.” 19 This basic stance is different from the previous uses of the figure. In the pop culture magazines, the reader is given an amusing choice. In the popular science monthly, the possibility of seeing both is introduced within the contexts of a psychological experiment. Here Gombrich takes for granted the reader’s ability to discern both animals. The interpretive

Psychology in Autobiography, edited by C. Murchison (Worchester US: Clark University Press, 1930), 135–162. 17.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4.

18.

These will be discussed below.

19.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4.

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act is not a complicated or taxing process of recognition. Furthermore, his direct question — rabbit or duck? — prompts a quick, unthinking reaction. The drawing is not photorealistic, and is limited to the heads of both animals. Nevertheless, identification of the two species is presented as a simple process. The animals as signifieds are, in Gombrich’s account, easily reached. He proceeds to complicate this underlying simplicity. Following his pronouncement that the duck and rabbit are both readily available, he contends that “[i]t is less easy to describe what happens when we switch from one interpretation to the other.” 20 While the duck and rabbit are evident for the reader of the image, its constitution as a whole is resistant to rationalization and conceptualization. Somehow the image settles into these two signifieds, but just how remains, according to Gombrich, unknowable. The captions for all the versions of the figure to this point gain additional clarity with this observation: the figure depicts rabbit and duck, or duck or rabbit, but never one settled compound. The image, using Gombrich’s term, is bi-stable: it is securely established in two distinct forms; it does not contain one simple signified, or a duality perceivable in one stable resolution. Gombrich investigates bi-stability by tracking the progression from one stable state to another. He states that “there is no doubt that the shape transforms itself in some subtle way when the duck’s beak becomes the rabbit’s ears and brings an otherwise neglected spot into prominence as the rabbit’s mouth.” 21 In other words, a rabbit’s mouth appears in the exact location where the reader previously did not notice a dent in the back of the duck’s head. 22 But the prominence only remains as long as the rabbit is seen: it does not intrude upon the reading of the image as duck. Gombrich’s theory progresses quickly past the initial linear process of recognition to focus on the perhaps endless and potentially maddening oscillation between the two stable forms. He asserts that it is impossible to eventually see the drawing as neither rabbit–nor–duck, nor as both rabbit–and–duck. He argues that pre-existing schemas

20.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4.

21.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4–5.

22. This description suggests that Gombrich assumes the “Rabbit or duck?” is actually seen in the opposite order: first as a duck, and then, when the dent registers, as a rabbit. The order is a small point.

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inherently and irrevocably control the process of identification. Interpretation always intrudes on the perception of the image. The base of Gombrich’s position is thus that the illusion “is hard to describe or analyse, for though we may be intellectually aware of the fact that any given experience must be an illusion, we cannot, strictly speaking, watch ourselves having an illusion.” 23 The mystery of the figure is necessarily retained. The “Rabbit or duck?” serves as a general motif for Art and Illusion. 24 The figural concept returns to the text in two other chapters. In “Conditions of Illusion”, Gombrich uses the London Underground emblem to again articulate the difference between seeing an image as one thing and then another, and being able to perceive a mixed image: 25 a hybridized rabbitduck, or perhaps rabbuck. 26 Gombrich notes the famous London Underground bull’s-eye — the circle with a horizontal line through it — can serve as a person’s head; or as a cuff link; or as the letter O. But, he writes, “[w]hat is interesting … is not so much the flexibility of our interpretations as their exclusiveness … What is difficult — indeed impossible — is to see all [the alternatives] at the same time.” 27 For Gombrich, the fact that one image can be read as more than one form is thus far less significant than the fact that each image is read at all times as one uncompromised thing. The London Underground symbol is “multi-stable”, but not multiplex. Under Gombrich’s theory, it is impossible to perceive more than one option or schema at a time. A reader cannot hold onto one reading while seeing another. Each signified is clear and distinct. The bi-stable or multi-stable image as a resolved form must therefore be unexceptional. The complexity that allows a form to become multi-stable cannot be something perceptible in and of itself. Gombrich grants that a reader can enjoy seeing in a form 23.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 5 – italics altered.

24. Likewise, the “hobby horse” provides a vehicle for Gombrich’s theorizations of art in E.H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London UK: Phaidon, 1963). It is notable that Lawrence Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, mentioned above in relation to “learned wit”, also uses the hobby horse as a trope. 25.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 198–201.

26. This is the name given to a hypothetical animal by Dougal Dixon in Dougal Dixon, After Man: A Zoology of the Future (New York US: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 38–39. Dixon’s rubbuck is the size of a horse, with a rabbit’s head and tail. Dixon’s rabbucks come in desert, mountain, common, and arctic varieties. 27. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 198. Notably here, Gombrich does add his own third. It does not ruin his general theory however: the “bull’s eye” is merely tri-stable.

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one, then another signified, and can marvel at the apparent paradox of one form standing for more than one signified. The reader can even increase the rapidity with which he or she alters their signified: duck; rabbit; duck, rabbit, duck – rabbit –duck–rabbit- and so forth. But according to Gombrich, the reader is “not aware of the ambiguity as such, but only of the various interpretations.” 28 He or she notices the rabbit; then notices the duck, and the illusion is revealed. It is not the formal qualities of the figure the reader enjoys but rather the process it allows: “[i]t is through the act of ‘switching’ that we find out that different shapes can be projected into the same outline.” 29 The process of switching underwrites Gombrich’s concept of art. Like a visual pun, switching puts what might be called the natural language status of an image under strain. The myth of representation is highlighted. For Gombrich, “[a]mbiguity — rabbit or duck? — is … the key to the whole problem of image reading.” 30 The ambiguous form dramatizes the process by which a figure is extracted from the ground and comes into psychological resolution for its reader.

4.4.

Ambiguity serves as the central prop for Gombrich’s psychologically

grounded thesis of perception. It also helps legitimate his concomitant methodological position. In Gombrich’s view, the duck–rabbit reveals how, when confronted with a form, the individual uses his or her experience, refers to his or her internal encyclopaedia of schemas, and takes a guess at what the form might be. The individual makes a “tentative projection” at its meaning. 31 According to Gombrich’s general theory, each form or object provokes an interpretation. In most cases, due to the efficiency of enculturation, this interpretation is accurate enough to be functionally correct. Under these circumstances the percept passes what 28.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 198.

29.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 198.

30. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 198. Elaborating this position, Gerald H. Fisher writes: “[t]he fundamental process involved in perceptual organization is that in which certain parts of a stimuluspattern become distinguished from others in such a way as to be figural while the remainder of the pattern is relegated to the background” – Gerald H. Fisher, “Measuring Ambiguity,” The American Journal of Psychology 80:4 (December, 1967): 541. Fisher’s experiments used versions of the “duck and rabbit” (and other images) to see how respondents’ classifications changed with subtly changing stimulus. The different versions of the “duck and rabbit” lay on a continuum of emphasis from strongly duck to strongly rabbit. Achieving ambiguity in an image relies on attaining a balance between both identities. 31.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 198.

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Gombrich calls the “test of consistency”: 32 the process by which a stimulus is classified within existing categories. In some irregular cases, the original guess proves incorrect. At such times, the reader must adjust his or her interpretation to proceed. In a small number of very rare cases, the form or object allows the reader to perceive and settle on more than one interpretation, making it ever-afterwards “ambiguous”. These cases are the exceptions that, in Gombrich’s argument, prove the rule. For Gombrich, ambiguity — or resolved instability — is the key to understanding two significant heroic modern avant-gardes: Cubism and Surrealism. 33 In Cubism, the planes that Gombrich suggests promise perspective are repeatedly and relentlessly flattened. 34 Gombrich’s assertion is that by including logical impossibility within the image itself, the Cubists exclude the potential of any stable reading. For Gombrich it is a “perplexing effect”. He claims the result is very similar to the paradoxes beloved of philosophers: the Cretan who says all Cretans lie, or the simple blackboard with only one statement on it which runs, “The only statement on this blackboard is untrue”. If it is true it is untrue and if untrue true. 35 When confronted with Cubism, all best guesses are false: nothing fixed can be derived; nothing can be comfortably catalogued within existing schemas; no new schemas can be added. Gombrich’s conceptualization of Surrealist practice is the inverse of this Cubist scenario. 36 In the context of the long tradition of artists using “each form and each

32.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 200.

33. Gombrich also celebrates the duck–rabbit condition in another, less well-known object. This case — which avoids any stable reading, or more correctly, suggests one meaning, then another meaning, but wilfully subverts either as a stabilized form — is Saul Steinberg’s drawing from The Passport “in which a drawing hand draws a drawing hand which draws it” – Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 200. It is a cartoon reminiscent of M.C. Escher’s more realistically rendered “Drawing Hands” (1948). The interpretation of one drawing hand is stymied by the other drawing hand, and vice versa. 34.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 238.

35. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 201. Jencks uses the “Cretan Liar Paradox” in conjunction with “the scientists’ hypostatization of concepts” (14) to reveal the cost of using language efficiently. See chapter 6. 36. In his “Retrospect” to Art and Illusion, Gombrich looks back to when he wrote The Story of Art in 1950, and claims he “had a hunch” that the artistic practice of surrealist artists “would provide the

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colour … to signify only one thing in nature,” Gombrich sees Salvador Dalí allowing “each form [to] represent several things at the same time.” 37 Gombrich’s Dalí thus presents opportunities for multiple interpretations, opening up “many possible meanings of each colour and form”: 38 realizing the role of interpretation in ambiguity, his paintings encourage various readings, and thus invoke many schemas. It is important to note that Gombrich’s Surrealism does not call forth new meanings. Gombrich consistently presents schemas as established objects of a system. Each schema is pre-existent. The concept of novel schemas is, for him, an oxymoron. Accordingly, under Gombrich’s apparatus, Dalí does not produce mere ducks, or mere rabbits, or bistable duck–rabbits, or un-stable Cubist non–ducks and non–rabbits, but rather forms that are multi-stable: duck–and–rabbit–and–ant–and–nude and so on. According to Gombrich, the Cubists and the Surrealists take “the story of art” 39 out of its naturalistic and representative setting. The Garden of Eden myth where representations form a one-to-one relation with objects of language is thereby disrupted. The Cubists defy stability; and the Surrealists multiply stability. These two avant-gardes provoke realizations of neither, or either–and–more, respectively. Using key references from the body of modern art avant-gardism, Gombrich thus outlines for his reader scenarios of duck and rabbit, duck–rabbit, neither duck nor rabbit, and both duck and rabbit plus.

4.5.

Gombrich and the duck–rabbit enter into “Semiology and Architecture” in the

contexts of a debate around what Jencks calls “ INTRINSIC OF MEANING ”.

40

AND EXTRINSIC EXPLANATIONS

The argument that eventually relies on Gombrich is pitched in response

to a problem Jencks frames around Erwin Panofsky. This context is significant to the current discussion.

best point of entry into the labyrinth of representation” – Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 331. Gombrich explicitly links Dalí (his only named “surrealist”) with “the game of ‘rabbit or duck?’” on page 331. 37.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 332.

38.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 332.

39 . This is the title of his most popular book: E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (New York US: Phaidon, 1950). 40.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17. This is the heading of this subsection.

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The mere mention of two Germanic scholars — Panofsky and Gombrich — brings a Teutonic gravity to the language of “Semiology and Architecture”, helping construct the austere and exacting persona of the Theorist within the text. Yet the actual relation of the two art historians is complex and strained. This conflict is not mentioned by Jencks; but its operation can be seen to underwrite the section of “Semiology and Architecture” forming around the duck–rabbit, implicitly realizing another binary opposition. The careers of Gombrich and Panofsky were influenced by similar structural factors. Both men were Jews who escaped the Nazi regime in the lead-in to World War Two. Both scholars are indebted to institutions established by Aby Warburg. Panofsky was a more senior member to Gombrich of the circle that formed in Hamburg. In 1931–32, Panofsky represented the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in the United States, where he would subsequently settle in 1934. 41 Across the Atlantic, Gombrich had a long association with the Warburg Institute in London that started as a Research Assistant in 1936 and culminated in an extended period as Director from 1959 to 1976. 42 The standings Panofsky and Gombrich have within art history discourse are also similar. Both scholars are highly influential. W.J.T. Mitchell claims, “[i]f linguistics has its Saussure and Chomsky, iconology has its Panofsky and Gombrich.” 43 The two Warburgites are not, however, ready assimilants. Their difference is well articulated through a number of topics, and was well established through significant debates held in the 1950s and 1960s. They were on opposites sides of a complex and many-voiced contest regarding linear perspective in the Renaissance: Panofsky developed his position from his 1914 doctoral thesis on Albrecht Dürer; Gombrich made his opposition formal in 1966’s Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, and continued his critique into Symbolic Images, 1972 — well beyond Panofsky’s death in 1968. 44 Panofsky and Gombrich clashed over discrete theories, for example regarding

41 . “Panofsky, Erwin, known as ‘Pan’,” Dictionary of Art Historians, accessed 25 April, 2015, https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/panofskye.htm. 42 . “Gombrich, E[rnst] H[ans Joseph], Sir, Dictionary of Art Historians, accessed 25 April, 2015, https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/gombriche.htm. 43. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago US: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 12. Eisenman would likely be pleased with the first pairing. 44 . Gombrich’s critique of Panofsky came into full focus in Symbolic Images (1972) – See Richard Woodfield, “Gombrich and Panofsky on Iconology,” International Yearbook on Aesthetics 12 (2008): 151. See also Kim H. Veltman, “Panofsky’s Perspective Half a Century Later,” in Atti del

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Botticelli’s “Primavera”; and they held contrastive relations to broader notions related to nation, period, class, religion, and philosophical ideals. Gombrich repeatedly challenged Panofsky’s enterprise, questioning the basis to his understanding and formulations of historical continuity, and his methodology, which produced transcendental, “longitudinal sections” that resulted in “grand narratives”. 45 Following Hegel, Panofsky believed artworks contain evidence of “a basic attitude towards the world, which is characteristic, in equal measure, of the creator as individual, of the single epoch, of a single people, of a single cultural community.” 46 In stark contradistinction, in a lecture delivered in Oxford on 19 November 1967, Gombrich stated “[s]ome people are allergic to Hegel and I confess that my own tolerance is low.” 47 Jencks’s argument does not engage with these significant differences. His Panofsky and Gombrich enter on the grounds of an entirely unrelated figure derived from Ogden and Richards, “The Semiological Triangle”, central to the analysis of the previous chapter of this thesis. For Jencks, the triangular relation of symbol, thought, and referent must be negotiated “if an over-all interpretation is to be at all correct”; 48 and it is in elaborating this process — and in constructing an approach to this goal of veracity — that Jencks introduces Panofsky. Panofsky’s contribution to the argument is in made relative to a simple problem. Describing Panofsky’s thesis, Jencks explains that a reader

convegno internazionale di studi: la prospettiva rinascimentale, edited by Marisa Dalai-Emiliani, (Fiorenza IT: Centro Di, 1980): 565–584. 45 . Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca US: Cornell University Press, 1984), 32; Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (Chicago US: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 277. See also Carlo Ginzburg, “From Aby Warburg to E.H. Gombrich,” in Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore US: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 39. 46 .

Quoted in Ginzburg, “From Aby Warburg to E.H. Gombrich,” 38.

47 . E.H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History: The Philip Maurice Deneke Lecture 1967 (Oxford UK: Clarendon Press, 1969), 6. 48.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

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may be confronted with two similar objects floating in space … In one case this hovering … is meant to be an apparition or vision; in the other case, a real thing. Without knowing the conventions which support these different meanings [the reader] might reverse the intended relations and come up with the wrong interpretations. 49 For Jencks, Panofsky overcomes this issue with a system that, like Ogden and Richards’s triangle, has three aspects or components. Panofsky elaborates the structure of his system in the chapter from which Jencks’s hovering example was taken, “Iconology and Iconography: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art”. 50 The primary level of the system is purely sensible: the perception of a form from a field, or a figure from a ground. This level is “pre-iconological”, and is limited to basic discernment. The secondary level conveys “intelligible” meanings, “in that it has been consciously imparted to the practical action by which it is conveyed.” 51 This secondary level, which Panofsky terms “iconographical”, relies on established conventions: communicable intentions are translated from one consciousness to another. The tertiary level, the “iconological”, is more synthetic, Hegelian, and as a result controversial. 52 According to Panofsky, the iconological content “is apprehended by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion — qualified by one personality and condensed into one work.” 53 Such content is thus not consciously programmed into the message by the addresser, but is rather a subconscious residue that registers culturalhistorical qualities. These may be specific to time and place, or reveal myths that exist across time. Panofsky calls the information gleaned from this last iconological analytic “intrinsic meaning”.

49.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

50.

Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, (Garden City US: Doubleday, 1955), 26–54.

51.

Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 27.

52. See Adi Efal, “Iconology and Iconicity: Toward an Iconic History of Figures, Between Erwin Panofsky and Jean-Luc Marion,” Naharaim 1 (2008): 81–105, for an interesting discussion. 53. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 30. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1993), xxvii makes an important point relevant to this discussion: Panofsky did not encourage iconological analysis of “non-objective” art. Jencks’s foregoing of the duck–rabbit’s approximate realism in favour of a more diagrammatic outline makes the “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” less suitable for iconological analysis than the previous iterations.

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Jencks’s presentation of Panofsky’s methodological armature is unresolved. On one hand, in accordance with Panofsky’s desire for “correctness”, 54 Jencks stresses the value of the integrated pre-iconographical–iconographical–iconological system. He writes: if correct understanding is [the] momentary goal, then [the reader] must be able to correlate correctly form, content and percept or, as Panofsky points out, the formal level of meaning with the iconographical (concepts, allegories) into a whole interpretation (what he calls iconological or the study of the underlying symptoms and symbols of a culture). 55 On the other hand, however, Jencks is critical of Panofsky’s conceptual apparatus. Jencks finds its combination of three levels “unwieldy”. 56 He suggests that if Panofsky’s methodology is followed, it would “destroy an experience” with an overload of process. 57 The significances would multiply to create an overly academic and artificially detached event. 58 Jencks thus at the same time presents Panofsky’s theory as “correct” yet “complex”, 59 appropriate yet undesirable. The significance of Panofsky to Jencks’s argumentation is unclear. The operations of reference are internally at odds. Panofskian iconology conflicts with the practical aims of “The Semiological Triangle”, discussed in this thesis’s previous chapter; Panofsky’s Hegel-backed philosophy seems entirely incompatible with the relationality that is the defining principle of the “Triangle”. Restricting analysis to the referential function, these issues merely resolve into paradox. The non-referential contribution to the text is more instructive. The opaque intrusion of Panofsky helps this section of the text construct the authorial figure of the Theorist. As with the Ogden–Richards “triangle”, Panofsky’s three-tiered apparatus emphasizes difficulty. By extension, it expresses the hardships anyone must endure to understand it; 54.

Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 33.

55.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

56.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

57.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

58. Of a supposedly analogous expectation of pilgrims to Jerusalem located in so-called “13th century semiologist” Durandus, Jencks defines the required exercise “an academic tour de force” – Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16. 59.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

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and, specifically, the hardships that the Theorist persona constructed within the text had to endure to present the theory. While stressing the capacity bordering on virtuosity required for a thorough comprehension, Jencks asserts that “in one way or another we are all condemned to … meaning” as it is inexorably produced within this interrelated matrix. 60 The persona of the Theorist construct takes shape in the text, but its fateful condition also spreads out towards the reader, infecting his or her constitution. The significance of Jencks’s framing of the interpretive process now comes into full relief. Jencks states “correct” interpretation “is by no means easy”: indeed, “[s]omething may go wrong at any point.” 61 The drama is tangible. A level of selfimposed struggle and even danger is implied. The implied righteous ascetic forgoes naive but enjoyable experience for the greater metaphysical good of correctness. The persona of the Theorist, the authorial figure constructed within these frames of Teutonic severity, undergoes this procedure ostensibly for the benefit of all. The complexity offered by Panofsky and his system has much to offer a prospective authorial figure within theory discourse. But the intuitive aspects of his analytic are vulnerable. For a persona of the Theorist construct within architecture’s discursive formation, the overt mysticism is destabilizing. The threatening shadow that irrationality casts upon the persona of the Theorist construct is evidenced by more paradox in the text. Again leading the syntagm to cross purposes, Jencks establishes his presentation not in some considered relation to Panofsky’s theory, but in direct opposition to iconology’s caricature. While he does not frame the argument in terms of intuition or Hegelian narratives, it is on a loose version of Panofsky’s theory that Jencks bases the explanations of meaning he refers to as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. The question of the “thingummybob” is played out on this referentially unsettled ground.

4.6.

To spell out the distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” explanations of

meaning, Jencks refers to the other figure from this thesis’s previous chapter, “The Sign

60.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

61.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 16.

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Situation”. Jencks states that an “intrinsic theory of meaning” is expressed by “the right side” of the thick, black, vertical line: the photorealistic image of the coffee table: the meeting of the referent with perception. 62 This attribution conflates the preiconographical and the iconological into one essentialist process. Jencks presents “extrinsic theory” as being represented by the left side, the side containing the outlined, codified form. According to Jencks, both duck and rabbit are extrinsic meanings. Any thingummybob should, by the same logic, be an extrinsic meaning. This is something to keep in mind for the discussion below. Jencks describes intrinsic theories using the Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, 63 and the nebulous “Platonists”. But his account of both is cursory; and in these perfunctory operations, the function of the text moves. Jencks reduces Arnheim’s theoretical position to the unconvincing argument that “because we are a part of the world it is conceivable that our nervous system shares a similar structure (or isomorphism) to forms. Thus a jagged line intrinsically means activity, whereas a flat line means inactivity or repose.” 64 The conspicuous jump to

62.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17.

63. Mark Jarzombek highlights Arnheim’s significance to architectural theory several times in his book Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 180 and passim. Jarzombek also mentions a Robert Morris Ogden — apparently no relation of namesake Charles Kay — who he credits as central to “popularizing the social-critical dimension of psychology” (132). 64. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17. Jencks trivialization of Gestalt theory is ably assisted by Broadbent’s obscure scientism With his margin note, Broadbent chimes in that “[t]he Gestalt concept of an isomorph, or literal model of the perceived object in the electrical field of the brain, really is untenable in the light of recent psychological studies into the electrical and chemical action of the brain” – Broadbent, in “Semiology and Architecture,” 17. The emphasized “and” is itself ambiguous. “[I]n any case”, Broadbent goes on, “if one is going to be so literal, the encephalograph trace of a brain in repose is remarkably jagged.” It is a surreal though visually potent tangent – and one that Jencks seems to harness later in “Semiology and Architecture” in his “Degree of Surprise” figure, discussed in chapter 5. Jencks and Broadbent’s dismissive attitude was no doubt influenced by longer and broader discursive factors. Their view of Gestalt psychology, and of Arnheim particularly, was constructed relative to that school’s previously high take-up in the early 1950s, and its continued, persistent presence throughout the 1960s. Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis US: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010) states Arnheim was a particularly important source for Norway’s principal architectural theorist, Christian Norberg-Schulz. According to Otero-Pailos, Norberg-Schulz’s classic early work, Intentions in Architecture, 1966, contends that “[a]s an experience, visual thinking was subject to the laws of Gestalt psychology” (155). This is despite the fact that “in the late 1950s, new research suggested that pictures were perceived in a piecemeal way, with their parts determined more by local factors than by their whole configuration” (157). For Otero-Pailos, Arnheim’s theories gave key support not only to Norberg-Schulz, but also to the broader phenomenological movement: they “add[ed] legitimacy to the central tenet of architectural phenomenology that practice and theory are inseparable and ambiguously related” (xxix). It is interesting to consider the diagramming practice of Jencks in relation to Arnheim’s contention, stated by Otero-Pailos, that “the measure of a theory’s conceptual clarity related to its translatability into a visual diagram” (159).

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formal literalism is highly significant. Christian Norberg-Schulz is an important referent for “Semiology and Architecture”: his Intentions in Architecture introduced a mainstream architectural audience to semiological tenets; the inclusion of the chapter “Meaning in Architecture” in Meaning in Architecture — and the conspicuous echoing of titles — reveals the debt to which the book and its editors Jencks and Baird owe the Norwegian. Yet Jencks’s reductive characterization of Arnheim masks this school and its figurehead under an opaque caricature: an inactive, even deathly, flat line. In like manner, Jencks’s characterization of the “Platonists” flouts referential function. This pseudo-collective is described as a kind of obstinately enduring mushroom that “sprouts another head” each time the inherent limitations of the “intrinsic” explanation are established. 65 Names emerge from Jencks’s text to be swiftly and summarily “squelched”: 66 Jean-Jacques “Rousseau”, Sigmund “Freud”, Carl “Jung”, and the generic “expressionist painter” are all effectively mentioned to be dropped as derisory figures that failed to realize the limitations of their intrinsic theories. 67 Even Le “Corbusier” — the focus of much Jencks scholarship, and an exemplary exponent of multivalence within Modern Movements in Architecture — has his Purism reduced to “the most recent case [of Platonism] in architecture”. 68 The final so-called Platonic example, which Jencks specifies came “quite recently”, are what he terms “the Psycholinguists”. 69 Whilst Jencks’s argument allows some truth to psycholinguistic theories, their full extension is

65.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17.

66.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17.

67. According to Jencks, the “expressionist painter”, when confronted with an “all blue canvas which strangely signified joy,” was forced out of his or her intrinsic mode into a confrontation with what Jencks deems “conventions, or the extrinsic theory of meaning” – Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17. 68. Jencks’s appreciative treatment Le Corbusier, focusing on the Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, features in Modern Movements in Architecture, 15–26. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17. Jencks included the chapter “Charles Jeanneret—Le Corbusier” in Modern Movements in Architecture (1973) and published Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture (Cambridge US: Cambridge University Press, 1973) in the same year. Following an assertion made by Jencks himself in “Recent British Architecture: Pop – Non Pop” however, one might mount a case for “The Academic Platonists” such as Richard Llewelyn-Davies, Leslie Martin and Lionel March to be “most recent”. The trajectory of Alison and Peter Smithson, marked by their famous assertion “ WE ARE NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT PROPORTION AND SYMMETRY ”, punctuate this case. 69. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17. The footnote Jencks attached cites a book titled Psycholinguistics by Charles Osgood and Thomas Sebeok, 1965 (first published in 1954). Osgood returns to this thesis in chapter 5. This example demonstrates Jencks’s ability to overlook ideological differences while adopting aspects of someone’s work. In a similar but less pronounced case, Jencks points out weaknesses of Sebeok’s “psycholinguistic” theories while trading off the cultural cache of the doctrine of signs: as noted above, Sebeok was a key figure in the semiotics movement, installed as editor-in-chief of the International Association of Semiotic Studies journal Semiotica from its birth in 1969.

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placed under doubt. Jencks claims Psycholinguists “have posited various inherent limitations in the mind which make certain language forms universal”, or “intrinsic to man”. 70 Addressing this proposition, Jencks forms an hypothesis: “[i]f there are certain favourable forms in man … extrinsic meanings should tend toward these attributes.” 71 He finds this is not so. The example given to support this rejection is tenuous: “in most cultures, the red light, being intrinsically active, would mean ‘go’.” 72 Extrinsic convention is thus placed in opposition to his entirely unsupported intrinsic meaning. The palpably visual focus of the flat-line, squelched-heads, and red-light-for-go attacks leads the text away from referential functionality. 73 The evidence supporting these arguments and characterizing the intrinsic theories as illogical is quite spurious, yet the rhetorical effect is not markedly compromised. These gratuitous and overtly formal selections distance the syntagm from the theoretical argument; but they also estrange key references, intellectual grounds, and even commonsense conventions. From the resultant landscape, an authorial figure contrastive to the persona of the Theorist is constructed. Using characteristic mechanisms of amplification, juxtaposition, and intertextuality, the persona of the Wit comes into focus. 74 It is here, with the persona of the Wit dominating the presentation of ostensible theory, that Jencks introduces Gombrich’s “very convincing example” 75 — thereby allowing that figure’s form to underline the formal aspects of the message, and stress the poetic function of the text.

70.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17.

71.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17.

72. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 17. Paul H. Fry tells a related anecdote: “During the Cultural Revolution in China, Madame Mao disapproved of the fact that red lights meant ‘stop’ because red is the color of progress. She wanted to change the system, but fortunately, it was considered unwise to redefine the colors” – Paul H. Fry, Theory of Literature (London UK: Yale University Press, 2012), 104. As Jencks ordained himself “Chairman” of the editorial board of the Harvard students’ publication Connections while he was undertaking his M.Arch at the Graduate School of Design, it seems likely he would have been aware of this story. 73 . The “jagged line” alludes to the straight vertical line of “The Sign Situation”. It also projects forward to next chapter’s “Degree of Surprise” figure. 74 . The characterization of Arnheim’s work as isomorphism through an inaccurate, even pantomimic construction might indeed be defined as false wit. See Darryl P. Domingo, “‘The Natural Propensity of Imitation’: or Pantomimic Poetics and the Rhetoric of Augustan Wit,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9:2 (Fall/Winter, 2009): 51–95. 75.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

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4.7.

Jencks celebrates Gombrich and his theoretical theme, the duck–rabbit.

Despite this fact, Jencks’s “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” does not replicate Gombrich’s “Rabbit or duck?”. 76 In fact, as discussed above, Jencks’s drawing is vastly different from Gombrich’s print, and the lineage from which it was derived. Jencks’s bold outline contrasts sharply with Gombrich’s finely hatched head. There is no camouflage or subtlety in Jencks’s thick outline. It is an image that draws attention to its materiality. The closest precedent for Jencks’s figure can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. 77 In his exposition of “seeing as”, Wittgenstein uses what can best be described as a doodle version of the duck–rabbit: a smooth single line traces the neck and head silhouette, and a dot registers as the eye for both duck and rabbit. 78 But Wittgenstein’s discussion — including his assertion that he “may say ‘[i]t’s a duckrabbit’” 79 — runs counter to Jencks’s argument, which seeks to retain the percept’s schematic separation. Jencks’s figure is formally similar to Wittgenstein’s doodle, but plays a very different rhetorical role. It is not a quickly perceived gestalt, but rather registers as a deliberate artefact, heavy-handed both in physical terms — the pressure behind the pen — and in visual terms — the closed shapes; the marked, angular articulation of the duck’s beak–rabbit’s ears. While laboured, the duck–rabbit of “Semiology and Architecture” avoids formal detail. It contains none of the realistically textured yet distracting hatches of Gombrich’s figure. Further, there are no clues to schema recognition within the two heads: the eye does not face left or right; the rabbit’s jaw does not shade the neck; the rabbit’s mouth does not impress; the rabbit’s mystacial zone is not raised; the line where the duck’s

76. It is notable that Jencks uses a blown-up copy of Gombrich’s duck–rabbit in his presentation of Post-Modern architecture – Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 42. This movement away from the vague outline to the hatched etching version accompanies Jencks’s more overt presentation of the duck and rabbit as representative of “modern” and “traditional” architectural codes. The gap between Jencks’s semiological and Post-Modern projects is evidenced in the contrast between these two treatments. 77.

It can be found in Philosophical Investigations, part II section xi.

78. William G. Lycan argues that Gombrich’s theorization of the “Rabbit or duck?” sits in general agreement with Wittgenstein’s more elaborated philosophical position related to “seeing as”. See William G. Lycan, “Gombrich, Wittgenstein, and the Duck–rabbit,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30:2 (1972): 229–237. See also Mitchell, Picture Theory, 49–50. Mitchell’s title page reproduces Gombrich’s “Rabbit or duck?” 79 . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen : Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Chichester UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 205.

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upper mandible’s meets with the feathered head is not suggested; and the shape of the duck’s mandibles are not shaped to fit convincingly together. In contradistinction to Gombrich’s “Duck or rabbit?”, Jencks’s duck–rabbit is neither a convincing duck, nor a convincing rabbit. Jauntily angled, the duck’s beak or rabbit’s ears are opened in an eye-catching scissor-like fashion; and the elongated eye suggests neither realism nor cartoonish abbreviation. Most significantly, the figure is closed: the animals’ necks do not elliptically imply their bodies, but rather convey a definitive separation. In other words, the duck–rabbit is decapitated. While its caption ensures its two heads are perceptible, these factors combine to avoid settled schemas. “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” does not, however, represent a standard avant-gardist exception. Unlike the Cubist practice that according to Gombrich suggests a reading before denying it, Jencks’s figure never really mounts any strong case for schematic identification. Neither does it approach Surrealism. It fails to complete even the first stage in the multiple-staged meaning proliferating process Gombrich locates within the work of Dalí. Jencks’s duck–rabbit eschews both of these established strategies of the heroic modern avant-garde. The figure is neither the avoidance of a schematic target, nor the expression of two and more stable signifieds. It is calculated to allude to a controlled surplus, an extra resulting from the connotative structure of the language system. The form of the figure remains, in an important sense, isolated and awkward, and untranslated into the argument. In the text body, after he summarizes Gombrich’s bi-stability theory, Jencks tries to manage the figure’s referential function. He writes: “[a] further interesting proof of the influence of schemata in perception arises when we try to see [the figure] as a third thing, a thingummybob, neither duck nor rabbit.” 80 It is to suggest this “third thing” within his argument that Jencks adds “– etc.?” to the duck–rabbit formula. The “etc.” form itself might again be traced to Gombrich. But Gombrich uses “etc.” to convey a very different content — indeed to describe a contrastive phenomenon. Gombrich’s “etc.” is based on that aspect of interpretation in which the schema of one reasonably well-defined object is extended onto all the members of an apparent series.

80.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

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The “etc. principle” is thus demonstrated “[w]hen we look at the trees in Constable’s Wivenhoe Park [and] we take those farther back on trust because those near us are so convincingly articulated.” 81 Gombrich notes that “this tendency of ours to take things as read can indeed lead to curious illusions when the mind is tricked into running ahead of the facts and expecting the continuation of a series that turns out to be less simple.” 82 The extension of this principle, and the essential point of its relevance to this discussion, is that “[i]f we are too keyed up … the slightest stimulus will produce an illusion.” 83 The “etc. principle” comes to life in the process of decoding under assumed premises. Using “etc.” as a suggestive followed by a question mark, as Jencks does is in his caption, is without precedent. No jokester, or psychologist, or art historian up to that point in history had made such an extension to the duck–rabbit figure. In fact, the basis of the figure’s relevance to the vast majority of its previous usages, from the humorous trick in the Blätter, through the serious arguments in Jastrow and Gombrich, is that the image is bi-stable, containing exactly two aspects. In positing a potential outside duck and rabbit, Jencks is effectively calling into question the very basis of the figure, not only as an historical artefact, but also as a theoretical object. The persona of the Theorist construct takes shape around this metaphysical trial. Accordingly, Jencks makes some self-sacrificial attempts to see something else in the figure. He proposes seeing it anew as “a hand making the V … for victory [sign]”, or as “a key-hole or bellows”. 84 But he asserts that perceiving something other than a duck or a rabbit in the figure “is actually quite hard to do because the [potential, new] schema … is not nearly so expected as the [duck or rabbit].” 85 Jencks claims that “[o]ur language has stabilized” the duck and the rabbit, and that these schematizations “will not budge under such a puny assault.” 86 According to his presentation, both the V for victory and

81.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 184–185.

82. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 184–185. Gombrich uses the Fraser spiral — “which is not a spiral at all but really a series of concentric circles” — to illustrate his point. 83. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 189. Thus “our weighing of the criteria in a given case is itself affected and conditioned to some extent by representational convention and by our own habitual way of seeing real objects” – Lycan, “Gombrich, Wittgenstein, and the Duck-Rabbit,” 232. 84.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

85.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

86.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

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the key-hole or bellows are destined to be “rejected by society”. 87 Even Jencks’s gnarly outline — far from mimesis, devoid of subtle articulation, overtly hand drawn, neither convincingly duck nor rabbit — is, according to his presentation, bound by convention, linguistically secured. But this line of reasoning and the authorial figure underwriting it are compromised by the inclusion of the obtrusive name “thingummybob”. While Jencks does not establish a third schema onto the figure, the text does formalize this word. In fact, “thingummybob” appears three times. And in its third appearance, Jencks draws attention to the material and conceptual consistency of the word by characterizing it as “inadequate” and rendering it in inverted commas. 88 This seme, its materiality highlighted, emphasizes the poetic function of the text. It also marks the return of the persona of the Wit construct: the casual character of the word and the playful but not revolutionary nature of the challenge to convention are symptomatic of its discursive presence. 89 Jencks is working against cultural norms and well-mannered form when he proposes the idea of the novel schema. The duck–rabbit dramatizes the effects of schemas; but Jencks wants to push this drama into a new, “radical” phase. According to his description, this requires socio-political action. Radicals have to position conservatives as “[t]he defenders of … two ancient concepts” — i.e., both the duck and the rabbit — who are “hindering progress, clearly anachronistic and out of touch with the present situation when all things are in flux.” 90 At the same time, to be recognized as a “successful movement”, the radicals have to “find” or promote “new, plausible meanings” for the reader to accept. 91 It is Jencks’s contention that Archigram achieve this unlikely goal. 92

87.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

88.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

89 . An analogy might be made here to Eco’s argument in Umberto Eco, “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom’,” in Carnival!, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin DE: Mouton, 1984), 1–9. This is significant to the discussion of Banham and Jencks’s famous quotation, “Architecture and revolution”. 90. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18. Again, the change from this position to the one Jencks holds in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture is telling. In this later book, Jencks promotes his theory of double-coding: using both duck and rabbit, retaining both, expressing their collision. This will be returned to in chapter 6’s conclusion. 91.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

92 . Note the appreciation for Archigram is common to both Jencks and Banham (see Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2002) 171-178; and Lara Schrijver, “Revisiting Yesterday’s Future: the 1960s and the Internet of Things,” Volume 28 (2011): 54). This is an interesting subplot to chapter 6, below.

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The isolating awkwardness of the “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” and the conspicuous inclusion of “thingummybob” in the argument indicate that the referential function is not at the heart of the message. Jencks makes his goal clear as he writes, “supposing we wanted to start a new art movement and see the old duck–rabbit in an ‘entirely radical’ new way. We have the form, we want to change the caption.” 93 Jencks is using the established duck–rabbit as material with which to advance his progressive agenda directed towards establishing new cultural forms. The use of the poetic function of language unsettles the argument, but it gives the text an additional means for gaining rhetoricality. The twinned authorial figures in this section of “Semiology and Architecture” — the Theorist–Wit — parallel both the pictorial figure and conceptual device of the duck–rabbit. To give the poetic function further supremacy and to add to its rhetorical potency, Jencks includes a full-page figure on the facing page: a supposed thingummybob produced by Archigram.

4.8.

“Archigram Robot II, 1968” (Fig. 4c) is a stark contrast to the “Duck–Rabbit

– etc.?” that it faces. 94 It is not a simple line drawing, but rather a composite image comprised of many elements, apparently from various sources. There is no legible cohering principle, visual or thematic. There is no obvious overall gestalt to perceive. It is a collage most comfortably approached as a collection of disparate elements. The most dominant element of the image sits in the centre of the page width, around one third down from the top. It is an irregularly shaped mass of information, best described as amoeboid or cloud-shaped. The main body of this mass is dark grey. Indeed, the cloud-shaped mass appears as a void-like ground. Upon this ground are several figures. Arguably, the most prominent of these figures are two English-language word groups. On the left, on an inclining angle of around twenty degrees from left to right, in wellspaced capital letters of a bold, sans serif font, is “FOR AN INSTANT”. On the right, on a shallower but still noticeable angle, capital letters in a tightly-packed serif font read, “MOMENT-VILLAGE”. The phrase and the hyphenated composite word, the former a cliché, the latter a neologism, do not cohere. They are kept separate by the changes in font and angle, and by virtue of their ungrammatical combination. On closer inspection, more words of a diminutive size are visible as figures on this dark grey ground. “Soft”

93.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

94.

Which, in turn, faces away from (the duck aspect) or towards (the rabbit aspect) it.

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appears three times: “SOFT”, “soft”, “soft”. “Service” appears four times, all in similar type, in two cases curving to follow the line of a neighbouring object. Again the words do not associate to form a coherent, intelligible linguistic entity.

Figure 4c: “Archigram Robot II, 1968”.

The dark grey amoeboid ground is colonized by several smaller, irregularly-shaped, cloud-like zones. Most of the zones are filled: some with a grid of dots; others with hatching; others with a noisy texture. The zones are contained by undulating lines controlled at irregular intervals by small rectilinear objects. If understood as objects at a 140

small scale, these objects might be read as gates; at a larger scale, they might read as plugs or valves. Some of these gate–valves connect to objects revealing mechanical articulations. Ball and socket joints are the most prominent. The overall forms of these line-drawn mechanical objects are vaguely defined within the dark grey ground cloud.

Figure 4d: Detail from “Archigram Robot II, 1968”.

An object emerging from the top of the cloud, an apparently larger and more complete version of these objects, gives some clarification (Fig. 4d). It is a body with six limbs. The bottom four limbs are ostensibly legs. They have hydraulic shaft shanks, and articulated ankle–feet. The top two are ostensibly arms, again extending through hydraulic shafts. The arms terminate in round hand-like components. The body itself is broken into two or three portions. These read quite comfortably as head, thorax, and abdomen. The head contains a particularly defined collection of circular forms. One standout dark grey crescent registering against a white circle gives the strong impression of an eye. Stretching over the six-limbed body, at the top of the image, is a semi-circular form. This arc terminates at both sides in thickened rims. An arm, constituted by a ball and socket joint and hydraulic shaft, reaches down from the inside of the arc. The arm seems to be presenting a small rectangle to the mechanical being within the arc. With some measure of imagination, this top third of the figure can be seen as a birth narrative: a six-limbed machine-like being engendered from a black ground cloud womb, being ejected from the birth canal, some of the viscous placenta still clinging to the 141

semi-circular external birth-shield that supplies the being with its first orders. It would follow that the other embryonic robots lie within the womb, developing with the assistance of their respective placentas. This nativity narrative offers a figural synecdoche, to be returned to below. Underneath the dark grey cloud, around the centre of the image, five tubes are visible. Due to their general proportion, their apparent transparency, and following on from the creation-based interpretation, they might be called test-tube shaped. This assignation is contentious, as the top and bottom of the tubes are sealed in round ends. To the reader conversant with architectural representation, the tubes appear to be shown in section. White circles at regular intervals, and lines connecting the circles tangentially, appear to give the tubes a ribbed structure. A line at the outside of the circles appears to provide a skin to the outside, while another on the inside defines an unbroken voluminous space. The detail represented in this interior suggests the test tubes may be of vast scale, far larger than standard test tubes, and closer to the dimensions of a building. Words are evident inside the tubes. The most easily perceptible word is “ METAMORPHOSIS ” rendered in a thin, Art Deco style font, featuring notably round Os. 95 The tubes also contain a collection of images that are collaged together with bold juxtapositions. The test tubes sit on angles on what appears — thanks to the collaged photographs of machine-like objects on the right — to be a receding black ground. The horizon line of this ground is defined to the left of the test tubes by a diagram that resembles an electronic circuit board. Rectangular components, vias, and coded numbers fill a rectangle. Photographic depictions of two circuit boards sit collaged below the test tubes. On the extreme left a machine-like object, with telescoping legs and a protruding lens-like pipe, faces the test tubes. Running across the bottom of the image, in a spatially ambiguous white zone, is a jumble of drawn items, including a complex diagram on the right, and a text-and-image design on the left. Appraised objectively, the figure is entirely nonsensical. But for the reader with a preexisting knowledge of 1960s architecture, the significance of the figure is readily apparent. “Archigram Robot II, 1968” presents an assemblage of the works of Archigram. 95. lettering.

The font is a mainstay of Archigram, and is reminiscent of early period Frank Lloyd Wright

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The coding of the figure is quite clear for those with prior exposure. From within the mixed-scale, mixed-perspective, and mixed-type mass of information, discrete signs come into resolution. The telescoping legs and lens-like pipe are from Walking City, 1964. Blow-out Village, 1966, appears on the left-hand edge. Future Possibilities, 1968, traverses across the bottom left of the image; and Moment-Village, 1968, and Instant City, 1968, provide the words located within the dark grey cloud. The test tubes are filled with largely-unrecognizable fragments from previous schemes for Cushicles, and Suitaloons, and Auto-Environments. With these fragments identified, the whole becomes an embodiment of bricolage, a collage formed from a closed set of textual resources.

4.9.

While the constitution of “Archigram Robot II, 1968” as collage is evident,

the collage itself does not form a clear picture or present a schema. An interpretation can nevertheless be managed if, with the title as guide, the reader focuses their attention on the abovementioned synecdochal element. A singular “robot” comes into view. It emerges from the top of the dark grey cloud of amniotic fluid. The hydraulic legs and articulated ball-and-socket joints signify this element’s identity. An aspect is presented. This form, however, contains equivocating components. The six limbs and three body parts are characteristic not of a robot but of an insect. This sense gains articulation with Jencks’s caption. Notably it is the only discursive caption in “Semiology and Architecture”. It reads: An example of finding the possible new meanings in old forms which no one else has found. Here the architectural metaphors come from telescopes, blow-ups and umbrellas; bugs, amoebae and pneumatic skins; tubes, capsules, pills and plastic baggies; electronic circuits, transistors and even the Early Warning System for Nuclear Attack. 96 The caption’s formal assembly echoes Archigram’s collage. The punctuation is strikingly eccentric. But if the reader looks beyond the poetic function and happens to

96. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18. Like all lists, this list benefits from the rhetoricality of tabulation. Not all items are obvious. The apparent absence of the technically named “Early Warning System for Nuclear Attack” is particularly glaring.

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extract “bug” from the caption, another aspect becomes resolved. Two aspects are now available. Another provisional parallel arises. Jencks’s “new meaning” of bug imposes itself on the form, which has been established by the title as a robot. The duck–rabbit is thus met with a potential robot–bug. But analysis reveals that as support for the argument, the figure, both in part and overall, fails. While the collaged image and its caption supposedly position “Archigram Robot II, 1968” as proof of Jencks’s theory of novel schemas, they do not exercise the referential function in any significant way. Indeed the argument falls at the first hurdle: “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is not a duck–rabbit’s thingummybob as, according to Gombrich’s tenets, it does not satisfy the requirements of the basic duck–rabbit. The case is best made by focusing in on the six-limbed machine-like form at the top of the figure. There are two reasons why it is not a robot–bug. First, the form does not lead to any strong, immediate denotation. Both robot and bug schematizations require abstract intellectualization: the former requires an appreciation of mechanics, the latter knowledge of zoology. The type of image does not help: unlike the Gombrichian duck– rabbit, there is no realism to help naturalize a schema; yet unlike the Wittgensteinian duck–rabbit, there is no cartoonish simplification. “Archigram Robot II, 1968” looks far too unrealistic, and yet far too considered to be perceived quickly as either robot or bug. Second, the form does not provoke multiple, discrete readings. The figure emerging from “Archigram Robot II, 1968” might be linked to robots and bugs, but the crux to Gombrich’s theory is schemas’ “exclusiveness”. Each schema, as Jencks points out, can only exist “separately — never together”. 97 Yet the figure’s robot and bug readings overlap: there are no elements of either robot or bug that approximate the disappearing rabbit’s nose or overlooked hatching: the mechanical and the hexapodal are always there in one resolved form. The bug is always robotic; and the robot never eludes buggishness. As a consequence there is no aspect switching. There is rather one hybridized form: a “robug”, or “bugbot”. A third schema is not added; but rather a single complex schema is born from the corruption of two now-effectively-destroyed schemas. Considering the image as a whole reaches similar findings. To satisfy Jencks’s tacit argument that “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is a thingummybob, the figure must realize

97.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

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two steps: affirm the accepted meaning alternatives, the equivalent of both the duck and the rabbit; and find one or many “new, plausible meaning[s]”. 98 Both of these steps must be realized relative to an existing catalogue of conventions. But “Archigram Robot II, 1968” does not offer any formal relation to architectural convention. There is neither an affirmation of architecturality, nor novel plausibility in the face of such contexts. The figure either starts off unreadable and continues to be so; gains limited resolution as circuit boards, diagrams of circuitry, and nonsensical noisy phrases; or connotes the work of Archigram. The form of “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is either schematized on its own terms and without relation to proper convention, or it is unschematizable. “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is a figure lacking in communicational clarity. It is not, however, a figure with a conflicting figural identity. It is closer to an inkblot or what Gombrich calls a nonsense figure than a product of Picasso or Dalí. Gombrich describes the process of classifying an inkblot: he details how a reader “first [has] to classify the blot and fit it into some sort of familiar schema”, and then, “[h]aving selected such a schema to fit the form approximately, … proceed to adjust it.” 99 The challenge with “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is with commencement: finding some rough schema to try to refine. The collage is a cacophonic composition requiring much effort and a great deal of previous knowledge. According to the definition of George Lakoff, “Archigram Robot II, 1968” reveals itself as an expression not of ambiguity but of vagueness. 100 Lakoff argues ambiguity is readable as two conventional but contrastive interpretations, whereas vagueness does not become legible through available means — is not secured by conventions at all. 101 Ambiguity is limited to two interpretations; vagueness, in its avoidance of schemas, generally due to a lack of intelligible information, is unlimited. 102

98.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

99.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 63–64.

100. 357–359.

George Lakoff, “A Note on Vagueness and Ambiguity,” Linguistic Inquiry 1:3 (June, 1970):

101. Lakoff, “A Note on Vagueness and Ambiguity,” 358. For a contrastive position starring “Whatshisname” see Janet L. Mistler-Lachman, “Comments on Vagueness,” Linguistic Inquiry 4:4 (Autumn, 1973): 549–551. 102. Roy Sorensen stresses that “vagueness is not a species of ambiguity [and t]he clue to the fundamentality of the contrast is the impossibility of higher order ambiguity” – Roy Sorensen, “Ambiguity, Discretion, and the Sorites,” The Monist 81:2 (April 1998): 215–232. Much philosophical and linguistic debate has been undertaken on the problem of vagueness in relation to a dichotomy. Authors of these papers often use a hypothetical Sorites series and “bald” or not-bald (sometimes “hairy”) men,

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Jencks’s “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” argument makes an interesting contrast with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s celebrated “duck and decorated shed” dichotomy, first published in Learning from Las Vegas (1972). 103 As demonstrated in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), Venturi owes much to William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930); and as discussed in chapter 2 of this thesis, and reinforced below in chapter 5, Jencks owes much to Empson’s New Critic peer, I.A. Richards. Similar scaffolds thus support both Venturi and Jencks. Yet where Venturi–Scott Brown choose a side — anti-ducks — Jencks refuses the oppositional structure and attempts to overcome it. Venturi–Scott Brown, supported by ambiguity, promote sheds; Jencks, favouring vagueness, denatures both rabbits and ducks. Thus under the influence of formal selections that are both conspicuous and vague, the referential function loses control of this section of the text. In his attempts to encompass bi-stability within a theory that allows for the inclusion of innovative schemas, Jencks promotes a theory incurably beset by paradox: an oxymoronic open field of conventions. The failings of the argument and the increased opacity of the text allow for less referential discursive constructs to take hold. More important than its discussion of the exceptions to convention, the text itself is revealed as an exception to convention — the convention of authorship in architectural discourse. “Semiology and Architecture” constructs its own duck–rabbit: the authorial figure of the Theorist–Wit, the persona that poetically spans asceticism and laxity, rigour and flippancy. The relation of this object to a pre-existent rabbitduck within the discourse at the time will be discussed in chapter 6. Aspect-switching that reveals oscillations between the personas of the Theorist and the Wit has been, and will continue to be revealed in instances of thickly mannered rhetoricality throughout the body chapters of this thesis.

4.10.

While this discussion suggests “Archigram Robot II, 1968” does not form a

coherent conceptual dialogue with “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?”, it does offer “Semiology and and/or the interpretations of Mrs Malaprop, to mount cases. See Ross P. Cameron, “Vagueness and Naturalness,” Erkenntnis 72:2 (March, 2010): 281–293. 103. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 1972). The in-text attribution here continues the common though perhaps unfair practice to degrade Izenour’s authorial status.

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Architecture” a valuable binary opposition. In contrast to Jencks’s argument, however, the significance of “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is not dependent on interpretations of the figure’s visual form. There is nothing actually riding on seeing a robot or a bug — or an amoebae, or a pneumatic skin, or a capsule — in “Archigram Robot II, 1968”. Owing to its lack of representative ambition, the image can be interpreted in a variety of ways. It is vague. The figure is a hypothetical and entirely unrealistic collage. 104 The operations the figure promotes in “Semiology and Architecture” are not coded and decoded in its form, but in the surrounding discursive cloud. The significance of “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is not dependent on cognition, but merely recognition: the name recognition of “Archigram”. A bi-stable state forms around the design collective’s proper name. The meaning of “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is dependent on the acceptance of Archigram as producers of architecture. It is this semic item that controls the rhetoricality of the eponymous figure and this section of the text more broadly. Far more significant than its form’s novel schematization is the acknowledgment of Living City, or Walking City, or Future Possibilities “Archigram Robot II, 1968” allows. The figure can thus be understood less as an exploration of Jencks’s “etc.?” query and more as an ideological example of Gombrich’s “etc. principle”: the vague representation of architecture depicted trades off previously established acts of architecture, themselves vaguely defined. While Jencks argues that Archigram is a “successful movement”, this is contentious. Indeed the reader of “Semiology and Architecture” does not have to go far to find an objection. In the margin note included alongside Jencks’s written body and sitting adjacent to “Archigram Robot II, 1968”, Geoffrey Broadbent asks: “how does one judge their ‘success’ in the absence of evidence that they actually work?” This question, rhetorical itself, is answered by Jencks: “[t]heir ‘success’ … is that they are ‘plausible’, whereas the Duck–Rabbit creations [i.e., ‘a hand making the V sign for victory; … a key-hole or bellows’] are not.” 105 This answer eludes the true subject of the question: the definition of architecture itself as a schema.

104. It is what Mitchell (Picture Theory, 49) calls a “metapicture”: it “encapsulates an entire episteme.” 105.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 18.

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History certainly grants Archigram a significant degree of success. It is almost obligatory in any account of the period to note their cultural and discursive influence. But it is difficult to argue that their work gave birth to a novel architectural schema. Their value is as a medium through which to define architecture and non-architecture. Their works do not prompt perceptual oscillations within individuals, but rather differences of opinion between individuals. Seen from this perspective, Archigram — with its full-page figure a prominent and effective form of rhetoricality — become practical: they provide Jencks a means through which to introduce the duck–rabbit into his argument and construct the Theorist–Wit within his text. The example of Archigram suggests any architectural thingummybobs rely less on conventions and more on attitudes: any measure of “success” depends less on aspects of imagery and more on the enculturation of readers. According to Gombrich, readers approach artists’ “cryptograms” with “expectations”: “with … receivers already attuned.” 106 For Gombrich, a reader confronted with an image “expect[s] to be presented with … a certain sign situation … and make[s] ready to cope with it.” 107 He asserts “a … climate of opinion […] sets up a horizon of expectation, a mental set, which registers deviations and modifications with exaggerated sensitivity.” 108 Any textual object can turn the reader towards such a horizon, and can encourage certain other sensitivities to be dulled. In Gombrich’s own poetic words, “artistic communication is quite unlike throwing hand grenades. There must be not only a sender but also a receiver suitably attuned.” 109 The ideal reader of “Archigram Robot II, 1968” is keyed up to see architecture by a climate that affords architects with the laxity and wit to produce what are effectively cryptograms: open-ended hybrids, vaguely defined forms. Both “Archigram Robot II, 1968” and “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” gain clarity with this realization. In its lack of legibility, “Archigram Robot II, 1968” demonstrates the conditions of its reception. Its readers — reading both when it was first published in the late 1960s and decades later, even now — are “suitably attuned” to see the figure as architecture. Similarly, in its affected representational mode, “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?”

106.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 53.

107.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 53.

108.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 53.

109.

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 53.

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delineates the conditions of the discourse in which it resides. The figure requires its reader to force stimuli into schemas to follow the presentation of so-called theory. The rhetoricality of “Duck–Rabbit – etc.?” and “Archigram Robot II, 1968” pivot around a nebulous potential. Jencks’s practice of naming plays an essential part. Without the captions, the recognitions of “duck” and “rabbit” in the first figure are in jeopardy, and the possibility of the projective “thingummybob” latent. Further, the acceptance of the second figure “Archigram Robot II, 1968” as architecture rests in large part on the first half of the accountable design collective’s compound word name. Faith underwrites this string of accepted meanings. An architectural Garden of Eden is implied, with vague outlines becoming articulate objects: potential “thingummybobs” relying on proper names. The oscillating authorial figure of the Theorist–Wit emerges from the poetic function of “Semiology and Architecture” to be established as an architectural logothete. 110

110 . Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, translated by Richard Miller (Baltimore US: Johns Hopkins University, 1997), 3.

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5. OPPOSITION AND ASSOCIATION

Figure 5a: Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture”, 22-23.

5.1.

In the fourth section of “Semiology and Architecture”, 1 Charles Jencks

nominates “two primary ways” through which to understand and analyse the workings of sign behaviour. 2 He refers to these ways as “opposition or association”, or “ CONTEXT AND METAPHOR ”.

This second couple is his section’s title. The first couple has been

adapted for this current chapter’s title. The change from “or” to “and” expresses the way in which “Semiology and Architecture” constructs an authorial voice with two personas, which throughout this thesis have been classified as the Theorist and the Wit. Jencks informs his reader that both opposition and association are relational. Each presents a mechanism through which a reader can extract meaning from a sign, or in

1. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 10–25. 2.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 21.

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Saussurean terms, effect a signification. According to Jencks’s formulation, one can either realize a sign’s difference from another sign or signs in the same frame from which it is then distinguished, or realize a sign’s similarity to another sign or signs from a distinct frame with which it becomes in some way linked. Ostensibly as graphic elaboration for his theoretical framework, the section includes two pictorial figures. They dominate the page spread 22–23 (Fig. 5a), occupying over half its surface. While typologically the figures are distinct, the two share a similar basic essence: they give the impression of being the product of empirical and positivist science.

Figure 5b: “Degree of Surprise”.

“Degree of Surprise” (Fig. 5b) fills the top half of page 22. The figure is integrated into the writing stream: it is contained within the column; is headed by “Thus:”; and has two 151

sentences — “‘Twiggy is as busty as Billy is lusty’” and “‘Twiggy is as busty as crashing is spring’” — included within its form, rendered in the same font as the rest of the chapter. The figure is also unreferenced. The text thus implies “Degree of Surprise” is the original product of its author, Jencks. The play on conventionality begins to sketch out the presence behind the figure of the persona of the Wit. The remainder of the figure represents a kind of graph. It uses a font similar in appearance to the largest words of “The Semiological Triangle” — though not quite as large and in mixed case — and arrows in keeping with this figure discussed in chapter 3. The arrows point in the direction of the bold san serif letters, which read “Probability” and “Information”. Two substantial horizontal lines connect the shafts of these two arrows. On and around these thick lines, jagged line graph representations add a lively dynamism to the figure. The overall impression is of a graphing of two alternative sentences, based on one repeating axis loosely representing time, and one stretching between “Probability” and “Information” through lines of conceptual neutrality. 3 Across the spine, page 23 is largely consumed by the sprawling figure, “Semantic Space of Current Architects” (Fig. 5c). This figure plots twenty-three names in a threedimensional volume. The names are Edward Durell “Stone”, Minoru “Yamasaki”, Basil “Spence”, Frederick “Gibberd”, Oscar “Niemeyer”, Philip “Johnson”, Mies “van der Rohe”, Jørn “Utzon”, Skidmore Owings & Merrill “SOM”, “Archigram”, Luigi “Moretti”, Robert “Venturi”, Louis “Kahn”, Konrad “Wachsmann”, Aldo “Van Eyck”, Josep Lluís “Sert”, Richard Buckminster “Fuller”, Cedric “Price”, Pier Luigi “Nervi”, Ray and Charles “Eames”, James “Stirling”, Alvar “Aalto” and Le “Corbusier”. The three dimensions are ordered by the axes “ FORM ”, “ FUNCTION ”, and “ TECHNIC ”. Each axis extends from the positive extreme — for example, “+

FORM ”

— beyond the effective

zero point where all axes meet to an unlabeled negative extreme equidistant from zero. Through this graph, the architect’s names become entries of data: calculable, relatable, and rated.

3. The arrows point vaguely off into space beyond “Probability” and “Information”; neutrality is marked by two strong horizontal lines (one for each sentence). The reader might presume that the lines denote zero or nothing or meaninglessness (the absence of speech, the before and after of syntagmatic construction), but Jencks’s own remonstrations against claims for such states may warn against such a presumption. The graphic itself might have been compromised by the black and white printing of Meaning in Architecture. A figure that used the same “zero” line for two coloured line graphs might be more visually arresting and theoretically apposite.

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Figure 5c: “Semantic Space of Current Architects”.

The exhibition clearly categorizes “Corbusier”, “Archigram”, “Utzon”, and “Johnson” high on “ FORM ”; “Corbusier” higher on “ TECHNIC ” than “Archigram”, “Johnson” and “Utzon”, who sit almost at zero on this axis; and “Corbusier” far more positive with respect to “ FUNCTION ” than “Archigram”, “Utzon”, and “Johnson”. “Johnson” is in fact below zero in “ FUNCTION ”. Jencks tells his reader that those appearing in the negative might “make positive efforts”, but according to his assessment, they “fail”. 4 It might be of some comfort to admirers of Johnson that “Stone” and “SOM” are rated more negative on “ FUNCTION ”, as is “Fuller”. “Fuller”, however, is ranked very positively on 4. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24. He goes on to say “(this is a diagram of prejudice)”. This celebration of subjectivity is not carried through with any vigour in the actual figure, which takes on the neutral form of a graph. Exactly what this failure equates to — what degree of negativity any architecture could actually attain, and by what mechanism or mechanisms it would realize this negativity — is unclear.

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“ TECHNIC ”. “SOM” is at least placed highly on the “ FORM ” axis. “Stone”, on the other hand, sinks on “ TECHNIC ”, “ FUNCTION ”, and “ FORM ”: there is no saving grace for the architect of the General Motors Building, New York City, completed in 1968, and thus no doubt topical in 1969. As two distinct figures within “ CONTEXT

AND METAPHOR ”,

“Degree of Surprise” and

“Semantic Space of Current Architects” appear to instantiate the “two primary ways” with which signification occurs in the order established by the section’s title. Under this presumption, “Degree of Surprise” describes “opposition” and “Semantic Space of Current Architects” “association”. Yet as with all the previous pictorial figures within “Semiology and Architecture” detailed in this thesis, these figures’ contribution to the argument, when closely interrogated, is far less straightforward. This chapter will reveal that, in fact, their functioning is not primarily transparent and referential, but opaque and poetic: that rather than elements of disputation, the figures are artefacts of parody. Their formal character — what will be exposed as a structuralist scientisticism — will help construct the authorial figures of the Theorist and the Wit.

5.2.

Jencks’s “opposition” and “association” conceptualization is a version of one

of the fundamental frameworks of semiological theory. Ferdinand de Saussure’s seminal Course in General Linguistics spells out two similar mechanisms for attaining “value”, which he names “syntagmatic” and “associative”. 5 In his groundbreaking article “Paradox in Regent’s Park”, George Baird refers to these alternatives as being dependent upon a “relationship of contiguity” and “a virtual relationship of substitution”, respectively. 6 Other semiologists and semioticians refer to the relations with terms suggested by Roman Jakobson: “syntagmatic” and “paradigmatic”. 7 In his prominent

5. Saussure writes: “all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle. They are always composed: (1) of a dissimilar thing can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined. Both factors are necessary for the existence of a value”; “The syntagmatic relation is in praesentia. It is based on two or more terms that occur in an effective series. Against this, the associative relation unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series” – Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Rieldlinger (New York US: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 16; 123. 6. George Baird, “Paradox in Regent’s Park: A Question of Interpretation,” Arena: Architectural Association Journal 81 (April, 1966): 276. 7. The term “paradigmatic” was introduced by Roman Jakobson. Jakobson played a key role in the intellectual development of Claude Lévi-Strauss as discussed in chapter 6. In Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes discusses Jakobson in his sections “The Idiolect” and “Duplex Structures”. Barthes

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work on the language related disorder aphasia, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles”, Jakobson asserts that “[t]he development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or their contiguity.” 8 Jencks’s twin concepts are central to structuralist theorization from psycholinguistics to women’s fashion. 9 In “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles”, Jakobson argues that language fundamentally revolves around those stated axial extremes, gravitating to these pure significatory mechanisms — “association” and “opposition”, in Jencks’s terms. In subsequent works Jakobson extends this notion to the construction and analysis of written and spoken discourse more broadly. Jakobson argues that a fundamental bipolarity underwrites discourse. 10 He also asserts that unfortunately this often resolves into analyses that focus on only one dimension. He writes that, for example in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic “displacement” and synecdochic “condensation”) or on similarity (Freud’s “indentification and symbolism”). The principles underlying magic rites have been resolved by Frazer into two types: charms based on the laws of similarity and those founded on association by contiguity. The first … has been called “homeopathic” or “imitative”, and the second, “contagious magic”. 11

elaborates the terms paradigm and syntagm in relation to the architectural “system”: the paradigmatic relations are seen in the stylistic and formal selections of certain elements from a virtual catalogue of options; the syntagmatic relations are likened to sequences within an architectural experience – see Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London UK: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 61–63. For a more extensive account of this material, see Roman Jakobson, “Part II. Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Fundamentals of Language (S’Gravenhage NL: Mouton & Co., 1956), 55–82. 8. Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” in Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, edited by René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (Berlin DE: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), 42. See also Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok (London UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1960). Jakobson also mentions the terms “substitutive” and “predicative” (42). 9. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York US: Hill & Wang, 1983) : Système de la mode (Paris FR: Éditions du Seuil, 1967). 10. The notion of “discourse”, as opposed to the more stable basic system of language langue, underwrote the work of Émile Benveniste and Roland Barthes, and their movement from what might be termed structuralist to poststructuralist modes of analysis. 11. Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” 46. “Magic” will be discussed in chapter 6 in the contexts of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

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In Jakobson’s opinion, “[a] competition between both devices, metaphor and metonymy, is manifest in any social process.” 12 And in his assessment, the competition usually favours the former. He asserts a “rich literature on metaphor” has been established, largely within the romantic tradition; 13 but meanwhile, metonymy has evaded incisive and insightful scrutiny. This is despite what Jakobson deems as the “intimate” relation between metonymy and realism, and indeed between metonymy and prose in general. 14 Jakobson promotes functional analyses that include both conceptual poles, and can also manage the relation between the two. He positions his framework as having the potential to control an expansive socio-cultural field. While unstated, it is effectively onto this restructured ground that Jencks and Baird submit Meaning in Architecture. This thesis, too, builds from this configuration; but hopes to make its analytics more explicit. While syntagmatic and paradigmatic models are basic to semiology, and context and metaphor common enough tropes in architectural criticism, their use in architectural discourse was immature in 1969. While Jencks does not mention Jakobson — nor Roland Barthes, Émile Benveniste, or any other thinker associated with structuralism in this context — it is clear he is falling in line with the prevailing historical development. The section “ CONTEXT

AND METAPHOR ”

presents itself as attending to Jakobson’s programme.

Using Jakobson’s terms, the figures of “ CONTEXT

AND METAPHOR ”

can be given another

treatment. The sentences of “Degree of Surprise” detailed earlier can be positioned as tests of the process of meaning making, assessing word combinations gaining value syntagmatically; and the figure “Semantic Space of Current Architects” ostensibly rationalizes a selection of architects, revealing values that are paradigmatic. But as discussion below will reveal, Jencks’s conceptualizations include both this structuralist dimension — lending itself to assessments of the poetic function, as affected in this thesis — and romantic aspects in a vague and idiosyncratic ideological hybrid.

12. Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” 46. The “social” aspect of this conceptualization is hence foregrounded. This opens structuralism up to the investigations ranging from Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology to Julia Kristeva’s semanalysis. Kristeva’s definition of a “text” as “a translinguistic apparatus that redistributes the order of language, relating a communicative ‘parole’ aiming at direct information to different types of previous or synchronic utterances” — Kristeva, quoted in Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington US: Indiana University Press, 1995), 322 — is pertinent to this thesis. 13.

Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” 47.

14.

Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” 47.

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The previous chapter, “Duck–Rabbit–Thingummybob”, discussed Jencks’s desire to achieve a novel aspect of architecture. This current chapter will again show Jencks probing for another conceptualization of architecture. But rather than seeking an extra, previously unseen, and “radical” object, this discussion will study Jencks’s attempts at reaching a solution integrating two established intellectual fields. Central to discussion is Jencks’s contention that architectural theory should incorporate both “ MULTIVALENCE AND UNIVALENCE ”:

that it should include the central qualities of both “imaginative

works” like poetry, and those of “science”. 15 To gain traction on this material, this chapter follows Jencks’s referential connection not to structuralism, but to literary criticism and experimental psycholinguistics — beginning with the former.

5.3.

In her account of “The Early Critical Bases of the Critic Charles Jencks”,

Judith Brine spends a subchapter discussing how Jencks’s doctoral thesis, “Modern Architecture: The Tradition Since 1945”, is supported by the critical apparatus of I.A. Richards. 16 She spends several pages analysing Jencks’s key chapter, “A Theory of Value”, which was largely dropped for Jencks’s follow-up book, Modern Movements in Architecture. 17 According to Brine, Jencks “derives his theory of value directly from that of I.A. Richards.” 18 The key Richards text Brine refers to in assessing Jencks’s derivation is Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). She argues that Richards’s chapter on “The Imagination” is particularly relevant to Jencks’s critical position. Richards appropriates his concept of the Imagination from Samuel T. Coleridge. The romantic poet’s conceptual and philosophical apparatus for poetry is implicitly based on

15. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24. “ MULTIVALENCE AND UNIVALENCE ” is the title of the last section of the text, which itself contains no pictorial figures. 16. Judith Brine, “The Early Critical Bases of the Critic Charles Jencks,” in “The Nature of Public Appreciation of Architecture: A Theoretical Exposition and Three Case Studies” (PhD, Adelaide University, 1987), 320–328. 17. Brine, “The Early Critical Bases of the Critic Charles Jencks,” 323–328. Modern Movements was published in 1973. 18. Brine, “The Early Critical Bases of the Critic Charles Jencks,” 323. Brine examines the theory in fine detail in one of the thesis’s appendices – see “Appendix 9: The Work of I.A. Richards Pertaining to Jencks’ Criticism,” 149–190. As noted in chapter 3 and below in chapter 6, Jencks completed a major in English Literature at Harvard during the tenureship of Professor I.A. Richards. Jencks thus came to his studies in Architecture at Harvard GSD with this theoretical scaffold.

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a religious ideal, 19 setting up a dichotomy between Imagination and Fancy. In Coleridge on Imagination (1934), Richards quotes Coleridge’s definitions of the two. The former comes in two related parts. The primary Imagination is “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.” 20 The secondary Imagination might be understood as a less divine version of this godlike facility, being an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its operation[: i]t dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. 21 Opposed to these heavenly, romantic concepts, lies Fancy. Fancy is “indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of space and time; … it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice.” 22 Fancy is, for Coleridge and Richards, far more earthly and prosaic. Richards tells his reader that Imagination, both primary and secondary, is established in contradistinction to Fancy, “which collects and re-arranges, without re-making them, units of meaning already constituted by Imagination.” 23 Richards decrees that “[i]n Imagination the mind is growing; in Fancy it is merely reassembling products of its past creation.” 24 Coleridge’s elaboration of the twin concepts focuses on how richness of

19. According to Bender and Wellbery and Jay, this apparatus contributes to the project of displacing classical rhetoric – see John Bender and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, edited by John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford US: Stanford University Press, 1990), 19–21; and Paul Jay, Contingency Blues: The Search for Foundations in American Criticism (Madison US: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 144– 145. 20. Coleridge quoted in I.A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London UK: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1950), 57. Some capital letters removed for clarity. 21. removed.

Coleridge quoted in Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 57–58. Some capital letters

22.

Coleridge quoted in Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 58. Some capital letters removed.

23.

Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 59.

24. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 59. Anjani Kumar asserts “[i]n Imagination, the mind is growing, in Fancy it is merely reassembling the products of its own creation, stereotyped as objects.” – Anjani Kumar, “The Concept of Imagination in I.A. Richards,” in Perspectives on Criticism, edited by Mohit K. Ray (New Delhi IN: Atlantic, 2002), 54.

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meaning is produced. He argues that the words or units of language are affected by what he calls “mutual modification”. Channelling Coleridge, Richards contends [i]n Imagination the joint effect (worthless or not) ensues only through and after reciprocal stressing, one by another, of the parts as they develop together, so that, in the ideal case, all the possible characters of any part are elicited and a place found for them, consentaneous with the rest, in the whole response. 25 This kind of interactivity of parts within the whole Richards calls “interinanimation”. 26 According to Richards, Fancy does not present any such interactivity. In Fancy, only a limited and fixed selection of the possible characters (and thus the possible effects) of the parts are admitted into the process … [and thus] the final effect … ruthlessly excludes all but a limited number of interactions between the parts, setting strict frontiers of relevance about them. 27 Thus by these standards, interinanimation is the measure of the value of language use: Fancy is limited by its absence; Imagination enriched by its presence. Brine’s analysis finds the footprints of Coleridge and Richards in Jencks’s thesis chapter, especially in its key critical concepts, “multivalence” and “univalence”. 28 The link is not hidden: Jencks allows links to Coleridge and Richards in many of his texts. Indeed, Jencks explicitly draws Coleridge and I.A. Richards, 29 and “imagination” and “fancy”, into “Semiology and Architecture”, claiming “the distinction between …

25.

Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 92.

26. Richards defines interinanimation as the “full use of language takes its word, not as the repository of a single constant power but as a means by which the different powers it may exert in different situations are brought together and again with an interinanimating apposition” – I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1936), 85. While Richards is invested in the ideal of Basic English, he is not shy in following his intellectual mentor Coleridge in constructing awkward compounding neologisms. See Fred Shapiro, “Neologisms in Coleridge’s Notebooks,” Notes and Queries 32:3 (1985): 346–347. 27.

Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 91–92.

28. This dichotomy grounds Jencks’s Modern Movements in Architecture and continues to provide the basic premise for Jencks in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture and beyond. 29. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24. Jencks draws these two authors together in a rather confusing conflation. By writing “[a]s Coleridge and I.A. Richards have shown in the analyses of a few lines from Shakespeare …”, Jencks implies a kind of transhistorical co-authorship. The discussion above makes clear that Richards elaborates Coleridge.

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imagination and fancy, is one of the oldest in criticism and probably enters any critic’s language in synonymous terms.” 30 Marking the significance with conspicuously contrasting paradigmatic selections, Jencks suggests these twin concepts form the likely basis of criticism for “any sign system from Hamlet to French pastry.” 31 Jencks uses multivalence and univalence to present his fundamental rule of composition, and basic grounds for judgment: if the object has been created through an imaginative linkage of matrices … then it will be experienced as a multivalent whole. If, on the other hand, the object is the summation of past forms which remain independent, and where they are joined the linkage is weak, then it is experienced as univalent. 32 In effect, both “A Theory of Value” and “Semiology and Architecture” make a very simple analogy: good architecture is like good poetry; or, more accurately, a good piece of architecture is like a good poem, or croissant. The ideal of a complex, interinanimated whole is the standard against which works of culture should be judged. 33 Good architecture exercises the imagination; poor architecture is stale, and derivative, and resorts to the baser, less divine and un-interinanimated fancy. Good architecture is innovative and generates new ideas and potentials; poor architecture is regurgitative and relies on past ideas and formulae. Jencks claims [w]hen one sees an architecture which has been created with equal concern for form, function and technic, this ambiguity or tension creates a multivalent experience where one oscillates from meaning to meaning always finding further justification and depth. 34

30. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24. The ellipsis in this quotation hides the terms “multivalence” and “univalence”. 31.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24.

32.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24.

33. According to Jencks, “[m]ultivalence is of the greatest value in imaginative works and hence architecture” – Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24. 34. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24. The word “justification” is curious: some latent ideological position underwrites this choice.

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Simply, under Jencks’s “theory of value”, good architecture is imbued with “mutual modification” or “interinanimation”; and poor architecture is not. A strong case can be made for associating Richards’s imagination and Jencks’s multivalence with Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function of language: that functionality which directs attention upon the message, “projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination,” 35 and promotes the conditions for seeing paradigmatic units and syntagmatic arrangements as capable of mutual modification and complex interplay. The approach that Richards takes towards this interrelationship, however, forms a contrast with that taken by Jakobson. Coleridge– Richards’s Imagination involves metaphysics. As discussed in chapter 2 in relation to Friedrich Schlegel, romantic ideology is based on godlike valorization of creation. Notably for this thesis, both the personas of the Theorist and the Wit have links to romantic religiosity by virtue of their metaphysical roots. Jakobson’s structuralism, on the other hand, does not have such a ready metaphysical basis through which to relate textual constructs. It also has no equivalent to the concept of Fancy. While the analytics of Richards and Jakobson can thus be related, their acritical crossbreeding overlooks serious differences in referential meaning and significant aspects of discursivity. According to Jencks, both the architect and the reader of architecture are drawn into an interinanimative matrix. The former consciously or unconsciously assumes an oscillative, multivalent tension in designerly construction; and the latter in proper appreciation. 36 Good architects and sophisticated members of the public interacting with works of architecture might be likened to romantic poets, exercising their imagination to create genuine new works rather than merely indulging fancy. They look endlessly into architecture for complex meaning and networked richness. Viewed in the terms of this thesis, such a practice can be seen to rely on the recognition of poetic figures, and a subsequent engagement in connotative play. A shared appreciation of the ludic potential of matrixes of signification can be seen to link Jencks’s poet-architect with the authorial persona of the Wit.

35.

Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 358. Italics removed.

36. This kind of implied, creative construction of architecture in reading, supports Brine’s characterization of Jencks’s early critical work as the appreciation of an “amateur” – Brine, “The Early Critical Bases of the Critic Charles Jencks,” 318.

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But for Jencks, this rule of architecture does not extend over all of its aspects. “Semiology and Architecture” argues that the architectural theorist should not approximate a romantic poet, but rather should incorporate this kind of approach with another epitomized by the physical scientist. Jencks contends that the opposition of “science” and “enjoyment” is “completely false … since one can have both.” 37 Architectural theory should realize a third alternative. 38 Jencks’s concept of “theory” thus involves sober referentiality: a portion of the analysis should include “a fragmented, controlled separation” of pre-existing objects of knowledge pre-established in cultural codes 39 — or, in other words, referents. This “scientific” component involves transparent communications of information far removed from products imbued with the provocative spirit encouraged by interinanimation. But what Jencks does not specify is that these elements, to be distinguishing to the reader, must also resolve into reified forms: their transparency must become at some point opaque for “science” to reveal itself. Just as those overt products of Imagination within Jencks’s architectural theory model denote “multivalence” and help construct in text the authorial persona of the Wit, those aspects exemplifying Fancy and resulting in a characteristic “univalence” help construct the authorial figure of the Theorist. Jencks’s argument pertaining to “univalence” plays out in his elaboration of “Semantic Space of Current Architects”, that figure ostensibly figuring “association”. The associated section of the text — which supposedly communicates the support for this type of analysis, as well as providing an exemplar of “science” and offering the form of the “semantic space” model itself — becomes available through an act of reference: a proper naming of “[t]he behaviourist Charles Osgood (Measurement of Meaning)”. 40 The next two sections will tease out Jencks’s engagement with and use of Osgood’s name and model, and his concomitant placement of both univalence and association.

37.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24.

38. In a later article, Jencks offers an anecdote: “Being forced to accept a choice between two such ridiculous alternatives [like individual expression or social science] immediately reminded me of the Rabbi’s advice to his son: ‘Son, whenever faced with only two alternatives, always pick a third’” – Charles Jencks, “Rhetoric and Architecture,” AAQ 4:3 (July, 1972): 4. “Always pick a third” might be seen as the crux to Jencks’s position as rhetor. 39.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24.

40. The book is actually co-authored: Charles E. Osgood, George J. Suci and Percy H. Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana US: University of Illinois Press, 1957).

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5.4.

Charles E. Osgood developed the “semantic differential” (SD) methodology

with experiments in psycholinguistics from the 1940s to the 1970s. His aim was to quantify and rationalize what makes concepts meaningful. He describes his “original ‘vision’ of a concept-studded space” as the extension of vectors around “an origin or neutral point … defined as ‘meaningless’.” 41 In their direction (relative to established axes) and in their length (relative to each other and the limits of the space), the vectors indicate the quality and the strength of meaningfulness, respectively. As Osgood elaborates, this allows for the representation of two basic relations: two concepts might be of similar type but of different strength (his example pair is

ANNOYANCE – HATRED )

and be of similar direction but uneven length; or two concepts may be of similar strength but antonyms (his example,

GOD – DEVIL )

and hence be of equivalent length but opposite

direction. All locations are relative to the zero point of meaninglessness. In a process that is far too complex to give fine detail here, 42 Osgood and his assistants designed a methodology whereby concepts (e.g.,

FEATHER )

could be mapped in relation

to scales (e.g., high—low) by experimental subjects (e.g., undergraduate college students). The subjects “should be a representative cross-section of the general population.” 43 The scales are a carefully composed series of fifty polar adjectives “selected so as to be representative of the major dimensions along which meaningful processes vary.” 44 The scales are intended to cover all the components of meaning available to meaning-production while avoiding what Osgood nominates as the “chief danger” in their formulation: “that some a priori conceptions … would influence sampling.” 45 As evident in one list Osgood provides —

LADY , BOULDER , SIN , FATHER ,

41. Charles Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” in Focus on Meaning (Den Haag NL: Mouton, 1976), 5. Again there is some irony here: Jencks criticizes Hannes Meyer for claiming their design can be meaningless, but uses a model developed around this concept. 42. As noted in Chapter 1 of this thesis, architectural theorist Robert G. Hershberger pursued Osgood’s methodology in his PhD thesis “A Study of Meaning in Architecture” (University of Pennsylvania, 1969) and in several related articles. Hershberger’s studies are interesting, but contribute to constructing an us–versus–them scenario that positions architects in opposition to lay public. Such an opposition also plagues Jencks’s Post-Modernism in relation to double-coding – see Andrew P. Steen, “Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture,” Fabrications 25:1 (2015): 130–145 for more on this “elite” and “man-on-the-street” framework. 43. Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 14. College undergraduates are not exactly representative of the broader population, but they are easy to access, and are willing to undertake tedious processes for what they deem at the time is generous payment. 44.

Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 14.

45.

Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 14.

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LAKE , SYMPHONY , RUSSIAN , FEATHER , ME FIRE , BABY , FRAUD , GOD , PATRIOT , TORNADO , SWORD , MOTHER , STATUE , COP , AMERICA

bag.

46

— the concepts in this model constitute a mixed

For Osgood, “concepts presented a less critical problem, since [the] purpose was a

factor analysis of scales of judgment rather than of concepts.” 47 In short and crudely, concepts meant things: the goal was to theorize how they “come to ‘mean’ these things and not other things.” 48 Osgood sought results that established reliable patterns. 49 The fundamental goal was to quantitatively index meaning, and to thus understand how the meaning-making process functioned. 50 While the variances produced in the experiments could not be entirely accounted for — at some points 50 per cent remaining unexplained — results proved replicable. 51 Factors identified as Evaluative (e.g., good—bad), Potency-based (e.g., strong—weak), and Activity-based (e.g., fast—slow) were heavily loaded and important to the construction of meaning. 52 The fourth and any subsequent factors were deemed residual — i.e., not worth analysing. It is in this fashion that Osgood determined the easy-to-plot threedimensional “space”, with E+/E–, P+/P–, and A+/A– axes. Osgood et al’s most significant finding was unqualified: of the three factors, the evaluative was consistently dominant — and by a good margin. Evidence suggests “meaningful judgment” can be attributed to evaluation “for almost 70 per cent of the common (extracted) variance.” 53 That is, of the scales that contributed to variance, seven in ten were evaluative; or, simpler again, when something determined what something meant, most of the time it was based on a consideration of whether it was thought to be good or bad. To summarize Osgood’s SD method: (1) Osgood and his fellow researchers undertook a painstaking process designed to arrive at objective scales of measurement based on

46.

Notably, the shadow of the Cold War can be seen to creep over objectivity.

47.

Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 16.

48.

Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 6.

49. “[C]onfidence in the validity of a particular factor structure grows as this structure persistently reappears in replications of the analysis” – Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 15. 50.

Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning, 1–2.

51.

Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 21.

52. By 1973, Osgood was theorizing a link extending to Neanderthal Man: the scales of evaluation, potency and activity, he writes, relate a sabre-toothed tiger to an antelope, a mosquito, and a pool of quicksand, respectively – Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique,” 89. 53.

Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 38.

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affective features and avoiding a priori categories. (2) The effective multiplication of concepts by scales by experiment subjects produces a massive volume of data, in his exemplar, 20 x 50 x 100. (3) SD analysis is necessarily limited by the variables entered into the system: “in a real sense, you only can get out what you put in.” 54 (4) Evaluative factors were reliable as “the first dimension of the semantic space”: 55 evaluation consistently accounted for meaning. These four points structure the model upon which “Semantic Space of Current Architects” is based, though not the figure itself.

5.5.

According to Jencks’s description of Osgood, each individual has a complex

of interrelated ideations constituted “by the way metaphors relate one to another.” 56 The assessment is curious. Osgood does draw metaphor into his discussion of semantic relation. Experiments in the early 1940s by Henry Odbert, Theodore Karwoski, A.B. Eckerson, and others tested how stimuli processed through different senses register similar significances, or realize “cross-modality stimulus equivalence”. 57 Findings from these studies suggest that synaesthesia is a pronounced phenomenon of a general condition: concepts are arranged in parallel, so that, for example, “Wagner’s Rienzi Overture was judged exciting or vigorous in mood and predominantly red in color.” 58 These “metaphors” — Rienzi Overture, excitement/vigour, the colour red — would occupy a similar location in a given individual’s semantic space. But it is unclear how such an understanding of metaphor relates to “Semantic Space of Current Architects”, a figure that, as stated above, locates architects’ names in a three-dimensional volume. Jencks’s argument suggests the interrelationships significant to “Semantic Space of Current Architects” are between what Osgood terms “concepts”: “Yamasaki”, “Venturi”, “Moretti”, etc. Yet unlike

LADY , BOULDER , SIN , FATHER ,

etc., these interrelationships

gain significance from their difference, not their similarity. Jencks’s model may associate “Kahn” and “Van Eyck”, may spatialize them similarly, but the obviousness of

54.

Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 14.

55.

Osgood, “Semantic Differential Technique: Ethnocentrics,” 26.

56.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 22.

57. Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning, 21. Synaesthesia might be placed in opposition to the aphasic similarity disorder, and likened with the contiguity disorder. Synaesthesia, however, is generally regarded an advantage, not a disorder. 58. Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning, 21. It is notable that like Jakobson’s research, these experiments approached cognitive abnormality: synaesthesia and aphasia.

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their inclusion in a paradigmatic set — as “current architects” — intrudes on their ability to attain a metaphoric relation. In other words, these words come into the “semantic space” as reified linguistic units. Instead of “concepts”, they are “names”. Jencks attempts to explain his reference to Osgood’s SD model and justify its use as the base to his figure through an example from The Measurement of Meaning. This example helps express how Jencks’s model deviates from its referent. The “Semantic Analysis of Voters in the 1952 Presidential Election” study asked Republican voters to plot assessments of Dwight Eisenhower against polar oppositions using a seven-part gradation from “very good” to “very bad”. 59 Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum describe their figure as an illustration of “the descriptive and significance testing measures” of the experiments detailed above, “the main purposes [of which] were to describe with the semantic differential the meanings of political concepts to three groups of subjects assumed to have different political biases.” 60 These authors describe how their study assumed that [the] three groups would represent quite different political biases — specifically, that the Taft Republicans would be more pro-Republican than the Eisenhower Republicans, who in turn, of course, would be more Pro-Republican than the Stevenson voters. 61 Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum’s study charted the relative positions towards ideologies framed by party politics held by groups self-identifying with subsections of that political system. The figures representing the “Semantic Analysis of Voters in the 1952 Presidential Election” demonstrated these inherent predispositions. They reveal a correlation between ideologies and ideologues. On the whole, the meaningfulness revealed by Osgood’s studies is not used to deny natural forms of knowledge: indeed the studies can largely be seen as demonstrative of commonsense, presenting tacit facts. A comparison of the methodologies supporting Osgood et al’s and Jencks’s semantic space

59. Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning, 104–124. Assessments of Eisenhower were analyzed relative to assessments of more-conservative Republican Robert Taft and Democrat Adlai Stevenson. This scale is not entirely accurate. Scales used were: wise—foolish; dirty— clean; fair—unfair; safe—dangerous; strong—weak; deep—shallow; active—passive; cool—warm; relaxed—tense; and idealistic—realistic. These were factored into three basic oppositions: fair—unfair; strong—weak; and active—passive (107). Subjects were also asked to rate concepts like “Atom Bomb”, “Socialism” and “Stalin”. 60.

Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning, 104.

61.

Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning, 104.

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models and the supposed significance of their findings reveals just how far removed the two are in functional terms. The simplest aspect of the disparity between the semantic spaces of Jencks and Osgood is introduced by Jencks himself: the “pre-judice” of his figure. 62 Jencks here associates his prejudice with the aggregated bias of these 1952 election voters, implicitly proposing an analogy between his opinions of “current architects” and those opinions of the group of Republican voters in the “Semantic Analysis of Voters in the 1952 Presidential Election”. Such an analogy is misleading: the two datasets are not at all comparable. The Eisenhower group results, for example, are a representation of this voting block: the resultant plot-space can tell the reader how weak, passive, and unfair they think Harry S. Truman’s Policy in China was. On the other hand, Jencks’s placement of “Gibberd” as “–

FORM ”,

“–

FUNCTION ”,

and “–

TECHNIC ”

enters the semantic space and is reified as an

evaluation of Gibberd as a mediocre architect. The difference between ideological partiality and critical assessment is significant: Jencks is entirely in control of his judgment. A more thorough examination reveals deeper flaws in Jencks’s use of Osgood’s method and model. It is clear that the three axes used in Jencks’s figure were not arrived at after a measured and deliberative process. The triad of form, function, and technic or technique is, as Jencks himself states, “traditional”. 63 Throughout the modern-movement era it was retained as the basic framework for analysing architecture. Related to the Vitruvian trio of firmitas, utilitas and venustas — firmness, commodity, and delight — represented in the tradition looking to Leon Battista Alberti, the trinity can also be related to the categories of Aristotle’s logic, and C.S. Peirce’s subsequent categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness — ideas (venustas), actualities (firmitas), and laws (utilitas) respectively. Indeed this much-travelled threesome would almost without challenge present itself to any architectural theorist explicitly looking for a priori categories. Rather than following Osgood and avoiding the stumbling block of preexisting categories, Jencks actively adopts them: he bases his space on a priori.

62.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 23.

63.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24.

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While not engaged with in these terms, the issue of a priori was not lost on Jencks’s audience. Both Broadbent and Baird question the form–function–technic framework in the margins of “Semiology and Architecture”. Broadbent critiques the ineffectuality of Jencks’s methodology, claiming [i]n fact buildings, architects, even briefing information on activities, can be plotted very successfully within Osgood’s three dimensions of evaluation, potency and activity with much less foregone conclusions than Jencks’s form, function and technic would impose. 64 Baird’s objections are less detailed, and more political. In a comment not directly addressing “The Semantic Space” but nevertheless keying into its scales, he laments “form, function and technique” … seem … hopelessly overworked, and intellectually exhausted. I don’t want to see the tedious and gratuitous warfare among them to be fought out all over again within architectural semiology. 65 Despite these critiques delivered in the published margins of the chapter, Jencks remains unapologetic of his argument’s usage of what is essentially cliché. This significant detail will be returned to below. In addition to its reproduction of a priori, “Semantic Space of Current Architects” lacks scale and calibration. The figure presents as data the assessments of one critic, Charles Jencks, who positions twenty-three names within three axes. There is never any suggestion of objective measures — of, for example, the use of a seven-increment grade, i.e., –

FORM

: : : : : : +

FORM .

It seems likely that the names are located at least

equally if not more strongly in relation to the other names in the graph, rather than to the axes or zero point. 66 64. Broadbent, in “Semiology and Architecture,” 24. Broadbent also correctly asserts that Osgood “would not plot buildings … against a scale of plain/decorated, which describes specific, physical characteristics, but he might use friendly/unfriendly, which can only be applied to buildings metaphorically.” 65.

Baird, in “Semiology and Architecture,” 17.

66. The issues inherent in the exercise come into stark relief when one wonders what, precisely, might be placed at or near zero. The question of what might be convincingly nominated as neutral architectural form remains unanswered; and, as discussed in chapter 2, Jencks himself denies rhetorical claims to deliver neutral forms by Hannes Meyer. At the other end of the scale, there is no scientific basis for which, for example, Le Corbusier is positioned almost at the positive extreme of some broader scale of

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This issue reveals a difference in process between Jencks and Osgood. Rather than being a representation of data generated by scientific procedure, Jencks is constructing a semantic space as a graphic form; rather than allowing a graph to form as the product of controlled experimentation, he is locating names amongst other names within axes. As such, Jencks is risking two negative effects Osgood explicitly warns against: the halo effect — where one judgment casts its glow upon another — relative to space; and the anchoring effect — where the order in which subjects make judgments unduly links these judgments 67 — relative to time or process. “Semantic Space of Current Architects” does not demonstrate a semantic differential or scale a semantic space. The plot is less an investigation of any existing space, and more an exercise in spatializing. The concepts being spatialized are the proper names of so-called current architects. In short, in his space: (1) Jencks uses the most banal and definitively a priori scales available; (2) Jencks’s data set is ostensibly 23 x 3 x 1, but if the primary relationships are understood to be made within names rather than against the scales, and the process of graphing is understood to be linear (placing names one after another) that number is reduced to 23 x 1 x 1; (3) Jencks puts in twenty-three names and gets twenty-three locations, each relative — likely in the halo of and anchored to — twenty-two others and the highly contentious meaningless architect or architecture; and (4) Jencks cannot find that evaluative factors are most significant as he is trying to display a plurality of ways in which an architect can be + or –, thereby disregarding Osgood’s quantitative factorization entirely. When added to the basic fact that Jencks’s list of twenty-three is patently far too small to be representative, “Semantic Space of Current Architects” effectively reverses the semantic differential technique. Evaluative factors are

FORM: how he ranks as exceptional. At the same time, there is no reason why Le Corbusier, if he is judged by Jencks as quite superlative, is not at the extreme positive: why there is any latent space at all. Even starting from the assumption that Jencks is indulging in an evaluative program rather than undertaking a process that realizes quantified indexes, the system resists internal logic. In short, it is arbitrary. 67. “When a subject has been judging a set of relatively light weights, the judgment of ‘neutral’ tends to shift toward the middle range of the set, and if a relatively heavy weight is inserted, it is now judged ‘heavy’ where it ordinarily would not be” – Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, The Meaning of Meaning, 84.

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implicated in the very scales of “ FORM ”, “ FUNCTION ” and “ TECHNIC ”. The figure is not scientific but merely scientistic. Its univalent capacity is realized in parody. 68

5.6.

The analysis above gives a damning assessment of the referential functioning

of “Semantic Space of Current Architects”. But such failings do not compromise the poetic function of this section of the text. In fact such acts of misappropriation and poor translation help direct attention towards the message, and reveal the figures constructed within the text. Jencks himself registers the ascendancy of the message over the content in his repetition of the key word “frozen”: by his assessment, the goal of Osgood’s model is to create a “frozen map of an individual’s attitudes and the relation between them”; 69 and in his characterization of his figure as an embodiment of his own “frozen … prejudice”, 70 Jencks formally mimics this objective. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The poetic function of the figure affects all levels of its discursivity. In its array of “current architects”, it isolates linguistic units in a structure, populating the text with proper names. “Semantic Space of Current Architects” is a representation of criticism — that kind of criticism that assesses the present to predict the future. In this Jencks follows Alfred H. Barr’s well-known diagram of “Cubism and Abstract Art” (1936). The figure also prepares the ground for Jencks’s own “Structural Diagram 1920–2000”, his renowned “Evolutionary Tree” diagram of Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods, 71 and his many subsequent Evolutionary Trees, including the one in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). These figures proliferate names, and use classifications and axes to control these names. The amoeboid forms in the trees that group architects and movements together in an architectural soup might to the romantic be seen to approximate interinanimation, or to the structuralist suggest the equivalence of paradigmatic and syntagmatic elements within architectural discourse. The formal

68 . “Parody … is a form of imitation, but imitation characterised by ironic inversion” – Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The teachings of twentieth-century art forms (New York US: Methuen, 1985), 6. 69. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 23. This seems an especially apt metaphor for this Cold-War-era example. 70.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 24.

71. Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods (London UK: Studio Vista, 1971), 40; 46–47. Jencks first publication using this trope is Charles Jencks, “The Evolutionary Tree,” AD (October, 1970): 527. Jencks uses Evolutionary Tree diagrams throughout his oeuvre to describe Modern, Late-Modern, Post-Modern architecture.

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complexity of the figures helps construct in these texts the Theorist “Jencks”; the names of architects become signs planted to colonize a vast territory of ideological and aesthetic meanings and qualities. In its elaboration of methodology too, “Semantic Space of Current Architects” acts to make opaque the discursive act of theoretical composition. Jencks boldly states his justification for the figure: “I have plotted a semantic space for certain architects, not because my judgment is important, but because a critical consensus is formed through such overlapping of many semantic spaces and mine was the only one available at the moment.” 72 Jencks’s presentation distances the figure from the model of singular authorship. In framing the figure in this manner, Jencks avoids positioning himself as a critic inherently sanctioned to construct representations of relative value, whether they be in the form of a semantic space or otherwise. He further democratizes this critical landscape, implying many other spaces are required to realize a fuller picture. There is no indication that knowledge, repute, or discernment is necessary for such subsequent critics. Anyone, apparently, might add his or her opinion. 73 Pushed to this extreme, the scenario seems untenable. The justification is also characterized by a writing tone best described as flippant. It is difficult to accept that Jencks’s judgment “was the only one available” if the reader expects the transparent communication of referential function. The contrived rhetoric justifying his exercise of judgment is heightened by the “objections” Jencks voices against his pictorial figure: [w]hy just the three traditional polar terms (form, function and technic)? We should all know there are simply no rules or standards for good architecture, and all I have done is frozen my own prejudice and as if this were not bad enough, had the naivety to make it clear. These objections — which he deems “obvious” 74 — might be conceptualized through the classical rhetorical strategies of prolepsis or hypophora. Jencks appears to empathize

72.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 23.

73 . Such an approach is comparable to the representative sampling model of experimental psychology, but as there is no evidence that Jencks made any attempts to strengthen his data set, this is merely an unsubstantiated analogue. 74.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 23.

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with the reader. This thick rhetorical act is far removed from transparent communication. Again, the referential function is dominated by the poetic function. Yet if this section of text is taken not as a communication of ideas but as a provocation of affect, its meaning becomes clear. The persona of the Wit constructed around the “Semantic Space of Current Architects” realizes a textual product approaching parody. The figuration of the Wit around “Semantic Space of Current Architects” distances it from Osgood’s Measurement of Meaning. While Jencks claims the pictorial figure embodies scientific univalence, those aspects of the text that resolve into the Wit construct serve to distance this section of the text from clear reference. The re-figuring evades both re-arranging and re-making, and hence avoids association with both Fancy and Imagination. The significance of “Semantic Space of Current Architects” rests on the blatant formal importation of a reified psycholinguistics model into architectural discourse. Any connection of the figure to empirical positivism is superficial: the closer it gets to “science”, the more it is verified as a productive scientism. 75 This basic finding can be extended across the binding to the other figure in the spread.

5.7.

There is a specificity and precision in the form of “Degree of Surprise” that

encourages the reader to view it as being rigorously organized and testable; to focus on the denotative level of communication; to try to absorb the discrete and calculable quanta of information it presents: to read the form as functioning referentially. But as discussion below will reveal, the sentences its form charts with peaked and dipped lines terminally subvert this process. For the sake of argument here, the effect of the opaque forms and poetic functioning of the figure will be deferred for as long as possible. In his written elaboration of the first figure of “ CONTEXT

AND METAPHOR ”,

Jencks admits

its key element is a “quasi-ridiculous sentence”. 76 The quasi-ridiculousness of the sentence is a bold and provocative arousal of connotation; and within the contexts of a theoretical presentation, an exhibition of the materiality of the text as discursive object.

75. The deficiencies in Jencks’s “scientific” analysis of architecture are brought into high contrast when placed in relation to Benveniste’s description of “the effort to submit linguistics to rigorous methods and to banish from it mere approximations, subjective constructions, and philosophical a prioriism” – Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 14. Jencks’s method is far from rigorous, and his model can be banished on all three counts. 76.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 21.

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As conspicuously as the image of Claudia Cardinale in chapter 2, the “quasi-ridiculous” sentence constructs in the text the persona of the Wit. While this section of the text is coloured by this overpowering demonstration of poetic function, Jencks nevertheless perseveres with an argument based on the figure’s referentiality. Jencks defines the underlying rule to his theoretical position as: “the amount of meaning conveyed by a message is proportional to the unexpectancy of its occurrence in a context. 77 Or, to put it differently, the more a message is expected the less its information.” 78 Again, while this is not acknowledged in the text, Jencks’s demonstration here is in keeping with Jakobson’s theory of poetics, particularly that aspect related to “frustrated expectation”. 79 The axial patterns of language establish bases against which discrepancies and convergences become significant. Jencks’s apparent yet unacknowledged appropriation of Jakobson again implies parody. Jencks presents his primary sentence as being assembled fragment by fragment in a linear procedure. The goal is to demonstrate meaning realized in the syntagmatic axis. Jencks provides a narrative account to highlight this construction:

77. The basic problematic is strikingly similar to that within the theoretical work of Max Bense and Abraham A. Moles: “[a]ccording to [Max Bense’s information] theory, the products of the avantgarde, being radically new, highly improbable, and maximally surprising, turn out to be most informative aesthetically, but in their extreme also incomprehensible. And as these products become more common, by mass reproduction or increased familiarity, their information value declines to the point of losing any aesthetic appeal” – Klaus Krippendorff, The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design (Boca Raton US: CRC/Taylor & Francis, 2006), 303. See also Christoph Klütsch, “Information aesthetics and the Stuttgart School,” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early computing and the foundations of the Digital Arts, edited by Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley US: University of California Press, 2012). As mentioned in chapter 1, Bense taught at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm from 1953 to 1958. 78. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 21. Jencks elaborates the point by adding, “‘clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.’” This is an unreferenced quotation derived from Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, first published in 1950 and re-printed in 1954. The lack of citation is in itself an interesting demonstration: was Wiener’s book so popularly-established and commonplace that it was cliché, its use in the contexts of Jencks’s so-called semiology in architecture clichéd? Or on the contrary was the ambiguity of the reference, the fact that it was appropriated casually approximating a vague recollection or loose maxim, designed to be “poetic”? Dirk van den Heuvel tells his reader that the Smithsons use references causally “to point out their intellectual affinities, rather than rigorously reconceptualizing a political-philosophical discourse” – Dirk van den Heuvel, “Alison and Peter Smithson: A Brutalist Story Involving the House, the City and the Everyday (Plus a Couple of Other Things)” (PhD Thesis, TU Delft, 2013), 76. 79.

Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 363.

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Start with the word “Twiggy”. We expect something like a verb to follow: “is”. Then the words “as busty as” are not unexpected, all for reasons of sound, sense and syntax. We now have the highly probably beginning “Twiggy is as busty as …” which because of its probability and triteness amounts to something of a boring cliché. Suppose we add the word “Billy”. This is rather a surprise in terms of sense, but not in terms of grammar because we expect a noun and a rhyming noun at that. Then if we finish “Twiggy is as busty as Billy is lusty”, we’re rather shocked because the comparison is odd. 80 Some aspects of this presentation conform to the expectations of a reader expecting coherent argumentation. As the present tense form of “to be”, “is” is both a grammatically appropriate, and a statistically likely word to follow a proper noun. The “sound” portion of “Twiggy is as busty as” is not objectionable: a simple sibilant stream, stressed with assonance and consonance, follows the occlusive start. The syntax of this sentence fragment is also reasonably clear, offering a basic objectification — a relative yardstick. 81 The addition of “Billy” is routine enough judged by sound and syntax: as Jencks states, “Billy” rhymes with “Twiggy”; 82 and the paralleling of the names is a common pattern. 83 Syntactic and prosodic challenges are available; 84 but the referential function is, within these components, in control of the account. But these components are not the most significant aspect of the sentence. The syntagmatic construction is dominated by Jencks’s initial name choice, “Twiggy”. Jencks provides no context with which to approach this moniker. Indeed “Semiology and Architecture” does not provide a single opportunity for a signification of this name to

80.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 21.

81. The sentence to this point might in fact be represented as a simple — and “univalent” — mathematical equation representing equivalence: i.e., x (i.e., Twiggy’s bustiness) ~ y; or perhaps x ! y — where y is yet to be provided. 82. See Robert Abernathy, “Rhymes, Non-Rhymes, and Anti-Rhymes,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Den Haag NL: Mouton, 1967), 1–14, for an interesting discussion, which may be applied to this couple and that of “Twiggy” and “crashing” discussed below. 83. Indeed the acceptability of the syntax of the syntagm to this point is suggested by its logical coherence. “Billy” might complete the sentence. Rather than a comparison, or an analogy, the reader might understand a simple standardized measure: “Twiggy is as busty as Billy” — i.e., assuming Billy is male, Twiggy is as busty as a male. Of course Billy might be short for Wilhelmina, in which case the sentence is even more straightforward – i.e., a direct measure within the same paradigmatic set. 84. Why is another name more expected than an inanimate object? If the purpose was to generate a rhyme, why not use “Peggy” or “Iggy”?

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arise by virtue of a relation of contiguity. Neither does it include an image. Fortunately, even forty-five years later, the name is not obscure. Twiggy was one of the world’s first supermodels. She was crowned “The Face of ’66” by the Daily Mail. She is a Golden Globe-winning actress; 85 and more recently a judge on America’s Next Top Model. The lack of contextualization in “Semiology and Architecture” is nevertheless striking. Jencks effectively positions Twiggy as a kind of default referent, an ostensible conventional form in architectural discourse. This is exceedingly notable: Jencks is framing a waif-like figure from popular culture with a doe-eyed expression and fake eyelashes inspired by porcelain dolls as a norm within architectural discourse. The 1950s avant-gardism of the Independent Group — epitomized in Marilyn Monroe’s inclusion in the Smithsons’ famed yet unsuccessful Golden Lane competition entry, 86 and Richard Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker’s This is Tomorrow exhibition — is according to Jencks now supposedly typical. Pop culture has integrated into late-1960s architecture culture to such a degree that it is now commonsense. The so-called “sense” relation between “Twiggy” and “as busty as” is also far from the “unexpected” coupling Jencks claims. It is, in fact, extremely complex. Twiggy was famously non-busty, her nickname referencing her stick-like physique, of which she once quipped “it’s not what you’d call a figure, is it?” 87 For Jencks writing in 1969, the sense of Twiggy’s boyish body was well established: her flat-chestedness in comparison with, for example, the IG’s muse Marilyn Monroe, this dissertation’s chapter 2’s Cardinale, or chapter 4 Archigram’s Instant Citizen Sharon Tate — the androgynous look that made Twiggy stand out from other pop icons — was “not unexpected”. 88 Without doubt, Twiggy was entirely established in a cultural niche in 1969, and her pop phenomenon had reached a level of cultural saturation: there were Twiggy dresses and coat hangers, designed by Twiggy; Twiggy Board Game by Milton Bradley; Twiggy 85. See Twiggy’s official website, “Biography,” TWiGGY, accessed 10 June, 2015, http://www.twiggylawson.co.uk/biography.html. 86 . Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio avoiding the paparazzi were foregrounded in a street in the sky in this Smithsons work. 87. Quoted in Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London UK: Routledge, 2003), 82, amongst numerous other sources. 88 . Using similar logic, the same might have been said for her girlish attitude; her charming inelegance; her giggly demeanour; her unsophisticated disposition; her working class northwest London identity; or her fashion forwardness.

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Barbie Doll, Binder, Treasure Box, and Fashion Tote Bag by Mattel; Twiggy Lunch Box and Twiggy Thermos by Aladdin; Twiggy Paper Dolls by Whitman; Twiggy False Eye Lashes by Yardley; Twiggy Tights by Hampton Trimfit; Twiggy Dress Up Kit by Colorforms; and even Twiggy Pen by Scripto. 89 There was, by that date, simply nothing new about her as a fashion symbol. 90 Nevertheless, Jencks’s claim that “Twiggy is as busty as …” is more than “expected” but “highly probable” to the point of being “trite” and “something of a boring cliché” overwhelms any referential function assessment. 91

5.8.

Using “Twiggy” to fashion a bust-related figure is linguistically conspicuous.

While Twiggy might have been a boring cultural cliché in 1969, her name carried a recognizable significance, and still does. “Twiggy” prompts the reader given a command of mid-‘60s pop culture references to insert the interpretation, “i.e., not very” or “so: hardly at all then” after “Twiggy is as busty as” as a kind of semantic connector; and to prepare themselves for another minimal or negative expression as the succeeding clause. Whether one is expecting to compare within or across paradigm or type, the expected compound sentence is one suggestive of a lack. It is less an intellectual or communicational function, and more the formation of affectivity: the onset of a desire. Twiggy’s unpronounced bust may not provide a solid reference upon which to realize a transparent communication of architectural theory — to reflect Fancy — but it serves very well to establish a cultural reference point upon which Imagination can be built. The obviousness of this extra-referential, poetic, linguistic unit transforms the text. Theoretical argumentation — the model cultural operation that transparently communicates the ideas of a lucid author to an ideal reader — is displaced by its poetic functioning. The nature of this structuralist “poetry”, its contrarian tone and juxtapositional mode, constructs in this section of the text the authorial figure of the Wit. Just as the images of Claudia Cardinale and Esquire ironized “Three Uses of a Bicycle Seat”, so too the mere name “Twiggy” ironizes “Degree of Surprise”. This evaluation of the potency of linguistic units — their functional equivalence to pictorial

89.

“Fashion,” TWiGGY, accessed 10 June, 2015, http://www.twiggylawson.co.uk/fashion.html.

90. Jencks’s assessment of Twiggy and her bust — and we might extend the characterization to her whole figure — can be seen as quite prescient: Twiggy quit modelling in 1970. 91.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 21.

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elements — is a significant finding of this thesis, and one to be pressed further in chapter 6’s investigation of “Levi-Strauss”. The second name of the first sentence within “Degree of Surprise” is far less notable. It is indeed a highly generic and everyday pet name. Yet according to Jencks’s presentation, in the context of the sentence, “Billy” is “rather a surprise”: this one word supposedly disrupts expectations, and extinguishes the “boring cliché” of Twiggy. 92 The dominance of this section of the text by the authorial construct of the persona of the Wit might lead the compliant reader to react to the name with the question, “Billy who?” But this is a subtle effect in comparison to the culmination of the syntagm. “Billy” gains a predicate adjective: he is — or perhaps, is decidedly not — “lusty”: filled with lust. The curious selection of lust from its paradigmatic set is not discussed. 93 Again one of the most vivid, conspicuous, mannered, amplified, and juxtapositional units of the textual construction is overlooked as a functional determinant. The Wit construct offers the absurdist seme like an in-joke told behind a straight face, a subtle wink discernable to those in the know. The boldness of “lusty” is unadulterated. Despite the obvious corruption of the referential function by the name “Twiggy”, her “busty”-ness, and the generic male’s “lusty”-ness, Jencks continues building his ostensible theory. He claims that when the sentence is finalized, the reader will recognize its strangeness. Granted, it is difficult to see on what grounds the breast dimensions of “Twiggy” — perhaps measured by bra cup size — might be related to the degree to which Billy is “lusty” — perhaps measured qualitatively by Rorschach tests, or quantitatively as an indexed factor analysis of the answers given to questions related to sex by Billy and a random but representative sample. There is no scientific basis to the analogy. To express Twiggy’s bustiness or Billy’s lustiness factually, the best methods would be measurement — i.e., Twiggy wears 28AA; Billy sits below the fifth percentile — and not an analogous comparison. This all of course flies in the face of the obvious,

92. After this presentation of semantic “surprise”, it is notable that the addition of “is lusty” is not isolated and analyzed by Jencks. While, as we have seen, George Baird was writing about “‘La Dimension Amoureuse’ in Architecture”, Jencks is adding a degree of eroticism to architectural discourse, and normalizing it within its broader context. 93. As seen in the focus on Claudia Cardinale’s “seat” in chapter 1, Jencks is not shy in drawing upon sex ironically.

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poetic reading of the syntagm that would have elicited associations of bizarreness from its very first word, and solidified the affect of absurdity by its last.

5.9.

According to the now-compromised argument, during the course of Jencks’s

first syntagm, the expectations of the hypothetical reader are raised by cliché, and then collapsed as they are forced to try to assimilate the new and odd pieces of information. A graphic representation of the supposed shock the oddness in the sentence realizes is presented by a line graph that, charting the probability of the sentence, climbs its way up to “… as”; but then comes down abruptly as it reaches the unexpected “Billy”; climbs again through the expected verb “is”; and despite the rhyme with “busty”, plummets further when it comes to rest on “lusty”. The second sentence takes an even more dramatic plunge when instead of “Billy” it comes to “crashing”, thus removing rhyme and parallelism, as well as adding more vagueness in terms of grammar and meaning. With the addition of the patently incongruous “is spring”, the graph plotting the real-time “Probability”/“Information” of the syntagm is left closer to the latter. It is a unique and nonsensical formulation. The referential function’s display of absurdity contributes to Jencks’s so-called semiological theory: the figure gains argumentative strength with the second sentence. Within this poetic construction lies a solid argument. “Degree of Surprise” is effectively a commentary on opacity. Despite the standard connotation, the downward movements of the graph do not represent a fall in esteem or value. The figure indicates a word’s im“Probability” in terms of grammatical and semantic expectancy results in “Information”. Rather than a collection of linguistic units making an expected but unchallenging cliché, the units become disaggregated, making a complex dataset that requires processing. Again in keeping with simplified Jakobsonian poetic theory, 94 Jencks effectively argues that the less a linguistic object is expected in a set context, the more the reader will pay attention to it, and the more thought it will require and potentially provoke. In other words, the more focus is drawn to the message, the more content it will contain and transmit; and in the terms of this thesis, the more poetic it will become. Romantic poetry

94. See Linda R. Waugh, “The Poetic Function in the Theory of Roman Jakobson,” Poetics Today 2:18 (Autumn, 1980): 57–82; and Tzvetan Todorov, “Structuralism and Literature,” in Approaches to Poetics, edited by Seymour Chatman (New York US: Columbia University Press, 1973).

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and structuralist poetry are thus highly compatible. But for this fact to be revealed a transparent communication of references is required. Yet, again in this section, the referential function of the text and its simple argument is overthrown by material aspects of the message. Jencks’s elaboration of “Degree of Surprise” contains a wilfully provocative construction. When he states that “information, or great poetry, always hovers on the edge of total incomprehensibility,” he forces into the text an outlandish synonym: 95 “great poetry” judged in the contexts of Richards and Coleridge cannot easily be equated with “information” understood in the contexts of empirical psycholinguistics. This perverseness is exacerbated when, after he suggests there is a threshold at which the unexpectedness of linguistic form rather than increasing “Information” actually interferes with the transmission of content, Jencks encapsulates the paradox with a quotation from Jean Cocteau. The inclusion of the Frivolous Prince — painter, poet, set designer, novelist, playwright, critic, and writer and director of films such as La Belle et la Bête, 1946 — is highly conspicuous, and his aphoristic quotation — “[t]act is knowing how far too far you can go” 96 — goads the reader into making an aesthetic and non-critical reaction.

5.10.

“Degree of Surprise” models a structuralist theory of language that is entirely

in keeping with this thesis’s framework. It is representative of the unreferenced structuralist, Jakobson. When stripped of its opaque syntagms and its scientistic axes, the relationship between “Probability” and “Information” can be seen as a demonstration of the interplay between the referential and the poetic functions. Operations of reference, like works of Fancy, rely on pre-existing and pre-established units of meaning; and the category of the most resolved of these is cliché. One the other hand, the affects of poetry, as products of the Imagination, produces new material, new figures. This kind of poetic tension between “Probability” and “Information” underwrites Jencks’s critique of Modern Architecture and his presentation of its Post-Modern successor in Modern Movements in Architecture and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. It underwrites the “radically schizophrenic” make-up Jencks lauds in the

95.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 21.

96.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 22.

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latter. 97 The poetic writings of Jencks might be seen as part of a concerted effort to affect a re-boot of the avant-garde project: to reinstate a feeling if not a landscape of expectancy; to re-establish some clichés against which to generate information. The axis joining “Probability” and “Information” should not, however, be taken to conceptualize the relation of the twin personas lying within the written text of “Semiology and Architecture”. Both the “Theorist” and “Wit” are constructs of “Information”: they are mannered figures far removed from the transparency-dependent utility of “Probability”. The landscape of names within “Semantic Space of Current Architects” also has a poetic function. Within the three-dimensional volume, clichés are both rife and hidden in plain sight: most glaringly in the form of the a priori triumvirate of “ FORM ”, “ FUNCTION ”, and “ TECHNIC ”; but more subtly and insidiously, in names such as “Corbusier”, “Mies”, “Eames” and “Kahn”. “Modern Architecture” as a whole discursive object is positioned as an “exhausted” cliché; as is structuralism for those readers who can supply their own key references. 98 It seems inevitable that any authors mediating this cliché-ridden territory become clichés. The palpable textuality of the names — both “Twiggy” and “Fuller” et al — helps construct a discursive formation that resolves “Jencks” into the authorial figures of the Theorist and the Wit. The striking key here is that, though in “ CONTEXT

AND METAPHOR ”

— and in “Semiology

and Architecture” more broadly — Jencks is arguing badly about the poetic function of architectural theory discourse, this does not mean that the text is not an excellent resource on this subject. Perhaps most surprisingly, the chapter is itself a demonstration of poetic functioning. It is not transparent about its characterization of “Information”: indeed it is intentionally opaque, using conspicuous names, terms, and references without adequately defining them; it is sharply mannered, employing a string of conceits that are, if judged by a so-called critical reader, highly tactless. And this very quality, which again can be framed as hidden in plain sight, is its greatest asset. The clichés of “Twiggy” and the a priori terms of “form”, “function”, and “technic” dominate the text around “Degree of Surprise” and “Semantic Space of Current

97. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London UK: Academy Editions, 1978), 24. See Steen, “Radical Eclecticism and Post-Modern Architecture,” 130–145 for more on the basis to this schizophrenia. 98 .

Such as Jakobson; or Lévi-Strauss, as per the next chapter.

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Architects” with their heavy irony. The clichés in a sense limit the text, rendering its textuality as an admixture of pre-existent units; but they also allow for interinanimation between their recognizable forms. The next chapter, this thesis’s conclusion, will return to this finding in relation to Jencks’s own constitution as an architectural author. Before reaching that point, however, it will push this thesis’s pursuit of the names within “Semiology and Architecture” to the extreme.

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6. LANGUAGE USES, LANGUAGE ABUSES 6.1.

Throughout “Semiology and Architecture”, 1 Charles Jencks encourages his

reader to see the inherent failings in natural or commonsense language use. In fact, he labels using “contractions” and “regarding words as parts of things” as “abuse” of language. 2 Jencks exemplifies this abuse with four caricatures: “the politicians’ cliché”; “the astronomer who said: ‘[w]hat guarantee have we that the planet regarded by astronomers as Uranus really is Uranus’”; the unnamed “architects who search for the essence of architecture” through whatever a priori categories or philosophical frameworks they favour; and the archetypal “aesthetician who scoured the British Museum looking for what by definition all the objects must have in common: ‘beauty’.” 3 These four exemplars all fail to understand the limitations of reference, and — either through naive ambiguity or conscious manipulation — reinforce the erroneous idea that words can equal things without noise or surplus, thereby promoting denotation. Yet this thesis has argued that Jencks is regularly guilty of just this kind of practice of linguistic naturalism. The preceding pages have been filled with evidence demonstrating how Jencks’s figures — his images, diagrams, and graphs, ostensibly included in “Semiology and Architecture” to give pictorial elaboration to the written language — lead the text away from the chimera of transparently communicated ideas and toward the evocative effects of linguistic opacity, particularly in the forms of proper names. The chapters to this point have revealed how, within “Semiology and Architecture”, simple referential functioning repeatedly gives way to poetic functioning; and the pictorial figures of the text — which reify the formal presence of the message — construct the authorial figures of the Theorist and the Wit. This final chapter, the ultimate chapter of this thesis, will directly attend to the functioning of Jencks’s words. Rather than being based on figures separate from the written body of “Semiology and Architecture” as with chapters 2 to 5, this concluding chapter will take the mode of analysis to its extreme by figuring a single, isolated 1. Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 10–25. 2.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

3. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14. As seen in chapter 5, Jencks himself is guilty of using the a priori categories of form, function, and technic/que.

signifier from the linguistic stream. The poetic function of the text and the construction of the Theorist and Wit personas within the text will be studied through one semic unit: one sign. The chapter will extend its analysis into discursive objects following semiology in Jencks’s body of works: Adhocism: The Case of Improvisation (1972), and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). It will thus, by its conclusion, include sections with both historical and theoretical ambitions and significance. The referential base to the section of “Semiology and Architecture” under consideration — the problem against which Jencks’s argument is set — is what he calls “the scientists’ hypostatization of concepts.” 4 To hypostatize is to treat something that is not a substance as a substance. 5 Hypostatization is nearly synonymous with reification, the hardening of an abstract concept or idea into a real or material object. 6 Both terms express a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. While it is not always the case, both Jencks’s hypostatization and this thesis’s reification see these aformal things resolved into linguistic forms — signs, semes, names. If the poetic function of “Semiology and Architecture” is recognized as significant, and the text understood to reify its figures and linguistic forms, it follows that Jencks is arguing with himself: within his text, he is both installing signs and objects of language into architectural theory discourse, and loosening the grip words have on things. It is a problematical process, and one that brings Jencks’s offhand mention of “the Cretan Liar Paradox” 7 — i.e., this sentence is false — into sharp relief. Following his four abusive caricatures — the politician, the astronomer, the aesthetician, and the architect — Jencks includes one final example to characterize what he calls the “power of signs”. 8 According to him it is “[p]erhaps the most convincing example”: “that of the shaman cited by Levi-Strauss.” 9 This last hyphenated word (Fig. 6a) — incorrectly rendered without the accent aigu in “Lévi-Strauss”, thus in tension with the Frenchlanguage referent, and more tangibly graphic as an object — will be the focus of this 4.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

5. “hypostatize, v.,” OED Online, March 2015, Oxford University Press, accessed 13 May, 2015, www.oed.com/view/Entry/90567?redirectedFrom=hypostatization. 6. “reification, n.,” OED Online, March 2015, Oxford University Press, accessed 25 May, 2015, www.oed.com/view/Entry/161512?redirectedFrom=reification&. Reification is preferred here due to its more neutral effect: its ability to avoid physical, substantial connotations. 7.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

8.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

9. Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14. This chapter will use the unaccented form – shown in Figure 6 – when referring to this sign.

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chapter. With the help of critic Reyner Banham, this figure of writing will help define the authorial constructs within “Semiology and Architecture”. It will also be shown to demonstrate the receptiveness of architectural theory to symbolic signs, particularly proper names; and framed as a preparation for another name: “Jencks”.

Figure 6a: “Levi-Strauss”.

6.2.

After invoking “Levi-Strauss”, Jencks presents a summary of his figural

structural anthropologist’s theoretical findings regarding the shaman. By the effective use of signs in a social situation the shaman can destroy another man without touching him: the sympathetic nervous system is upset, the blood pressure drops, food and drink are rejected, the capillary vessels become more permeable and the man dies without a trace of damage or lesions. All because a sign was effectively coordinated with a strong belief and social situation. Naturally most sign situations are less extreme than that of a sorcerer, but they are similar in theory and may even reach the same pitch as in religion, or on a mundane level, hypnotic trauma. 10 The mentions of the shaman and religion, damage and trauma, are not returned to or extended by Jencks in “Semiology and Architecture”. This single paragraph establishes the strength and authority of conventional language forms. It serves to render both the language forms of written architecture and the physical forms of designed architecture with the reifying power that comes from this conventionalism. Jencks’s argument suggests architecture works not through its conceptuality, but through its formality. 10.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14.

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While the contents of Jencks’s quotation are best characterized as a gloss, Jencks’s endnote does provide the source of this information: “Chapter IX” of Claude LéviStrauss’s Structural Anthropology (1963). Lévi-Strauss supplies his own reference in the introduction to this chapter, titled “The Sorcerer and His Magic”. He cites W.B. Cannon’s “‘Voodoo’ Death”, published in American Anthropologist in 1942. According to Lévi-Strauss, in this article, “Cannon show[s] that fear … is associated with a particularly intense activity of the sympathetic nervous system.” 11 Leaning on Cannon’s findings, Lévi-Strauss explains that while [t]his activity is ordinarily helpful, … if the individual cannot avail himself of any instinctive or acquired response to an extraordinary situation (or to one which he conceives of as such), the activity of the sympathetic nervous system becomes intensified and disorganized. 12 In other words, if the affected person cannot rationalize or systematize the feeling in their body for their own psyche, the intense activity disturbs their physical state. According to Lévi-Strauss, Cannon’s investigations reveal that the situation “may, sometimes within a few hours, lead to a decrease in the volume of blood and a concomitant drop in blood pressure, which result in irreparable damage to the circulatory organs.” 13 Lévi-Strauss continues, saying “[t]he rejection of food and drink, frequent among patients in the throes of intense anxiety, precipitates this process” of irreparable damage: “dehydration acts as a stimulus to the sympathetic nervous system, and the decrease in blood volume is accentuated by the growing permeability of the capillary vessels.” 14 The body, then, is effectively killing itself. The subject of “voodoo” sorcery, through the actions of his own physiology, is scaring him- or herself to death. Again, according to Lévi-Strauss’s précis of Cannon, “[t]hese hypotheses were confirmed by the

11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” in Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York US: Doubleday, 1967), 168. 12.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 168.

13.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 168.

14.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 168.

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study of several cases of trauma resulting from bombings, battle shock, and even surgical operations; death results, yet the autopsy reveals no lesions.” 15 Lévi-Strauss tells his reader that the shaman or voodoo sorcerer’s effectiveness — their ability to generate physiological effects through psychological mechanisms — largely depends on the socio-psychological structures of the society in question. In short, the efficacy of magic “implies a belief in magic.” 16 This climate of belief requires three “complementary” components: “the sorcerer’s belief in the effectiveness of his techniques”; “the patient’s or victim’s belief in the sorcerer’s powers”; and “the faith and expectations of the group … within which the relationship between sorcerer and bewitched is located and defined.” 17 Magic is “a consensual phenomenon” that requires a matrix of structural relations and social mechanisms. 18 In this dissertation, chapter 4’s interrogation of Archigram’s architecture has shown that, in like fashion, architecture’s institutional mental set may have less to do with factual reality or even visual identity, and more to do with generalized consent a desire to be bewitched or taken in. Later in “The Sorcerer and His Magic”, Lévi-Strauss recounts a story first told by Franz Boaz, the so-called father of American anthropology. Boaz writes of Quesalid, a member the Kwakiutl people indigenous to the Vancouver area of Canada. Quesalid was a sceptic: in the words of Lévi-Strauss, he was “[d]riven by curiosity about [his culture’s shamans’] tricks and by the desire to expose them.” 19 Disguising his scepticism, Quesalid was accepted into the shaman circle, taught empirical knowledge and sacred songs, instructed how to “simulate fainting and nervous fits” and induce vomiting, advised to use spies to “listen into private conversations and secretly convey to the shaman bits of information”, and, “[a]bove all”, told the key secret, the “ars magna” of the group: during rituals, the shaman keeps a small feather in his mouth, bites his tongue or makes his gums bleed, and at an opportune moment, extracts the bloodied feather. He then “presents it to his patient and the onlookers as the pathological foreign body”. 20 The Kwakiutl shaman is effectively saying to the afflicted person, the gathered crowd, and

15.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 168.

16.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 168.

17.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 168.

18.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 169.

19.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 175.

20.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 175.

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presumably to himself: “in this bloody mass is the source of your affliction; and with it extracted, you should be well again.” The account Lévi-Strauss gives of Quesalid is quite extensive. He writes of his eventual fidelity to the shaman’s code, and includes an interesting cross-cultural episode. Quesalid visits the neighbouring Koskimo, and witnesses their shamans using a different technique: “[i]nstead of spitting out the illness in the form of a ‘bloody worm’” — the ensanguined feather, secreted in the mouth of the shaman — “the Koskimo shamans merely spit a little saliva into their hands, and … dare to claim that this is ‘the sickness’.” 21 Quesalid is not convinced by this procedure. 22 One occasion during Quesalid’s stay with the Koskimo, the saliva technique for some reason fails to cure a patient. 23 Quesalid believes his magic can save the patient. The Koskimo allow him to use the Kwakiutl bloody worm technique on the ill Koskimo tribesperson. Whether due to some eccentric belief, some fear-related reaction, or some other contingent physiological factors, 24 Quesalid’s treatment works: the patient recovers. His success pours shame and discredit on the Koskimo shaman and his rites. 25 The “consensual” basis of the magical community is undermined. Jencks’s précis in “Semiology and Architecture” passes over some rich and significant details of his reference. This section of the text constructs neither the Theorist nor Wit persona with any strength. Jencks limits Lévi-Strauss’s account of “The Sorcerer and His Magic” in favour of simple, direct language. He reduces a complex theoretical description to a journalese rendition. He appropriates key technical terms — “sympathetic nervous system”, “blood pressure”, “capillary vessels”, “damage” and “lesions” — while condensing the amount of language and information. As a result, anthropological theory becomes a vaguely melodramatic anecdote. Most of the discursive functionality of the paragraph relies on the authority of the source — the name behind the example. 21. Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 176. In a “consensual” society, the bloodied feather–bloody worm signifier–signified pair is assured through fidelity to social codes. 22.

As we shall see, it follows that he is not alone in holding these doubts.

23. This failure may be the result of a lack of faith. It might also be due to the fact that no substantive procedure was carried out. 24.

It may just have been lucky timing.

25.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” 176.

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6.3

Thanks to his variant of anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s name is

practically synonymous with structuralism. 26 He literally wrote the book on the subdiscipline. In doing so he achieved two goals: he added “rigour and scientificity … to the soft belly of a social science still in its infancy”; and thus gave it institutional strength. 27 For a short time during the late 1950s and early 1960s, his version of anthropology superseded linguistics as the primary structuralist discipline. 28 This influence in the English-speaking world was delayed by translation: Structural Anthropology and Totemism were first published in English in 1963; and The Savage Mind followed in 1966. Through these books Lévi-Strauss positioned the original linguistic branch of structuralism as a mere training ground for its more complex anthropological successor. 29 His debt to semiology and linguistics is nonetheless significant, and secured by a set of historical contingencies. 30 Following the occupation by the Third Reich and the installation of the Vichy government in the French State, Lévi-Strauss, of Jewish heritage, fled France for Martinique. He eventually arrived in the United States to take a position at the New School in New York. There he met fellow exile Roman Jakobson, central figure in the Moscow, Prague, and Copenhagen Linguistic Circles, who was giving lectures in French on structural phonology. 31 Lévi-Strauss attended Jakobson’s lectures. His interaction with the linguistic concept of the phoneme led Lévi-Strauss to realize a potential “phonological revolution” available for anthropology. He believed that “Phonology [could not] help but play the same renovative role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, [had] played for all of the hard sciences.” 32 He set about

26. “[T]he [anthropologist] whose committed pursuit of the principles involved has most helped to attract the epithet ‘structuralist’ to his discipline, was the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss” – Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London UK: Routledge, 2003), 19–20. 27. François Dosse, History of Structuralism, translated by Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis US: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 24. 28.

Dosse, History of Structuralism, 23.

29.

Dosse, History of Structuralism, 23.

30. Lévi-Strauss did not hide this debt, in “his announcement in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1961 that he saw anthropology as part of semiology” – Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London UK: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1981), 31. In Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss refers to Nikolai Troubetzkoy as the “illustrious founder of structural linguistics” – Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology,” in Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York US: Doubleday, 1967), 31. 31.

Dosse, History of Structuralism, 12.

32.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Dosse, History of Structuralism, 21.

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appropriating the bases of phonological analysis, “virtually on a term for term basis,” for anthropological investigation. 33 The goal of Lévi-Strauss’s project, following that of phonology, is to find beneath the conscious world of disordered phenomena the relationships that allow meaning to emerge. He investigates cultural objects and events to draw conclusions about the basic structure upon which such objects and events are realized. Lévi-Strauss’s project reveals a link to his earlier influence Karl Marx: the belief in underlying structures of culture echoes the Marxist concept of the base to industrial society. 34 As Jonathan Culler explains, Lévi-Strauss believes “[i]f the meanings assigned to objects or actions are not purely random phenomena, then there must be a system of distinctions, categories, and operations to be described.” 35 Applying Jakobson’s phonemic framework to his own ends, Lévi-Strauss sought to reveal this system with a method based around the idea of binary pairs that “in their conjunction or opposition create meaning.” 36 These oppositions, in his theory, work to differentiate the cultural world and create meaning for social life. 37 Lévi-Strauss gives a concise definition of his structuralist methodology in the Totemism chapter “The Totemic Illusion”. 38 It involves three basic steps: “(1) define the phenomenon under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed; 39 (2) construct a table of possible permutations between these terms; (3) take this table as the

33.

Dosse, History of Structuralism, 21.

34. Lévi-Strauss was the secretary-general of the Federation of Socialist Students as a youth, though he soon thereafter became depoliticized, deciding against a practice that “enclose[s] political realities within the framework of formal ideas” – Dosse, History of Structuralism, 11. 35.

Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 25.

36.

Roger C. Poole, “Introduction,” in Totemism (London UK: Penguin, 1969), 12.

37. Thus, “[t]o describe [the] system would be to identify the oppositions which combine to differentiate the phenomena in question” – Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 28. 38. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, translated by Rodney Needham (London UK: Penguin, 1969); originally Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (Paris FR: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). 39. “The binary opposition is therefore at the outset a heuristic principle … We would ourselves be tempted to describe it as a technique for stimulating perception, when faced with a mass of apparently homogeneous data to which the mind and the eyes are numb: a way of forcing ourselves to perceive difference and identity in a wholly new language the very sounds of which we cannot yet distinguish from each other. It is a decoding or deciphering device, or alternatively, a technique of language learning” – Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton US: Princeton University Press, 1972), 113.

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general object of analysis.” 40 Analysis proceeds from these grounds. The underlying system consists of all possible combinations of the tabularized elements.41 In his 54-page introduction to the Penguin edition of Totemism, Roger C. Poole elaborates Lévi-Strauss’s three points. To (1) he adds [t]here will be no attempt to find out what such and such a totemic fact, taken in isolation, means, nor what it is trying to explain, nor what content it may have. We shall be interested in it only in so far as it has a place in the system, in which it is defined by its relations to other terms in the system. 42 With respect to (2), Poole asserts [r]eification is strenuously rejected from the beginning. We are not about to collect and arrange totemic “facts” as if they were coloured bricks, and build a new totemic castle out of them. At the end, we shall not only have a new totemic castle of our own, but we shall have destroyed all other castles. 43 Poole’s take on (3) stresses [w]hat is essential in a structuralist view of the world is the form, the internal coherence, how the thing hangs together. If no fact has a meaning in itself, and everything might be a significant part of the system we have to study, then even the minutest detail might be of critical importance, as in the detective novel. 44

40.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Totemic Illusion,” 84.

41. Lévi-Strauss, “The Totemic Illusion,” 84. This shows a development from knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seen in Linnaeus’s taxonomic system, in which the table incorporates all individuated things. Jencks attempts to leverage tables directly in his other chapter in Meaning in Architecture, “History as Myth”. Here he collapses architectural historiography, presenting a structuralist alternative for architectural chronicling. While these tables are relevant, this current discussion will continue to stay within “Semiology and Architecture”. 42.

Poole, “Introduction,” 30–31.

43. Poole, “Introduction,” 30–31. Indeed for Lévi-Strauss, “[t]he goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man but to dissolve him” – quoted in Culler, “In Pursuit of Signs,” 33; “To achieve what is real … one must repudiate, above all, that which has been lived, with the aim of reintegrating it in an objective synthesis drained of all sentimentality” – Lévi-Strauss quoted in Xavier Rubert de Ventos, “The Sociology of Semiology,” in Signs, Symbols, and Architecture, edited by Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt and Charles Jencks (Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), 179–180. 44.

Poole, “Introduction,” 31.

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The three-step process is thus highly scientific in character, yet integrated and focused on unconscious cultural relations that are not empirically observable. The structuralist method’s connection to the persona of the Theorist is evident: commonsense language understandings are cast as dead or due for destruction on moral grounds; 45 and the explanatory device or system that replaces these understandings is transcendental, holistic, and capable of installing an entirely new code. 46 The relation of structuralist anthropology to the persona of the Wit, on the other hand, is tenuous: no opportunity for playful conceits or linguistic gymnastics readily presents itself.

6.4.

The character of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist project is clarified in an analysis

of the Oedipus myth. According to his account, this myth has many cultural variants and “is well known to everyone.” 47 Lévi-Strauss’s Oedipus myth is different from Sigmund Freud’s famous complex: the structural anthropologist does accept Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, but only as one example of his more general phenomenon. 48 Where Freud sees a universal and settled narrative — what in “Desire and its Interpretation” Jacques Lacan calls “the primal murder of the father”, motivated by a desire to have sex with the mother 49 — Lévi-Strauss sees a structural representation of the “universal properties of the human mind.” 50

45 . The oppositional tone of Lévi-Strauss’s project is manifested most strongly in his extended attack on the then-existent theories of totemism: “Totemism is like hysteria, in that once we are persuaded to doubt that it is possible arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and to group them together as diagnostic signs of an illness, or of an objective institution, the symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation” – Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 69. 46. Jeffrey Mehlman characterizes this type of authorial construct as he asserts the “epistemological break” Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological predecessor Marcel Maus realized “involve[d] seeing nothing new … but everything anew” – Jeffrey Mehlman, “The ‘Floating Signifier’: From LéviStrauss to Lacan,” Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 21. 47. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 213. According to A.C. Goodson, “Lévi-Strauss’ account of Oedipus” is itself “well-known”: “[i]ntended to illustrate the structural method, it has come instead to exemplify its arbitrariness” – A.C. Goodson, “Oedipus Anthropologicus,” MLN 94:4 (May, 1979): 688. 48. Thomas A. Sebeok, Myth: A Symposium (Bloomington US: Indiana University Press, 1 st ed. nd 1956; 2 ed. 1965): 16. The paper was written for “Myth: A Symposium”, and originally published as Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore 68:270, “Myth: A Symposium” (October/December, 1955): 428–444. The issue was edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, the future long-time editor-in-chief of Semiotica. 49. Lacan in Markos Zafiropoulos, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or the Return to Freud (1951–57) (London UK: Karnac, 2010), 190 – from Lacan’s unpublished seminar. 50. Michael P. Carroll, “The Savage Bind: Lévi-Strauss, Myth Analysis and Anglophone Social Science,” Pacific Sociological Review 21:4 (October, 1978): 470. See also Robert C. Philen, “Reflections

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Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis of Oedipus bears a strong resemblance to the seminal work by Russian formalist Vladímir Propp, “Morphology of the Folktale” (1928), which breaks down all Russian folktales into 31 functional components. 51 The Oedipus story is reduced by Lévi-Strauss into eleven elements ordered into four columns. The columns express: “the overrating of blood relations”, “the underrating of blood relations”, “the denial of the autochthonous origin of man”, and “the persistence of the autochthonous origin of man”. 52 The columns thus form two pairs of symmetrical and inverted relations. Lévi-Strauss fills the columns of his Oedipus myth table with narrative elements. The elements in the columns can be read diachronically or synchronically. According to Lévi-Strauss, “to tell the myth, … disregard the columns and read the rows from left to right and from top to bottom”; but “to understand the myth, … disregard one half of the diachronic dimension (top to bottom) and read from left to right, column after column, each [column] being considered as a unit.” 53 Lévi-Strauss finds that all variants of the Oedipus myth “refer to difficulties in walking straight and standing upright.” 54 His interpretation suggests that the myth, in all its variants, is used to deal with “the inability, for a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous …, to find a satisfactory transition between this theory and

on Meaning and Myth: Claude Lévi-Strauss Revisited,” Anthropos 100:1 (2005): 221–228. Interestingly in Tristes Tropiques (1 st ed. 1955) Lévi-Strauss famously nominates Freud as one of “three mistresses” of his intellectual life. Such a nomination avoids alternate classifications as either mother or more likely father. 51. Vladímir Propp, “Morphology of the Folktale”, first published in Russian in 1928, and translated and published in English in 1958 and again in 1968 by Indian University and The American Folklore Society. Lévi-Strauss’s Oedipus myth can also be likened to the later work by Umberto Eco, “Narrative Structures in Fleming,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (London UK: Hutchinson, 1981), first published in Italian as “Le Strutture narrative in Fleming” in Il caso Bond, edited by O. Del Buono and U. Eco (Milano IT: Bompiani, 1965). Eco breaks James Bond stories down to nine structural events or actions. According to Eco’s analysis, the stories manifest some combination of: “(A) M moves and gives a task to Bond; (B) Villain moves and appears to Bond (perhaps in vicarious forms); (C) Bond moves and gives first check to Villain or Villain gives first check to Bond; (D) Woman moves and shows herself to Bond; (E) Bond takes Woman (possesses her or begins her seduction); (F) Villain captures Bond (with or without Woman, or at different moments); (G) Villain tortures Bond (with or without Woman); (H) Bond beats Villain (kills him, or kills his representative or helps at their killing); (I) Bond, convalescing, enjoys Woman, whom he then loses” (156). 52.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 215–216 – italics removed.

53.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 214.

54.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 216 – italics removed.

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the knowledge that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman.” 55 For Lévi-Strauss, Oedipus resolves a paradox lying deep in the collective subconscious into narrative form. The significance of Oedipus thus extends onto broad epistemological questions involving convention and creativity, association and lineage. This has implications for language use, in terms of communicational clarity as well as acts of eloquence, and for architecture, as discussed below. History shows Lévi-Strauss’s totalizing and abstract theoretical framework was a perfect vehicle for intellectual revolution. According to François Dosse’s historical account, the position of structuralism in France during the 1950s and 1960s was “without precedent”, enjoying “such widespread support … among … the intelligentsia that the resistance and minor objections put forth during what we can call the structuralist moment were simply moot.” 56 Structuralism was a force of “contestation and counterculture”, expressing “the rejection of traditional Western culture” and a search for “new” modes of intellectual action. 57 This was despite the fact that there was no coherence to structuralism as a mode of inquiry: no actual structuralist doctrine, so defined, was ever agreed upon. Nevertheless, structuralism is understood as the common first language of a generation of French scholars including Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. And all of these scholars shared a common father: Lévi-Strauss. 58 Twenty years later, in the academic contexts within which Jencks was writing “Semiology and Architecture”, Lévi-Strauss was a name in high circulation. Its decadeslong ascendancy in French-language theory had been stimulated by the more recent English translations. For those complicit in the discourse of structuralism, the name and associated techniques were used to approach many intellectual problems. Within Meaning in Architecture alone there are 19 positive references to the authority of LéviStrauss, contained within contributions by Jencks, Françoise Choay, Geoffrey

55.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 215.

56.

Dosse, History of Structuralism, xix. Dosse’s focus is France.

57.

Dosse, History of Structuralism, xx; xx.

58. Dosse, History of Structuralism, xxi. Other structuralists named by Dosse include Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Gérard Genette, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Michel Serres, Tzvetan Todorov and Jean-Pierre Vernant. – Dosse, History of Structuralism, xxiii–xxiv. It is ironic that Lévi-Strauss’s moniker holds such significance: when at the New School in New York, he was driven to modifying his name to Claude L. Strauss to avoid receiving orders for denim jeans – Dosse, History of Structuralism, 12. This nominal confusion extends to this day, when a search on Avery, the architectural database, returns about as many results for Claude Lévi-Strauss as for Levi Strauss & Co., purveyors of blue jeans since 1853.

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Broadbent, George Baird, Martin Pawley, Joseph Rykwert, and Alan Colquhoun. For example, in “Typology and Design Method”, Colquhoun supports his abstract approach to typology through a reference to Lévi-Strauss’s theorization of kinship. 59 A quotation from Lévi-Strauss stresses the arbitrariness of kinship systems, their distance from natural statements of fact, and thus natural language. Colquhoun rests on this quotation to argue against romanticized notions of architecture as originating in primitive huts and subsequently developing under the influence of technology. Like Jencks’s Adhocism, “Typology and Design Method” looks to renovate the position of the so-called savage mind in relation to design. But Lévi-Strauss was also a sign with which to focus criticism. In a scathing tone, the celebrated critic Banham writes the only original contribution [of structuralist discourse in architecture] seems to be the use of Lévi-Strauss as an external buttress to the academic/traditionalist position, instead of one of the earlier instant gurus who were conscripted for duty; older readers may remember how, five or six years ago, Karl Popper was employed by Stanford Anderson as a bulwark of the “Tradition that is not Trad, Dad”. 60 Banham even uses the name as the base for an awkward neologism: “Lévistrology”. 61 The term is reminiscent of “iconology”, discussed in chapter 4. It takes advantage of the insecure footings Panofksy saw in iconology’s association with astrology. In one word, Lévistrology eloquently exposes a lack of intellectual rigour, prompting thoughts of unscientific belief. It is a droll put-down directed at those who would cite and site the French structuralist in architectural writing. Yet the term’s prominent suffix suggests another reading: Lévistrology conjures a transcendent system of reason with which to derive meaning and knowledge. In this case, it is knowledge of the name, rendered here

59. Alan Colquhoun, “Typology and Design Method,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 268. 60. Reyner Banham, “The Architecture of Wampanoag,” 101. Popper is still being used by Jencks in “Semiology and Architecture” (21). Anderson’s use of “Dad” is an articulation of the Oedipal structure underwriting his work at the time. In the “Acknowledgements” section of Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2000), Anderson describes how he was awarded his PhD from Columbia University by Professors Edward Kaufmann and George Collins, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Robert Rosenblum, amidst the student unrest in 1968. The defence was heard in Collins’ apartment. Anderson “awaited the decision with Christiane Collins, seated on the marital bed” (vii). The scene prompts associations with the Freudian Oedipus. 61.

Banham, “The Architecture of Wampanoag,” 102. Note the correct accent aigu inclusion.

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“Lévi”. It is a subtly complex piece of nomenclature. As such, it is a term around whose contours the construction of authorial figures can be mapped.

6.5.

According to the theory passed down from Cannon and Lévi-Strauss to

Jencks, the power of the shaman comes from manipulations of language that are latent in specific social contexts. In “The Effectiveness of Symbols”, Lévi-Strauss tells his reader that sorcery is a relationship between symbol and thing symbolised, or, to use the terminology of linguists, between sign and meaning. The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed. 62 In other words, a “chaotic and inexpressible” situation becomes “ordered and intelligible” through a linguistic expression. 63 The shaman can exorcise an evil presence. The shaman names a cure. But, as stated above, in the contexts of criticizing so-called abuses of language, Jencks focuses the “Semiology and Architecture” reader’s mind on an opposing function. Dramatically, “[b]y the effective use of signs in a social situation”, Jencks’s shaman can kill “without a trace of damage or lesions.” 64 A pre-existent psychic state of vulnerability is pounced upon: a belief in supernatural powers and an unexpressed fear of death can cause death when a shaman utters an appropriate expression — supplies the right sign. A linguistic key turns to break open the subject’s usual defences. The shaman names an illness, even pronounces a death. Thus, while in anthropology, finding effective language forms can be either positive or negative, Jencks’s argument within “Semiology and Architecture” limits the process to the malevolence of the latter. His four caricatures of doublespeak are positioned as taking advantage of the inbuilt duplicity of language. The authorial figure of the persona

62.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” 198.

63.

Lévi-Strauss, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” 198.

64.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 14–15.

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of the Theorist is constructed with this characteristic self-righteousness: the corny politician, the baffling astronomer, the essentialist architect, and the naive aesthete are framed as trading off what others might pejoratively call rhetoric. They do not pronounce a cure for social ailments; they contribute to intellectual infirmness. Jencks’s argument is directed towards overcoming this condition. Yet, as with the figures of the previous chapters — the images, charts, and graphs — he uses a simplified form. In this case it is a contraction of a complex web of information into a supposedly representative piece of semic code. Jencks’s insertion of “Levi-Strauss” reduces a detailed account of a vast and rigorous study into a dramatic bite-sized image. Jencks is taking advantage of the ingrained practice of assigning a theory the name of its originator. The author of the text on shamanism is being used to stand for the information contained in that text and its preceding studies. In using “Levi-Strauss”, Jencks is reifying theory. The sign of the structuralist shaman is incanted, and fluid thought fixes on this form. 65

6.6.

In S/Z, Barthes stresses the significance of naming in textual functioning. He

declares: To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor. 66 Under Barthes’s argument, the very progression of the text “Sarrasine” depends on the capacity to find names. This is the base for his theory of the so-called classic novel. It is also the basis of logothesis in the broader discursive territories Barthes discusses in

65 . One might say that an inexpressible problem, a linguistic miasma, is set with a formula: in its culinary, though not medical sense, cured. 66. 11.

Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970), translated by Richard Miller (New York US: Hill & Wang, 1974),

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Sade/Fourier/Loyola, achieving “the lamination of a substructure; the writing reach[ing] a point at which it produces a new row of signifiers.” 67 This thesis suggests “architectural theory proper” 68 may function in a similar manner: “proper” may be best understood as proper names. The ability to condense nebulous ailments into articulable objects of discourse is a trait shared by shamans and Theorist persona constructs within architecture. 69 Psychic states unavailable to conscious interpretation are given form in proper names. When communicated to a consenting audience, these forms become neologisms, aphorisms, and, with time and use, clichés. Forerunning theoretical semes are razed, and successors are established in their place. The authorial figure of the Theorist thus takes on the social function of the shaman. Within the text, he or she takes an inexpressible, variable condition framed as an ailment and presents a settled, formal articulation, framed as a cure: a semic unit: a name. Both these actions rely on assuming words can act as parts of things — or indeed, if understood within the social world, on assuming words can be things. While structuralism rejects previous acts of reification, it engages in just this practice. The internal contradiction within “Semiology and Architecture” is part of a broader system. While linguistically Lévistrology is a portmanteau, discursively it is a contraction. Ironically, in describing an aspect of architectural theory, Banham’s pejorative gains rhetorical power in the very discourse to which it refers, through the very potential it critiques. The palpable irony contained in the word, however, disrupts its potential reification, leaving it rhetorically ambiguous. Its relation to knowledge is unsettled.

67 . Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, translated by Richard Miller (Baltimore US: Johns Hopkins University, 1997), 6. 68. Felicity D. Scott, “On the Counter-Design of Institutions: Emilio Ambasz’s Universitas Project at MoMA,” Grey Room 14 (Winter, 2004): 49. As quoted in chapter 1. 69. Umberto Eco contends architects in general act as shaman. “The visual practices (painting, sculpture) and the environmental practices (architecture, city planning) are in an extreme position: few people know how to draw and nobody knows how to build a house. In this field, people use the product of an unfamiliar skill. Technique is administered by the artist or by the technician, who acts as a shaman” – Umberto Eco, “Critical Essay,” The Universitas Project: Solutions for a Post-Technological Society, edited by Emilio Ambasz and Harriet Schoenholz Bee (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 103. This thesis suggests that the architectural practitioner’s ability to affect this mode is far less pronounced than the architectural writer due to the structural conditions of language and its poetic function.

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No such ambiguity is evident if Jencks’s use of “Levi-Strauss” is taken as the product of the authorial figure of the Theorist. Indeed, under these conditions, it is a model of Lévistrology. But Jencks’s figure of writing is not so one-dimensional. A subtle act of irony does intervene: the sign’s missing accent looms as a commentary on the resonance of the name in verbal communications. It also points to a distance between the textual products in translated English and original French. “Levi-Strauss” is a mention; a surname dropped without a given name or typological introduction. It reveals the propensity of architectural theory readers to take theory at face value, to faithfully attach meanings to conventional forms. This is particularly the case with proper names, which give “raw semic material” and thereby “complete” the text with a controlled allusiveness: a conventional, symbolic trimming. 70

6.7.

Whether intended or unintended, the subtle irony of the missing acute diacritic

is heightened by the excursive content that follows this chapter’s key figure. After his arguably Lévistrological “Levi-Strauss”, Jencks makes a series of assertions. The sentences that contain these assertions are conspicuously devoid of names. Nonetheless they bring extra-textual, biographical authors into focus; and with these authors, conventional historiographic accounts of authorship. While this section of Jencks’s text constructs the authorial figure of the Wit, it strongly connotes another myth lying within the discourse. Jencks brings this construct into his text; but Lévi-Strauss will help translate his narrative-based content into discursive positions for this discussion. As mentioned above, Jencks extends the potentials of shamanism to broader society. He claims that, though “[n]aturally most sign situations are less extreme than that of the sorcerer,” all sign situations are “similar in theory”, and some like religion and hypnosis “may even reach the same pitch” as sorcery. 71 What follows is very suggestive. Alongside the imagery of religious fervour and psychological disturbance, Jencks writes, “the nausea due to misunderstanding a language, the fear due to unfamiliarity with a style, the conflict of generations, are all mild examples of sign shock.” 72 The most

70.

Barthes, S/Z, 191.

71.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 15.

72.

Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture,” 15.

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telling element in the extended sentence is the third of three cases: “the conflict of generations”. Coupling sign shock with inter-generational conflict is provocative and polemical. Jencks’s presentation implies established yet ageing architectural writers are subjects of a shamanistic psycho-physiological disorder. They take on the preceding depictions: they are nauseous due to linguistic confusion; they are fearful of new styles. An irregularity is introduced into architectural discourse, and the older generation’s comfort is disrupted. Effectively, by including the generational conflict cliché, Jencks divides “them” from “us”. Jencks is trading off that conflict, mobilizing further waves of shock. While it is loaded with irony, the sign of semiology — “the theory of signs” 73 — is nevertheless implicated in traumatizing the older generation in general; and, most pointedly, his doctoral mentor Banham. By most accounts, the year preceding the publication of Meaning in Architecture — 1968 — was momentous. The architectural theory anthologies of Hays, Mallgrave, and Ockman all terminate or commence in this year. The intellectual lineage Jencks was developing under is positioned as being undermined by contingent happenings. Problems were being felt if not entirely well-articulated within (post)structuralist discourse. Channelling customary accounts, this might be called degeneration. Banham’s place within architectural culture is framed as particularly threatened. His faith in technology was being undermined by prevailing doubts about progress and modernity. While throughout his career his writing profited from witty embellishments, as the decades proceeded, his underlying premises, dependent on a secure ideological position, became vulnerable. The proper naming of the New Brutalism in 1955 — a semic tour de force — was not repeated. In the late 1960s, Banham was still producing the formless saliva of technology dependent un-houses. Some ailments suffered by his audience would not be remedied by this spell. The Koskimo readers were ready for a Kwakiutl bloody worm. Semiology or semiotics was indeed one such foreign body within architecture. Sign theory added apparent structure. And the symbol proved reasonably shocking: the histories written by Martin Krampen, Juan Pablo Bonta, Louis Martin, and Paul Walker

73. Charles Jencks, “Glossary of Semiological Terms,” in Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (London UK: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), 9.

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all portray a vibrant intellectual scene during the early to mid 1970s. 74 1972 saw the Symposium on Architecture, History and Theory of Signs in Castelldefels, and the International Semiotics Workshop at Ulm; 1973 the Colloque de sémiotique de l’architecture at the Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e Linguistica of Urbino; 1974 a “major conference of architectural semiotics” in Milan. 75 Walker adds 1972’s Universitas Project symposium, convened by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, into the semiotic tumult. 76 While architectural semiology was incoherent and somewhat delirious at this time, it was a happening scene. But this was not to last. The history written by Martin declares that “[a]fter 1976 the semiotic movement in architecture entered its negative phase, with the collapse of its epistemological program and the spreading influence of French ‘Structuralist’ critical theory.” 77 While Walker notes that “English-language publishing in the semiotics of architecture reaches a climax in 1979 and 1980 with the publication of no less than seven important works”, 78 evidence suggests this burst of activity is best considered the architectural semiology — or by then, “semiotics” — supernova.

74. Martin Krampen, “Survey on Current Work in Semiology of Architecture,” in A Semiotic Landscape: Proceedings of the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Milan, June 1974 : Panorama Sémiotique: Actes Du Premier Congrès De L’association Internationale De Sémiotique. Milan, Juin 1974, edited by Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (Den Haag NL: Mouton, 1979), 169–194; Juan Pablo Bonta, “Notes for a Theory of Meaning in Design,” in Signs, Symbols, and Architecture, edited by Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt and Charles Jencks (Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1980); Louis Martin, “The Search for a Theory of Architecture: Anglo-American Debates 1957–1976” (PhD Thesis, Princeton University, 2002), 676–706; Paul Walker, “Chapter 3. Semiotics and the Modernism of Architecture,” in “Semiotics and the Discourse of Architecture” (PhD Thesis, University of Auckland, 1987), 120–132, 150–172. 75. Krampen, “Survey of Current Work in Semiology of Architecture,” 179–180; Martin, “The Search for a Theory in Architecture,” 678–679. See also Charles Jencks, “The Architectural Sign,” in Signs, Symbols, and Architecture, edited by Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, and Charles Jencks (Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1980). The Milan conference was published as Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg eds., A Semiotic Landscape: Proceedings of the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Milan, June 1974 : Panorama Sémiotique: Actes Du Premier Congrès De L”association Internationale De Sémiotique. Milan, Juin 1974 (Den Haag NL: Mouton, 1979). According to Martin and Jencks, architectural semiotics was also a key topic at several meetings of the Environmental Design Research Association in the early 1970s. 76.

Walker, “Semiotics and the Discourse of Architecture,” 121.

77. Martin, “The Search for a Theory in Architecture,” 850. See Martin, 730–750, for a more in depth history of the decline. 78. “Juan Pablo Bonta’s Architecture and it Interpretation; Donald Preziosi’s Architecture, Language and Meaning and The Semiotics of the Built Environment; Martin Krampen’s Meaning in the Urban Environment …; Signs, Symbols, and Architecture (editors Broadbent, Bunt and Jencks) and Meaning and Behaviour in the Built Environment (Broadbent, Bunt and Llorens); and the English translation of Manfredo Tafuri’s Theories and History of Architecture” – Walker, “Semiotics and the Discourse of Architecture,” 121.

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Theories of signs continued to play a significant role in postmodern architectural theory. In explicit use, however, the stars of the “sign”, “semiotics”, and “semiology” had burned out. These are the tragic facts upon which standard histories are written. While often cast as one of its lead characters, Jencks is not by necessity bound to this tragedy. Indeed history suggests he was prepared for, if not complicit with, the downfall. 79 In 1972, Jencks had a new feather in his mouth, all prepared for tongue cutting. With coauthor Nathan Silver, Jencks published Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation. 80 This book, with its eponymous proper name, constructs a largely unrealized existential crisis. Jencks claims Today we are immersed in forces and ideas that hinder the fulfilment of human purposes; large corporations standardize and limit our choice; philosophies of behaviorism condition people to deny their potential freedom; “modern architecture” becomes the convention for “good taste” and an excuse to deny the plurality of actual needs. 81 His reply is immediate. But a new mode of direct action is emerging. The rebirth of a democratic mode and style where everyone can create his personal environment out of impersonal subsystems, whether they are new or old, modern or antique. By realizing his immediate needs, by combining ad hoc parts, the individual creates, sustains and transcends himself. 82 The authorial figure of the Theorist is constructed with this everyday philosophy. The language is less abstract and academic, and more political and do-it-yourself than in “Semiology and Architecture”. Jencks nevertheless suggests that, through a simple

79. In its ambitions to repackage and define an ailing discourse around “semiotics”, Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, and Charles Jencks eds., Signs, Symbols, and Architecture (Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), can be positioned as particularly collusive in this process. 80. Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (New York US: Doubleday, 1972). 81.

Jencks, Adhocism, 15.

82.

Jencks, Adhocism, 15.

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rearticulation of the environment that avoids the influence of multinationals, social conditioning, and “good taste”, a form of ascetic transcendence can be achieved. Springboarding off his use of “Levi-Strauss” in “Semiology and Architecture”, Jencks hitches the whole discursive enterprise of his half of Adhocism to the sign of French structuralism. This text is based on a more articulated version of “[t]he anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss”. 83 To this end Jencks includes a large quotation from The Savage Mind describing the character of the “bricoleur”. 84 This francophone term, with its aural echo of the romantically conventional masonry unit, attracts mythical connotations. According to the translator of The Savage Mind, “[t]he ‘bricoleur’ has no precise equivalent in English[: h]e is a man who undertakes odd jobs and is a Jack of all trades or a kind of professional do-it-yourself man.” 85 The closed universe of objects that forms the palette of the bricoleur’s practice might be related to the Independent Group’s philosophy of the “as found”. Anthropological concepts are key to the IG’s conceptual armature: group member Lawrence Alloway called for their practice to be an “anthropology of ourselves”. 86 This link remains latent in Adhocism; but the presence of IG member Banham in the surrounding discursive formation is highly significant.

6.8.

Critical architectural historians such as Marco Biraghi, K. Michael Hays,

Anthony Vidler, and Nigel Whiteley all highlight operative intergenerational relationships between male masters and apprentices. They stress the interpersonal relations between Banham and Jencks, Rykwert and Baird, Colin Rowe and Peter Eisenman, and so on. Anthropomorphized international relations between the United Kingdom and the United States of America may also be underscored in this mode. 87 It is a common pattern that is itself passed through generations.

83.

Jencks, Adhocism, 16. Note the correct, accented version of the name.

84. This is the first of a large number of extended quotations included in Adhocism by Jencks. The overall collage effect is in keeping with the “bricological” theory Jencks presents. 85.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London UK: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 16.

86. Lawrence Alloway, “The Independence Group and the Aesthetics of Plenty,” The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, edited by David Robbins (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 199). See also Catherine Spencer, “The Independent Group’s ‘Anthropology of Ourselves’,” Art History 35:2 (April, 2012): 314–335. 87. See Peter Eisenman, Peter Eisenman, “Building in Meaning. Book Review: Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird,” Architectural Forum 133 (July/August, 1970):

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Anyone looking for biographically articulated demonstrations of a Freudian Oedipal complex within architectural culture has vast reserves of ammunition. Banham alone provides two convincing examples. As noted in the introduction to this thesis, he asserted himself relative to his doctoral supervisor Nikolaus Pevsner. 88 Banham also held patricidal designs on Institute of Contemporary Arts co-founder Herbert Read. This opposition is palpable in Banham’s desire “to bury Sir Herbert under a book entitled Non-Art Not Now,” 89 a challenge to Read’s Art Now (1933). This thesis develops a characterization of author function Jencks based on a structural interpretation of intellectual history. But for those employing a psychoanalytic apparatus, Jencks himself is a good fit for the role of Oedipus. His father figures include Harvard English Literature Professor I.A. Richards; Harvard Graduate School of Design Dean Josep Lluís Sert; Harvard Graduate School of Design Lecturer Sigfried Giedion; and Bartlett Doctor of Philosophy supervisor Banham. All these authorities were to some degree followed; and, in time, largely defied. In charting his Historian of the Immediate Future, Whiteley refers to the playing out of the Banham–Jencks saga as “a form of apostolic succession.” 90 This phrasing is symptomatic of the still-prevailing man-andhis-work model in architectural historiography: pseudo-religious canonization of a proper name. To those predisposed to see such patterns, Adhocism provides strong evidence. While in “Semiology and Architecture” Jencks’s position relative to Banham might go unnoticed, the relation in the 1972 book is decisive. An extended Lévi-Strauss quotation in its first chapter emphasizes a distinction between the “bricoleur” and the “engineer”, the latter “always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a

88. More recently, Murray Fraser and Joe Kerr, Architecture and the “Special Relationship”: The American Influence on Post-War British Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007) have investigated the relationship from the other post-colonial perspective. The inferior position has moved. 88. This is emphasized in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge US: MIT Press, 2002), xiii. 89. Whiteley, Reyner Banham, 84. Given the history of noms de plume in architectural writing, particularly in the Architectural Review, it is surprising Banham did not pen a critique under the guise of George Speak. Perhaps at that stage he was still under parole. 90. Whiteley, Reyner Banham, xiii. Whiteley also stresses the father–son relation between Banham and Jencks on page 374.

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particular state of civilization.” 91 Jencks positions the engineer’s role as futile: he positions engineered components as expressive of a naive ideology. In keeping with the “seat” discussion of chapter 2 of this thesis, he presents each object as inevitably subject not only to negation but also to connotative extension. The functionalist project of engineering components to meet progressing needs is anathema to adhocist theory; and make-do improvisation is fundamentally contrastive to un-house promoter Banham. Indeed, viewed from the standard critical regime of architectural history, such an emphasis seems designed to provoke him. Banham duly responds. In an article titled “Bricologues a la Lanterne” written for the magazine New Society in 1976, he deems Jencks’s Lévi-Strauss quotation “a brilliant piece of selective editing from which the original meaning has been totally mislaid.” 92 This attack marks a decisive change of attitude. Where in Meaning in Architecture Banham determined the sign of “Lévistrology” enough to ward the French structural anthropologist off architectural terrain, the unease Adhocism caused brought from him a lengthier, and more direct — though very tardy — articulation. The article’s gothic graphic of a streetlamp suspending a noose provides a compelling representation of the spectacle. Banham’s pronouncement was delivered in a very public setting, in full view of the scandalmongers of architectural history. Banham’s anti-Adhocism tirade might be classified as a counter-attack responding to an attempted patricide: a former Enfant terrible, now matured, resisting what he perceives as a violent attack from his Enfant terrible offspring. But inter-generational friction is not a concern of this thesis. Rather than seeing a narrativized byplay between two scholars — both tragic figures, each holding a banner — it is possible and instructive to internalize the conflict within the text: to see Jencks’s writing as containing the presence of Banham, as responding to his doctoral supervisor’s apparatus and authorial persona.

6.9.

Banham’s response to Adhocism is almost Shakespearian: deliberate, cutting,

and pithy. While eloquent, it has none of the contrived casualness and gross amplification of the persona of the Wit described throughout this thesis. It is too

91.

Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Jencks, Adhocism, 16.

92.

Reyner Banham, “Bricologues a La Lanterne,” New Society (1 July, 1976): 25.

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considered, and delivers no pleasurable linguistic surprises. Yet, while the argument spotlights deficiencies in Jencks’s text, no “blind spots” are revealed. Its vengeful and hot-tempered manner is far from constructing the Theorist persona. Rather than realizing the authorial figure of the Theorist or the Wit, Banham’s prickly attack draws attention to both language and knowledge in a concerted fashion. This is characteristic of his writing, the primary function and genre of which is not theory, but criticism. Banham’s critical apparatus mixes conceptual theses with linguistic embellishment into a seamless whole. His settled attitude — gruff and uncompromising, yet stylish and playful, like an architectural Raymond Chandler — and his unswerving, almost primitive belief in the modern project, make him a target easy to caricature, and even to parody. His blunt and supposedly non-ideological concepts are vulnerable to semiological derision: easy to portray as naive. Jencks’s isolation of the “entirely radical” within “Semiology and Architecture” — and, in even greater graphic clarity within the figure “The Major Historians” in his other chapter in Meaning in Architecture, “History as Myth” 93 — is a case in point. Banham’s discursive directness might profitably be found to be his own eventual historical undoing. The seamlessness of Banham’s writing is not ambiguous, but rather vigorous: his language forms construct a spirited, hybrid entity. The rhetoricality of his texts is not fractured, but involved. Using the framework from chapter 4 of this thesis, Banham might be categorized a “historiancritic”. 94 Using the terms from chapter 5, his writing might be deemed interinanimated and Imaginative. Banham did not launch a revolution in architectural writing. He did not realize in text a novel author construct, but rather developed the pre-existing figure of the historiancritic, animated in the preceding decades by Pevsner, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, J.M. Richards and others at the Architectural Review. As an established and trusted persona within many cultural fields, the historiancritic is allowed acts of eloquence and moments of genius. The role is licensed to present speculative interpretations and forecasts; to guide through the present and lead into the future. Linguistic capacity is understood as part of the historiancritic’s intellect, both in reading and in communicating. Such a role might 93.

Jencks, “History as Myth,” 256.

94. The neologism “histic” is a possible alternative, but its phonetic similarity to “mystic” draws uncontrolled connotations.

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be premised on an acritical acceptance of language; but the historiancritic’s audience, like that of Barthes’s literature discussed in chapter 2, willingly overlooks this flaw to gain the Imaginative payoff. Jencks’s body of works — particularly his PhD “Modern Architecture: The Tradition Since 1945” and the follow-up book Modern Movements in Architecture — suggest some desire to emulate Banham, and follow the tradition of the historiancritic. But Jencks appears beset by an anxiety of influence. 95 His meta-level readings indirectly confront a fragmented architecture through underlying modes of engagement. An institutionalized Oedipus myth holds the historiancritic aspiration in tension with a desire to revolutionize the discursive formation. The result can be likened to Jencks’s conceptualization of Post-Modern architecture as expressing “a marked duality, a conscious schizophrenia”: 96 shaped by his structuralist environment, Jencks internalizes a basic authorial opposition, and presents signs — or symptoms — of each component. In “Semiology and Architecture”, Jencks refuses the role of the historiancritic, and proceeds subtextually to dissect Banham’s composite apparatus. Rather than adopting or adapting a dialectical position, developed over time in the tradition of architectural history and criticism, Jencks performs what might be termed an adhocist operation. He isolates concepts and language, develops each independently, and attempts to recombine them. Borrowing terms and strategies from both Banham and I.A. Richards, Jencks might be said to be approaching the position of the New New Critic. 97 When assessed through its referential function, the resultant janus-faced whole displays all the grace of Frankenstein’s monster. 98

95. See Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1973). 96. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London UK: Academy, 1978), 6. This description in itself is quite misleading: it conjures images of the commonly-held but erroneous “split-personality” diagnosis of schizophrenia. 97. More subtly, Jencks’s ideal position may be related to Barthes’s “new criticism” – see Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, translated by Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (London UK: Continuum, 2007), 1. 98. Despite Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York US: Penguin, 2009. 1e. Capitalisme et schizophré nie: l’anti-oedipe, 1972), schizophrenia continues to be defined and treated clinically classified as a mental disorder and illness with “chronic, severe, and disabling” effects – “Schizophrenia,” National Institute of Mental Health, accessed 27 February, 2105, www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/schizophrenia/index.shtml#pub11.

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Viewed from this perspective, a dazzling irony comes into view. It is indeed the underlying irony that generates the position of Jencks within architectural discourse. His theory in “Semiology and Architecture”, so explicitly concerned with language, undermines its own linguistic form’s ability to cohere through transparent communication into a solid argument. Reflexive attention directed at linguistic structure makes his text fracture into constituent units. A landscape of semes results from Jencks’s semiology. Jencks makes his own name by making “semiology” a proper name.

6.10.

The chapters of this thesis have exposed the deficiencies of argumentation

within its focal text. Chapter 2, “Bicycle Saddles”, saw Jencks implicate and challenge two established methodological and ideological alternatives, and advocate for a third. This third, however, was shown to be an incoherent other, overwhelmed by context. Chapter 3, “The Semiological Situation”, saw two intellectual and epistemological alternatives assimilated under the name “semiology”. But this object proved to be flawed; and Jencks’s attempts to use it to add complexity to interpretation were shown merely to corrupt the conceptualization of naming. The very discursive condition of opposition was brought into full contrast in “4. Duck–Rabbit–Thingummybob”. The chapter tracked Jencks’s attempts to show a way out of the dichotomy of conservatism and radicalism, and also showed his attempts to construct a new radical centre resulted in a counterproductive denial of ambiguity, and an establishment instead of vagueness. “Opposition and Association”, chapter 5, showed Jencks mounting an argument for a dualistic whole in which architectural theory was both science and poetry; yet again, due to interference resident within the text itself, his thesis was compromised, and the breakthrough object failed to reach solid ground. This chapter, addressing this issue of names within architectural theory writing directly by focusing on “Levi-Strauss”, has placed this issue in its broader context. It has proposed a structural genesis to Jencks’s text: an internalized Oedipal myth, expressed through an anxiety over the practice and objectives of writing within the established discursive formation. Jencks’s relation to history– criticism, and his desire to revolutionize architectural writing, thus resolves into a deconstruction and reconstruction of that existing conventional object, using the same parts in awkward collisions. The atomization of architectural discourse into a field of names can be seen as central to the success of Jencks as an architectural writer. The most successful manifestation of 207

this practice is his Evolutionary Tree model. 99 First published in 1970 and charting the six traditions of so-called Modern Architecture, Jencks has used the Tree model in many subsequent iterations to describe Late Modern, Post-Modern, as well as resurgent Modern architectural “movements”. The Evolutionary Trees are widely understood as spatializations of architectural discourse; but they are also more importantly and perhaps more insidiously a device for denaturing proper names and reifying concepts. However, assessing “Semiology and Architecture” on its argumentation alone neglects significant aspects of its discursive functioning. Indeed as the conspicuous presence of figures and names throughout the text promotes its own material substance and the poetic function gains supremacy over the referential function, standard theoretical critiques are reduced to marginal consequence. The reification of figures and names distorts the process of meaning production, and alters the nature of communication, heightening its “palpability”, and changing what is at stake in its textuality. 100 The overt use of the poetic function of language draws attention to the message of the text. It also draws attention to a more expansive message: the discourse at large. Characterizing the author of “Semiology and Architecture” — Jencks — through a single, stable persona — such as the Theorist, or the Wit; or indeed, given the dominance of the poetic function of the text, the Poet — misrepresents the multiple constructions within the text affected by the disruptive influence of its language forms. Such a portrayal would be as deficient as referring to an empirical person behind these facades. The text’s gravitational fields, set up around the concrete forms of the message, unhinge the voice of the text from the argument. The figures and names install a kind of ironized, Edenic language that serves to naturalize naive denotations into architectural discourse. “Jencks” becomes one of these names, whose sign value is separated from its referent. “Semiology and Architecture”, too, becomes yet another name, reified as a text.

99. As discussed in chapter 5, Jencks’s Evolutionary Tree model owes much to Alfred H. Barr’s diagram, “The Development of Abstract Art” (1936). Barr, MoMA founding Director, shaped the discourse of Modern art discourse with names in the main suffixed by “ism”. 100. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok (New York US: John Wiley & Sons, 1960), 356. Jencks’s Evolutionary Trees might thus be understood as grounded in the relation of words and things established within this dissertation’s central object. The figures of Charles Jencks, “Semiology and Architecture” uproot and yet make palpable architects, architecture, and architectural authors, leaving in their place linguistic forms, no less substantial, no less significant: palpable and pulpable.

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