Barthes Invitation to Urban Semiology | Urban Space Critics

13/12/01 23:57

Barthes Invitation to Urban Semiology

Friday was the day of meeting Roland Barthes. Before encountered only through some poor translations of his French manuscripts, today he came closer in a friendly presence. The first was of course the Eiffels Tower, who he gently describes (as quoted in AA files, 2/2012) as the one element he has in common with all his Paris friends. Indeed, it is everywhere. Following was the close reading of Semiology and the Urban found in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. by Neil Leach. (1997). Amazingly, for the first time Barthes appeared clear, straight to the point, and also somewhere on the common ground. In his text he makes an approach to convince, or better invite, planners and architects to take a look on the possibilities of converging the spheres of semiology and urban thinking. It might be the describing of himself as an amateur of semiology that makes the text so open and frankly inviting. After an overview of the current state of semiology, its possible application to urban planning is analysed. The latter criticized for the flattering of the city informative layers into a set of similarily assesed elements, while instead the city shall be constituted by strong and neutral elements, the marked and unmarked. Hence, signification is standing in opposition to objective (quantified) data, such as maps. Barthes invitation comes from his promise of making a scientific leap forward, once the speaking of the language of the city is conceived without the metaphoric sense of language. In order to achieve that, three hints might be helpful: - no more lexicons distinction has to be made between the paradigmatic nature, and the (traditional) semantic dimension of the symbol. The words should be understood rather as dynamically contextualized signifying vehicles rather than self contained packages of meaning. This route may lead to the usage of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture, - it is all of us who are the readers of the city and we have to learn its discourse. Inhttp://criticalurbanspace.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/barthes-invitation-to-urban-semiology/ Pgina 1 de 6

Barthes Invitation to Urban Semiology | Urban Space Critics

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vestogations on the micro scale of the everyday functioning of the city, framed by deep investigations on the macro level, expressed in writing should leed us to a common language of the urban, - the city is erotic. What brings the people together in a city is its erotics. Barthes stresses the broadest sense of the word, which may be replaced with the sociality of the city. Sociality, or, maybe social life of the city, again at the deepest sense of the words, describes the concealed excitement generated through the activity of purchasing (commercial) and meeting (other people), both connected to urban existence expressed mostly by the youth in the city. These deeply intuitive observations, or rather sensations, end up with the revelation of the meaning of water to the city. Not being a practicing city comparatist, Barthes consciously invites us to look at the structural deficiency of the cities lacking a generous access to water, water surfaces, or water flowing in any form. A list of Polish cities comes to the front: Warszawa, Krakw, Gda!sk the most important for Polish history, all located on the Vistula River or its epistuary; "d# the city with highest depopulation rate, does not have any visible river proper (only an ongoing discussion about how to bring back the streams dried by expanding industry); Wroc$aw the city promoted as the meeting place, benchmarked as the city of youth, is also the city of 100 bridges. About these ads In his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Charles Jencks traces the sources of semiotic analysis in architecture back to the 1960!s with the offspring of Post-Modern thought in other sciences influenced by the writings of Umberto Eco. Metaphor buidlings as physical images in space are read as messages. This implies their basic function as signs coded differently within different backgrounds. This means the same building may signify different things when read from an internet photo, and when read as confronted in space and including its cultural balast. An example of Kisho Kurokawas Nagakin Capsule Building serves as an example for Jencks it was a mere ammalgamate of washing machines, until he met the building aouthor who explained him that the guiding metaphor here were bird boxes as a response to the come-and-go character of the buildings users.

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Barthes Invitation to Urban Semiology | Urban Space Critics

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Metaphors apply the same to Post-Modern as to Modern buildings. The only difference is that the latter ones tend(ed) to deny this natural humane capability. The acceptance of fact that buildings are commonly read as metaphors, as Jencks strengthens, was a breaking point in many modern architects careers. Word the basic unit of a spoken language. Seeing architecture as a spatial language implies that its elements function as words, hence they have commonly understood definitions cliches. In so much as does a word have different meanings, do the architectural words change their meanings together with their application in different contexts. The crusade between traditional pitched roof and flat roof favoured by Modernists depicts tensions in understaning the architectural word transmitting safety and homeness. Semiotic groups as long as architecture has its clients and users, the users will divide themselves according to their tastes (Post-Modern acceptance of plurality). The divisions grow not only according to class culture (social and economic background), but more importantly to preferences of meaning which transgress classes. Therefore, semiotic groups and their preferred words (architectural cliches). The first time these different groups were addressed directly counts back to Venturis and Scott Browns exhibition Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City, 1976. For their bold exposing, though not necesarrily accepting the observed architectural languages, Jencks called them and their followers as the primitives of a new sensibility, a phrase borrowed from the Futurists. Syntax the acknowledgement of a possible logic of architecture, analogous to the language logics, drove the Post-Modern architecture into discussion of a possible architectural syntax. Hans Hollein, Robert Stern, Michael Graves were one of its first proponents, followed by Frank Gehry and Eric Moss. This path of discussion of an architectural grammar was accompanied by the writings of Jacques Derrida, and such sophisticated experiments as Peter Eisenmans House III in Connecticut (1971). Semantics of architecture are definately not the discovery of Post-Modernism. A Poststructuralist differentiation between a Doric, Ioninc and Corynthian column was the intuitive rule of their implementation in diverse buildings. It is Post-Modernism, however, that refreshed the importance of an architectural communication (through its final product building), which does not require an additional mediator between the architect and the user, as witnessed with some radically Modern realizations.
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Barthes Invitation to Urban Semiology | Urban Space Critics

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The Multi-use structure executed in Rome as early as 1965 by Passarelli brothers is the clearest example of how an architect could apply the building materials to concert with the function wrapped by them. The abolishment of the Modernist unity prevails, in order to address the users unimposed well-feeling. About these ads

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Like Loading... A successful entry to plenitude and emptiness, Symposium on Architectural Research by Design, University of Edinburgh, 4-6 October 2013: In the presented project I research the applicability of transculturation theory for the understanding of architectural practices in posttraumatic urban territories. With this goal transculturation processes between the post-German urban heritage and the contemporary architectural practices in Northern and Western Poland are studied with the use of architectural theory and case studies of existing and planned buildings. In the first decades after the Second World War in the territories gained by Poland from Germany the new socialist government attempted to deconstruct the acquired urban heritage through physical and propagandist actions which established the conditions for modernist urban planning that assimilated tabula rasa. On the level of cultural memory the concept of calculated amnesia explained the policy of ethnical clearances. As a precondition of a socialist utopia an aura of emptiness prevailed. In the following decades, however, the Zeitgeist changed in favor of plenitude. Postmodern critique and context awareness were thriving. The consequent liberation of information exchange by the system revolution of 1989 inclined the architects towards a palimpsest-like reading of space, which enabled the reconnection to the knowledge concealed in the layers of urban heritage. The resulting new generation of buildings restores the lost connections through a transcultural overcoming of both the emptiness of historical context and the modern plenitude of possible architectural interpretations.

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A glimpse on an example from Wroc$aw. The tension between the old and the new: the prewar German/Jewish heritage of the Wertheim department store (1929) and its contemporary expansion Renoma (2008) was mediated in an active way. The space in-between wrapped in bauhaus colors as a modern application of the language contemporary to the heritage building resulting in a thirdspace, an added value to the whole building complex. (design by http://www.mackow.pl) The research explores the ways contemporary architecture overcomes political barriers instilled in Northern and Western Poland. This overcoming is enabled through the generation of information from the once rejected urban heritage through the process of transculturation. Transculturation as a poststructuralist concept of a democratic cultural exchange was constructed against the hegemonic model of acculturation which assumed a one-direction, colonial-like exchange between cultures, rendering it unproductive and detached from reality. The abstracted concepts of emptiness and plenitude are contextualized through the concept of transculturation in the vocabulary of architectural design. There they can be seen as the boundary conditions of an architectural practice which can legitimize itself only through the recognition of these oppositional boundaries as foundations of the final design. The recognition of emptiness and plenitude is challenged as precondition for architectural truth.

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Barthes Invitation to Urban Semiology | Urban Space Critics

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A 45 minute presentation will follow during the symposium consisting of body of research work, case study analyses and maybe some Witkacys mantra as: it is not enough to exist simply, non-reflectively, passively, negatively, it is necessary to manifest ones existence more clearly, against the background of possible death and surrounding nothingness To my own surprise I already quoted those lines once while writing about the volcanic Yougyakarta. T.b.c. About these ads

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