Interpretation

Definition

Interpretation is the act of understanding meaning — a text, a work of art, a building — through an engagement that is never neutral or final but always situated in a horizon of tradition and prejudice. Gadamer's hermeneutics redefines interpretation from a method (rules for recovering the author's intention) into an event: the "fusion of horizons" in which the interpreter's own historically-conditioned perspective meets the work's, producing understanding that is always partial and always open. For architecture, interpretation is not an optional add-on to buildings but constitutive of them: buildings are "read" by inhabitants, critics, and historians, and their meanings are negotiated through these readings. Kidder emphasizes that "hermeneutics holds the promise of fundamentally altering the way one thinks about interpretation, understanding, and the communication of culture."

Key Thinkers

• Hans-Georg Gadamer — interpretation as an event of fusion of horizons, not a technique.
• Paul Kidder — the hermeneutic circle as "cumulatively productive"; interpretation in architectural practice and pedagogy.
• Martin Heidegger — interpretation grounded in Dasein's projective understanding ("as-structure").

Related Concepts

• Hermeneutics — the philosophical account of interpretation.
• Tradition — the effective-historical context that makes interpretation possible.
• Truth and Method — the claim that interpretative truth exceeds what method can capture.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Gadamer for Architects — interpretation, understanding, and the communication of culture.
• A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — interpretation as architectural criticism's constitutive project, and its fallibility: the Baker House "eludes the project of 'interpretation' that nominally guides architectural criticism," confronting "critics, again and again, with their own fallibility" (p. 65); vision as the interpretive sense's claimed mastery ("Vision is often associated with mastery and assumed (but ultimately failed) distance," p. 65); and interpretation's narrative engine — the unreadable interior produces "narrative suspense… It sets the stage for the final drama of the interior," culminating in the swimming-pool readings, "a place where criticism finds and flexes its own identity" (p. 67). Burns asks not what interpretation means but "what tasks it performs, what actions it enables" — a shift from hermeneutic truth to interpretive power. See power-and-space.