Symbolism

Definition

Symbolism is the mode of signification in which a sign relates to its object by convention, habit, or rule rather than by resemblance (icon) or causal connection (index). In Peirce's triadic semiotics, the symbol is the most sophisticated sign type — it depends on a community of interpreters and the "growth of signs" through use. In architecture, symbolism names the ways buildings carry meaning that is not inherent in their form but assigned by culture: the church steeple as symbol of sacred aspiration, the glass tower as symbol of corporate transparency. For Jencks, the architectural symbol becomes the "enigmatic signifier" — a form that gestures toward meaning without fixing it, which makes the building "iconic." For Sklair, symbolism is the ideological vehicle of the culture-ideology of consumerism: iconic architecture is "symbolic" in the service of capitalist hegemony. The tension between Peircean (pragmatic, indexical) and Saussurean (structuralist, conventional) accounts of symbolism runs through the wiki.

Key Thinkers

• Charles Sanders Peirce — the symbol as conventional sign; the growth of symbols through community.
• Charles Jencks — the "enigmatic signifier" as architectural symbol.
• Leslie Sklair — symbolism as ideological vehicle of consumerist hegemony.
• Robert Venturi — symbolism as communication; denotative vs connotative symbolism.
• Denise Scott Brown — commercial symbolism and signage.

Related Concepts

• Semiotics — the broader study of signs of which symbolism is one mode.
• Indexicality — the evidential, material sign that complements symbolism.
• Beauty — often conflated with the symbolic dimension of architecture.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Peirce for Architects — Peirce's triadic sign system and the symbol.
• source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas — denotative vs connotative symbolism; commercial symbolism.
• Salvador Dalí's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment (Weir 2018) — the symbol carried by architecture rather than a sign-vehicle: "the room fulfills Dalí's interpretation of the egg as a symbol of intrauterine paradise" — the Oval Room of the Port Lligat house as the egg-symbol's built realization (intrauterine-paradise). The chapter also shows the symbol's synecdochic work: the egg and lobster shells "present themselves as desirable objects" standing in for the soft interiors they conceal — the shell a synecdoche "for the grand desire to eat everything." Where Peirce's symbol lives in a community of interpreters, Dalí's egg-symbol lives in a room's geometry, furniture, and hidden door.
• Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the domestic symbol-system: Joan Kron's formula, quoted by Lawrence — "The furnishings of a home, the style of a house, and its landscape, are all part of a system – a system of symbols. And every item in the system has meaning. Some objects have personal meanings, some have social meanings which change over time! People understand this instinctively and they desire things, not for some mindless greed, but because things are necessary to communicate with… And what is truly remarkable is that we are able to comprehend and manipulate all the elements in this rich symbol system" (quoted p. 185). Where Jencks's symbol is the building's enigmatic signifier and Sklair's the icon's ideological vehicle, Kron's is the room's communicative tissue: the symbol system as the medium of domestic life itself, its social meanings changing over time — symbolism as the latent function of possession (see manifest-and-latent-functions, connotative-symbolism, semiotics).
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — symbolism's strongest functional definition and its non-semiotic deepening: the ornament that "appropriates the individual with the purpose of assigning a place in a social or cosmic order" (p. 316) — the symbol not as communication but as registration: the mark that assigns its bearer's place in an order ("It is the mark of socialization," p. 316); the "symbolic yield" the ornamental economy produces (p. 316); and the demotion of the visual — the ornament's meaning is not decoded from its form ("too decorative does not refer to a set of visually verifiable signs," p. 322) but conferred by the order it registers. On this reading symbolism's deepest architectural form is not the building's enigmatic signifier but the ornament's place-assignment — the symbol as the social order's writing on bodies and rooms. See ornamental-ground-plan, corporeal-inscription, dual-symbolic-classification.
• source-notes/baudrillard-2006-structures-of-atmosphere
• source-notes/hawthorne-2023-fifty-years-learning-from-las-vegas