Architectural Objects and Their Design as a Subject for Semiotic Studies

Author: Geoffrey Broadbent (Portsmouth Polytechnic, School of Architecture) Year: 1980 Source type: article Raw file: raw/articles/broadbent_1980-architectural-objects-semiotic-studies.md

The raw text carries the running header "DESIGN STUDIES", indicating publication in the journal Design Studies; the page numbers of the original are not preserved in the raw extract, so quotes below are given without page references. The article is a separate piece from Broadbent's 1980 anthology *Signs, Symbols, and Architecture* — a compact, self-contained exposition of the same programme (see Related source notes). Figures are at raw/images/broadbent-1980-figure-1.png through -4.png (Figure 1 the elaborated information channel; Figures 2–3 Chomskyan deep/surface structure; Figure 4 the semiological triangle).

Summary

Broadbent reviews "designed objects (here architectural products)" through Charles Morris's three-part division of semiotic — pragmatics, syntactics, semantics — built on the twin roots of Saussure's semiology and Peirce's semiotic. Pragmatics covers the multi-sensory reception of buildings (against language's single sensory dimension), the information-channel model, and the empirical meaning-measurement techniques (Semantic Differential, Repertory Grid) whose results he argues cannot be applied directly — you cannot build only the most-preferred form. Syntactics covers Chomsky's deep structures and the generative algorithms of design, from Hillier & Leaman's clustering rules to Eisenman's Chomskyan houses. Semantics covers the sign (Saussure, Vitruvius), the semiological triangle (Ogden & Richards, Hjelmslev), and Broadbent's defence of the referent against Eco. His conclusion: meaning and syntax "cannot be completely separated" — Eisenman's "pure syntax" is doomed, because people will read meanings whatever the architect intends — and since some architects have found semiotic approaches valuable in design generation, there is "ground for believing that semiotic approaches have application throughout the whole of designing."

Key Claims

• Semiotic defined and situated. Semiotic is "the general theory of signs, of how one thing 'stands' for another," twin-rooted in Saussure's Course in general linguistics and Peirce's Collected Papers. Current interest developed in the 1950s after Lévi-Strauss applied Saussure's synchronic/diachronic distinctions to social anthropology — the French-based Structuralism ("everything from mathematics… to travel guides and strip-tease were stretched over the same intellectual framework"). But "design never quite fitted into this structuralist ethos which seems in any case to be fading away" — its territory taken over by semiotic, which develops both from the Saussurean sign and "more particularly, from Peirce's more extensive analyses of different kinds of signs" (First Congress of the IASS, Milan 1974: 600+ people, 30+ disciplines).
• Morris's tripartition as the organizing scheme. Morris's three "inter-related matters" — pragmatics (origins, uses and effects of signs within behaviour), semantics (signification of signs), syntactics (combinations of signs without regard to their significations) — structure the whole review. See pragmatics-syntactics-semantics.
• Pragmatics: architecture is multi-sensory. Language "always operates in time within a single sensory dimension"; the designed environment "impinges on many of the senses simultaneously" (Table 1). Seeing is stimulated by a greater range of phenomena than any other sense; artefacts and climate stimulate the widest range of receptors; buildings — artefact plus climate control — "offer a particularly wide range of sensory stimuli." Any semiotic of architecture "will not be adequate unless it takes into account all the sensory modes by which buildings stimulate people." (Compare *Design in Architecture*'s Stourhead case.)
• The information channel elaborated for design. Shannon's channel (Figure 1) with a human brain as source and destination: the source chooses signifiers within a context of innate predispositions, a lifetime's repertoire of signs, and its perception of the current situation; connotational signifiers (analogies, metaphors) make decoding draw on the receiver's own connotations, introducing "perceptual noise."
• Koenig's architectural communication system. Sender = architect; codes and lexiques = functional, legal, structural and economic rules; signal = drawings/models/specifications; channel = the construction-site; physical signal = the material building; noise = environmental disturbance and physical disintegration; receiver = the human being and, collectively, the city; meaning = "the original function which the architectural object denotes and the second function which it connotes." Broadbent's verdict: "an interesting, if somewhat too literal an interpretation" — but its semantic emphasis has implications. See primary-and-secondary-functions.
• Symbols vs signals. Sign-emitters under voluntary control (speech mechanisms, hands, facial muscles) produce symbols; involuntary emissions (pupil dilation, flushing) and all natural phenomena are signals — a distinction largely lost when the communication model is applied to buildings.
• Language functions map directly onto designed-environment functions. Robinson's 14-item taxonomy of the functions of language (collating Bales, Tripp, Firth, Halliday, Jakobson), read against the designed environment (Table 2): "At this level we don't even have to translate linguistic concepts metaphorically into the designed environment; their application is obvious and direct" — e.g. avoidance-of-other-problems → filling an environmental gap with a routine solution; conformity-to-norms → the routine solution itself; regulation of encounter → planning routes and barriers; performatives → signs and notices confirming what the environment already shows.
• Empirical meaning-measurement and its limit. Building-performance research (Pilkington Research Unit, Liverpool; Building Performance Research Unit, Strathclyde; EDRA) and attitude studies used Osgood's Semantic Differential (Hershberger's scales; Acking's interior slides; Honikman's room ratings) and Kelley's Repertory Grid (Honikman's adaptation; subject-generated constructs). But there is "a fundamental problem": even an overwhelmingly preferred form should not be built exclusively — "it would become so boring that people no longer preferred it." The real use: measuring agreement/disagreement between architect and client, student and teacher (Chris Abel's work relating students' constructs to their designs and tutors' constructs to their critiques). See semantic-differential and repertory-grid.
• Syntactics: Saussure's own architectural metaphor. Saussure illustrates syntagmatic vs associative relations with a column — its relation to the architrave it supports is syntagmatic (arrangement in space); a Doric column's silent comparison with Ionic and Corinthian is associative. The column/architrave relation "is a structural one and words are related in sentences by equivalent structural rules."
• Chomsky's machinery and design algorithms. Deep structures converted into surface structures by transformational rules (Figure 2–3, with the worked generation of "the boy sees the girl"); Onions's five kernel sentences; Fillmore's case grammar. Chomsky's aim "was to write algorithms for the generation of sentences" — and algorithms have been written for parts of architectural design (structural frame, heating, lighting, ventilation, perspectives), over half of them concerned with circulation, pipework/drainage and space allocation — i.e. with the planning of buildings. March & Steadman and Hawkes & Mitchell generalize: built forms as geometric elements with attributes and relations, representable by grids/lattices, point-vectors, dual graphs, Smith diagrams. All syntactic play reduces to two basic operations: clustering small units by rules, or dividing a large volume progressively by rules.
• Clustering and subdivision exemplified. Hillier & Leaman's rules (each space bounded by 1–4 others, sharing walls with 1–4, plus exterior accessibility) generate detached, semi-detached, terrace forms matched against historical settlement patterns; Mitchell, Steadman & Liggett exhaustively divide a given space into 2–6 spaces. The Taller de Arquitectura (Barcelona) — Anna Bofill and José Agustín Goytisolo — built a vocabulary of minimal activity-spaces ("somewhat on the lines of Christopher Alexander's 'patterns'") and clustered it into apartment forms: the single-person apartment with the bath open to the living room was derived as a permutation and built as a prototype at Walden 7, where "it proved surprisingly popular."
• Eisenman's pure syntax — and its critique. Eisenman uses Chomsky's deep structures as an actual design process (Houses 1–10+; House 12: the 3×3-subdivided cube, cross walls on the grid, elaborated negative spaces). Gandelsonas: the shift "from the semantic to the syntactic," "paralysing" the semantic dimension. House 6 carries the abstraction into the master bedroom — a long slot in the floor with beds either side. Earlier precedent: Lutyens's "armature of planes." Broadbent's verdict: "all these attempts to withdraw from the semantic dimension, to design an architecture of pure syntax, are doomed to failure" — "people will read meanings in building whatever the architect intended. They cannot help it" (Jencks; perception psychology: the new is assimilated to past experience — Eisenman's white walls inevitably recall Le Corbusier's 1920s villas). And even if pure syntax were possible, Chomsky's own "Curious green ideas sleep furiously" shows syntactically correct combination can be nonsense: "How can it be possible that architecture put together by precisely analogous processes can make more sense than that?"
• Semantics: Vitruvius anticipated the sign. "In all matters, but particularly in architecture, there are those two points: the thing signified and that which gives it significance" — Saussure's sign avant la lettre. The signifier/signified relation is arbitrary and maintained by social contract (bull/boeuf/ochs); but "with a few exceptions, no such social contract exists to the meaning of architecture, this is a fundamental difference between architecture and language." See architectural-language.
• The referent debate. Ogden & Richards add the referent to Saussure's two-part sign (the semiological triangle, Figure 4); Hjelmslev reworks the sign as a four-part structure (plane of content / plane of expression). Eco objects: no necessary relation binds signifier, signified and referent (the unicorn; Napoleon's death; Alpha Centauri); the object of a sign-system is its "content," a "cultural unit." Broadbent's rejoinder: take the referent as a thing — "What is or may be an object of perception, knowledge, or thought" (Oxford definition) — which "can be real or imaginary"; Eco merely "confuses two perfectly ordinary terms… denotation and connotation," and Broadbent prefers Pei's simple definitions (denotation: the meaning a form has for all who use it; connotation: the "spatial shades of meaning… for its individual user"). See semiotic-triangle and denotation-and-connotation.
• Peirce's trichotomy applied to buildings. Peirce, "an inveterate 'trichotomizer'" who once identified 59,049 classes of sign, yields the fruitful icon/index/symbol triad (definitions quoted; his icons "so ambiguous that a generation of semiotics is still concerned" with them — Eco, Volli, Maldonado, Broadbent among the debaters). Icons: all drawings, models, photographs; buildings designed by visual analogy (Le Corbusier's crab-shell roof at Ronchamp; Wright's Chapel at Madison, Wisconsin (1950) from hands in prayer; de Stijl from modern painting); Venturi's Long Island poultry stand shaped like a duck; and structural icons — March & Steadman's three Frank Lloyd Wright plans (Life house, rectangular; Ralph Jester house, circular; Vigo Sundt house, triangular) share an underlying pattern of relationships (living rooms/terraces, terraces/pools, bedrooms/bathrooms): "each was an icon for the other." See iconicity and the-duck. Indices: route-planned buildings (art galleries, museums, Le Corbusier's Maison la Roche, 1923); a building fitting exactly around its functions "such as a nuclear power station" is an index of them. Symbols: the gothic cathedral symbolizes the Christian faith by learned convention; conventional church form is a shared social contract. But "most so-called 'functional' buildings are merely symbols of modernity" — the functional building as index only occasionally succeeded (certain power stations). See indexicality and functionalist-myth.
• Conclusion. Meaning and syntax cannot be completely separated; hence "a case for examining the semantic dimension in more detail"; and since architects (the Taller de Arquitectura, Eisenman) have found semiotic approaches of value in design generation, "there is ground for believing that semiotic approaches have application throughout the whole of designing" — with their relevance to other design fields left "to others with greater expertise."

Connections

Concepts: pragmatics-syntactics-semantics · semiotics · semiotic-triangle · denotation-and-connotation · iconicity · indexicality · architectural-language · deep-structures-of-architecture · four-types-of-design · primary-and-secondary-functions · environmental-psychology · semantic-differential · repertory-grid · functionalist-myth · the-duck · structuralism Authors: Geoffrey Broadbent · Ferdinand de Saussure · Charles Sanders Peirce · Umberto Eco · Peter Eisenman · Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson Debates: Structuralism vs. Peircean Semiotics · Design Methods Movement · Phenomenology vs. Semiotics Related source notes: *Signs, Symbols, and Architecture* (1980) — the same year's anthology; this article is its compact journal-length companion, sharing the Saussure/Peirce frame, the deep-structures programme and the Eisenman critique · Architecture and the Human Sciences (1973) — the empirical human-science base this article's pragmatics section carries into the semiotic frame · Meaning and Effect: Revisiting Semiotics in Architecture (2020) — the retrospective survey of the field this article helped define · Peirce for Architects — the Peircean apparatus (icon/index/symbol) in architectural terms

Direct Quotes

"Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to writing, to the deaf-mute alphabet, to symbolic rites, to codes of good manners, to military signals, etc. It is simply the most important of these systems. A science that studies the life of signs in society is therefore conceivable: it would be part of a general psychology; we shall call it semiology (from the Greek semion 'sign'). Semiology would teach us what signs are made of and what laws govern their behaviour. Since this science does not yet exist, no one can say quite what it will be like, but it has a right to exist and it has a place staked out in advance." (Saussure, Course in general linguistics, quoted by Broadbent)

"I hope to have shown that logic in its general acceptation is merely another word for semiotics, a quasi-necessary or formal doctrine of signs." (Peirce, quoted by Broadbent)

"Syntactics … 'deals with the combinations of signs without regard to their specific significations or their relations to the behaviour in which they occur.'" (Morris, quoted by Broadbent)

"From the associative and syntagmatic point of view a linguistic unit is like a fixed part of a building, e.g. a column. On the one hand the column has a certain relation to the architrave that it supports; the arrangement of the two units in space suggests the syntagmatic relation." (Saussure, quoted by Broadbent — the second half of the passage, on the Doric column's associative comparison with Ionic and Corinthian, is OCR-corrupted in the raw file)

"Once we allow that language has these pragmatic functions … then the parallels become clear. At this level we don't even have to translate linguistic concepts metaphorically into the designed environment; their application is obvious and direct."

"Suppose we could establish, for a particular population, that a particular room type, house form, or whatever actually was overwhelmingly more popular than another, should we then build only that type? Of course not, if we did that it would become so boring that people no longer preferred it."

"One of the most interesting and original aspects in the work of Eisenman is the discovery of the possibility of modifications within architecture which are the result of a shift from the semantic to the syntactic. By 'paralysing' the semantic dimension, the syntactic dimension is seen in a new light …" (Gandelsonas, quoted by Broadbent)

"It seems to me, however, that all these attempts to withdraw from the semantic dimension, to design an architecture of pure syntax, are doomed to failure. For the fact is, as Jencks so clearly points out, people will read meanings in building whatever the architect intended. They cannot help it"

"The one 'reminds' us of the other, there is nothing we, or Eisenman, can do about it. He cannot succeed in his aim of designing an architecture of pure syntax."

"How can it be possible that architecture put together by precisely analogous processes can make more sense than that?" (on Chomsky's "Curious green ideas sleep furiously")

"…in all matters, but particularly in architecture, there are those two points: the thing signified and that which gives it significance. That which is signified is the subject of which we may be speaking; and that which gives it significance is a demonstration of scientific principles." (Vitruvius, quoted by Broadbent)

"Let us note in passing that with a few exceptions, no such social contract exists to the meaning of architecture, this is a fundamental difference between architecture and language."

"denotation — The meaning which a form has for all who use it … connotation — The spatial shades of meaning (based on emotional or other factors) that a form has for its individual user" (Pei's definitions, as accepted by Broadbent against Eco's "complexification")

"An icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of certain characters of its own and which it possesses just the same, whether any such object actually exists or not." (Peirce, quoted by Broadbent)

"most so-called 'functional' buildings are merely symbols of modernity"

"It is argued that the aspects of meaning and syntax cannot be completely separated. Because of this there is a case for examining the semantic dimension in more detail." (abstract)

Open Questions

• The article dates Saussure's Geneva lectures 1902–1906 and calls Saussure a "Swiss philosopher" and Peirce an "American surveyor" — the lecture dates differ from the standard chronology (1907–1911, Course published posthumously 1916); verify against a critical edition before citing either date.
• House numbering: the text says Eisenman "is now up to house 10!" then analyses "House 12" — an internal inconsistency (or a house not yet designed at writing); verify Eisenman's house sequence.
• Does the "boring" objection to preference-led design (building only what people prefer destroys the preference) anticipate the wiki's later user-participation critiques (paternalistic flexibility, Skjettenbyen)? A cross-connection worth developing.
• The Social Contract gap: if architecture has "with a few exceptions" no social contract fixing meanings, what are the exceptions (conventional church form is Broadbent's example) — and do conventional building types (the terrace, the church) constitute partial contracts?
• Broadbent leaves the transfer of semiotic tools to other design fields "to others with greater expertise" — did that transfer happen, and where (product design, graphic design, urban design)?