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o_~CTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE

~coffrey H. Broadbent

=ead of the School of Architecture,


?ortsmouth Polytechnic,
~ing Henry 1 Street,
?ortsmouth POI 2DY, Hampshire.

?or some years now, EDRA and other such bodies have been concerned with many
things, including the processes by which buildings are designed; the creative,
analytical and managerial skills which an architect actually employs in the making
of a design. The problem as I see it (1) is to design the building - a physical
entity, in such ways that a particular human group - the clients and the users -
can do the things they want to do at a particular place on the earth's surface -
the site, conveniently and in comfort. Its solution obviously is a matter of
reconciling an enormous range of things. On the face of it, it seemed reasonable
to assume that if the users are analysed thoroughly enough in physiological,
psychological and sociological terms; if the site is analysed thoroughly enough
in geological, topographical and climatic terms; if the materials available for
building are understood in chemical, physical and mechanical terms, then after
rigorous analysis of the mass of data which thus becomes available an "optimum"
solution can be derived - by inductive processes - which solves the particular
problem. The hope was that if design were approached in this way, it could be
made "scientific" instead of merely intuitive.

Unfortunately this concept of "scientific" design was based on what scientists


said they did, as distinct from that they really did. Distinctions between these
two things have been made with increasing precision by philosophers of science
such as Popper (2), Kuhn (3) and Lakatos (4). Most scientists believe that theory
building starts when one observes that certain phenomena in nature: the planets,
chemical elements, atomic particles, birds, animals and even people display cer-
tain regularities in their behaviour: observable patterns, cyclic repetitions and
so on. Within his general observations of the universe, the scientist focuses
down on particular objects of interest, observes such regularities, amasses data
on them and analyses the data. Thus - by processes of induction - he derives an
explanation of how the phenomena come to behave as they do. This is his "theory"
and a "good" theory will not only explain, it will also enable him to predict how
these phenomena will behave at any stated time in the future.

According to Popper, science is not like that at all. As he put it (2):

"The Belief that science proceeds from observations to theory ... is


absurd ... 25 years ago, I tried to bring home the point to ...
students ... in Vienna by beginning a lecture with the following
instructions:-

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74 / DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS

"Take a pencil and paper; write down what you have observed". They asked
of course what I wanted them to observe ... observation is always selective,
it needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view."

But if one starts with an "interest, a point of view" one will tend to collect
examples which confirm it. I might have an interest, say in the environmental
control properties of vernacular architecture. The first cottage I see works
magnificently from this point of view, so does the second, the third .. the
thirtieth ... the hundredth and so on.

Before long, therefore, I have formed the unshaken conviction that all
vernacular building controls the climate beautifully. Yet sooner or later,
I might see one - such as those described by Rapoport (5) which really works
abysmally from this point of view, and if I am honest with myself - my
convictions will be shattered. So the honest scientist, according to
Popper (2), realises that he cannot help starting with "an interest, a point
of view" - his responsibility, therefore, is to recognise that interest,
state it clearly, unambiguously and then try to refute it. He will look,
not for good environmental filters, which will confirm his hunch, but for bad
ones, if they exist, in order to disprove it. If he cannot find any bad ones,
he should publish his supposition, stating it as clearly as he possibly can.
By doing so he invites the rest of the scientific community to refute his
ideas if they possibly can. If no-one can destroy it he has a right to call
it his "theory" and to hold it as such until a "better" one comes along.

If Popper's (2) true scientist - whether he likes it or not - is going to


have preconceptions, how can we suppose that the architect - in trying to
"design" is going to avoid their form - generative equivalents. How can
we suppose that by scanning evidence from the various disciplines which
concern him - physiology, psychology, physics, the client's brief, and so
on, he can possibly avoid selecting from them evidence which will confirm
his hunch, whilst suppressing that which somehow conflicts with what he
rea lly wants to do?

In other words, he will start designing with preconceptions and his respon-
sibility, therefore, wil~to find refutations for them - much as Popper's (2)
scientist tries to refute his hunches.. Obviously the fragments of information
available to us from the s~nces - including the human sciences - will be
useful in these refutation procedures - but so will the client's view, the
user's views, the views of anyone, or even everyone in the community.

So, the basic question we ought to be asking is not "How can we define human
needs so that buildings can be designed which will fit their user's better?"
but "How is it possible for a building not to fit its users?".

That, of course, is a matter of its functioning and everyone knows what a


"functional" building is. Although as .de Zurko (6) shows i t has had a
long and distinguished history, functionalism as we know it was a tenet of
that International Style architecture which 1e Corbusier (7), Gropius (8)
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 75

Mies Van der Rohe (9) and others advocated in the first half of this century.

Now, clearly the functions of a building can help determine how it should be
designed; the sizes and shapes of the spaces it contains, the ways in which
these spaces are linked together on plan, the means for moving between them
that ought to be provided, in terms of corridors, staircases, elevators and
so on. If a building fails in any of these ways it can hardly function at
all. Add to this a particular set of attitudes to structure, decoration
and so on, and the architecture emerges which everyone calls functional.
The architects who advocated it held, in particular, that the buildings
they designed should be free of any reference to foreign, exotic or native
historical styles. Such stylism, they thought, would actively present its
efficient functioning.

The ideal of functionalism, in this sense, was firmly attached by Pevsner (10)
and other critics to a particular building form, as exemplified by the office
bUilding which Gropius and Meyer had designed for Karl Benscheidt' s Fagus
works at Alfeld an der Leine in 1911 (11). Pevsner (10) rhapsodised over its
"complete facade ... conceived in glass" with supporting piers "reduced to
narrow bands of steel" and Gropius himself did nothing to refute that
description in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus of 1936 (8).

And even 50 years after it was built, in the 1960 edition of his book,
Pevsner (12) thought that this building still expressed "today's reality"
in a thoroughly responsible manner; its form should be recreated wherever
possible, to counter the resurgent excesses of a new Expressionism, as
represented in the late work of Le Corbusier (Jaoul Houses and Ronchamp),
"the structural acrobatics of the Brazilians" and other willful "attempts to
satisfy the craving of architects for individual expression, the craving of
the public for the surprising and fantastic; and for escape out of reality
into a fairy world".

Yet, curiously enough, Pevsner (10) himself was living in a fairy world; the
Fagus office is not constructed of steel and glass but of brick, his "narrow
bands of steel" are hefty brick peirs, some 90 cm. x 70 cm. and with entasis
like Doric columns; so Pevsner's "reality" was actually an
illusion of what he wanted Gropius's architecture to be like (11).
He was using the word "functional" to describe an appearance of buildings,
a fact which I realised when he applied it to the Arts Tower at Sheffield
University, in which I was then working, to distinguish it from Stirlings'
Engineering building at Leicester, which he found "expressionist" (l3). Neither
building clearly is perfect, but I was suffering from thoroughly inadequate
vertical circulation - there were two 40-seater lecture rooms on the roof
served by one 10-person lift - from solar heat gain (97F in my room one day
with snow on the ground outside), glare, noise transmission through floors and
partitions, a wind vortex at the base which sometimes made it impossible to
enter the front door and so on. How could Pevsner describe it as
"functional". It was rectilinear in form and glass curtain walled, it looked
machine made so, for Pevsner, it must be "functiona 1" (13).
76 I DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS

Whilst the building was thoroughly inadequate in terms of room size and shape,
circulation and so on, its greatest failures, as I have indicated, were
environmental; matters of thermal, acoustic and lighting control. Those too
are matters of its functioning and the belief has been growing amongst
certain British researchers that a building's performance in these terms
is even more important than the size and shape of the space it contains.

Bill Hillier of the RIBA's Research Committee was the first to realise that
these were aspects of a building's true functioning, further discussions amongst
members of that group identified a total of four such functions and these were
presented in a paper to EDRA 3 (1970) by Hillier, Musgrove and O'Sullivan (14). I
find it useful to add a fifth although the others do not agree with me. My
complete list now reads as follows:

(1) There is no point in making a building if the things we want to do can


be carried out, conveniently and in comfort, in the open site or in some
existing building. First of all, then, the building provides containers
for human activities, which in size and shape may be appropriate for the
activities we want to perform.

(2) The building fabric is a filter between the users of the building and the
external environment. It should perform effectively in terms of thermal,
lighting and acoustic control, we can define the limits of what it should
do with reference to human physiology and psychology.

(3) Concern for the building's functions as an environmental filter implies


concern for the satisfaction and hopefully - the delight of the human
senses. It would be ludicrous to design, say for thermal pleasure,
unless we designed also for visual pleasure and whether we like it or
not, this finally, is a cultural matter. People will read meanings
into our buildings, based on their past experience, and they therefore
ought to be relevant, symbolically, to the culture for which they are
buH t.

(4) Building involves the use of materials, which have to be located,


extracted, transported, worked, transported again, and assembled into
position. Each operation consumes resources in the form of labour and
plant charges. The site itself will be changed in value because it has
been built on, the building therefore is a capital investment which
changes the values of materials and site. It should do so with reason-
able economy.

(5) Every building affects its immediate environment; and the act of
building will change the micro-climate in terms of shading, thermal
capacity, air movement (wind vortices) etc., it will change traffic
patterns, may introduce pollution, may demand the input of energy for
environmental control and thus waste resources in achieving that even
where it could have been achieved by the building fabric itself.
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 77

This may not be an exhaustive list, although it seems adequate at the moment.
It can be helpful certainly, in helping us define some of the ways in which
buildings may not fit their users.

Taking the first of Hillier's points - that the buildings contain spaces in
which human activities may take place; obviously, in terms of size, shape,
arrangement, relationship to each other and so on, those spaces may facilitate -
or may inhibit - the activities we want to perform. Yet the fit of space to
activity, at this level, seems not to be very crucial. Peter Cowan (15) suggested
in 1964, that some 70% of human activities could be carried out conveniently
in rooms of around, or rather under 200 square feet (18.5 square metres). No
one so far, has disproved that and after a massive inventory - study of rooms
and their use at University College, Musgrove, Rawlinson (16) and others
have suggested that the greatest inhibition to using any room for any purpose
is not its size and shape, location, environmental conditions and so on but the
name on the door. Call a room "conference room" and that is what it will be
used for, to the exclusion of other activities which could have been accommo-
dated within it when no conference was scheduled.

But that raises another issue, we have seen already that in physiological terms
there may be one-to-one interactions between man and environment. It is often
assumed that this one-to-one relationship extends also to social relationships,
yet in most institutions a third factor - which I have called "management" or
"administration" intervenes in this relationship. As I put it (1)

"All users of buildings are contrained by administration, using that word


in the broadest possible sense to describe any p~rson or group of people
who decide what mayor may not be done within a building or to the building
fabric. Administration determines who shall work with whom in a particular
office (thus helping to determine whether they will commit love or murder) ...
Administration in the form of the headmaster lays down rules about how
pupils and teachers shall behave in school, which entrances the pupils may
use and so on, which side of the corridor they must walk, which staircase
they will go up and which they will go dowq .. At another level, ..
administration determines who shall live next door to who in a block of
flats, who will live in solitary confinement in prison . " and so on.

Provided that the building contains a variety of spaces therefore - a large


percentage of which may be "Cowan" rooms of around 18 square metres - adminis-
tration will have fare more power to see that they are used effectively than
the architect ever could. Administration, in fact, will be responsible for the
spatial fit of the building to the activities which actually go on within it.
Given a "Cowan" room, the actual fit of space to the activities within it
depends very much on matters such as shape; see Hole and Attenburrow (17)
and the degree to which furniture, fittings, etc. are moveable (1).
78 / DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS

Its flexibility of arrangement is possible within the room, then basic


decisions about the rooms itself are fairly easily made. If - as a basic space -
it offers environmental standards which are compatible with physiological
comfort, then there is little more we need to know about the social interactions
which will go on within it - beyond the fact that whatever meaning and
symbolism we build into the room may affect users' decisions to utilise it for
certain purposes but not for othe~

Let us take this argument to an extreme by envisaging a building which consists


of certain large rooms which may be used for communal purposes - dining,
relaxing, playing games and so on, and many smaller rooms with corridor access.
According to how it was administered, that building could be used as a hotel,
a college, a hostel, a monastery or a prison.

Different standards of furnishings, fittings, decorations and environmental


servicing may be thought appropriate in each case but these would be matters
of meaning and symbolism rather than of straight physiological comfort. The
important point is that the same fabric would be appropriate - or could be
made appropriate - for these very diverse users.

As for the building as environmental filter- a vast amount of research has


been undertaken in this area (much of it summarised, for instance, in the
Architect's Journal (18) or in Fitch (19). But, in particular, ten
years of research in building appraisal, environmental control, the physio-
logical and psychological aspects of architecture suggest that if the primary
function of an external wall is to protect the activities within the building
from the external environment - and few would doubt that this is the case -
then curtain walled buildings which have become such potent symbols for
architects, do not work, and cannot be made to work to any adequate standard
(see Broadbent (1) and forthcoming).

Now clearly if one assesses even the best curtain-walled, cubic architecture,
of 20th century functionalist against such criteria, it proves to be almost
a total failure in terms of solar heat gain, glare, heat loss, noise penetration
and so on. One can pump energy into it, to work heating, cooling and
ventilation plan~ut that in itself is a willful thing to do. It costs money,
uses mineral and other resources which we ought to conserve, whilst the
processes of producing the energy are often themselves polluting. It may be
that before very long, we will see Gropius Mies and the other
advocates of such architecture as more wilful, more perverse, more expressionist
than a Stirling or a Gaudi! For make no mistake, this architecture
is expressive, for like bobbed hair, the bowler hat, traditional jazz, the
~cktail and the Charleston, it now presents some highly potent symbols of
1920's attitudes.
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 79

But the question then arises as to how these architects and their apologists
could have so confused the nature of function in buildings that they inverted
the meaning of the word itself. Clearly, this is a linguistic matter, a
problem of relationship between the actual word and the things it "stands for".
Relationships of this kind obviously are the province of linguistic studies and
in particularly of semantics. It should be helpful therefore to see what
linguistics tells us about such relationships. The founding-fathers of modern
linguistic studies were Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss philospher whose lectures
at the University of Geneva in 1906-1911 were collated later by some of his
students and published as the Course in General Linguistics (21) and Charles
Sanders Peirce, an American surveyor whose voluminous collected papers
(1860-1908) contain scattered, complex and ambiguous references to such
matters (22).

There is a further reason for looking at their work. Whilst both Peirce and
Saussure developed their ideas from their analyses of languages, they were
both intent on setting up general theories of signification - how one thing
"stands for" another, which they called, respectively Semiotic (Peirce) and
Semiology (Saussure). Linguistics, before their time, had largely been
concerned with change, with the ways in which language develops over time
(diachronic linguistics); Saussure's particular contribution was to add
another dimension to such studies (synchronic linguistics) in which structural
relationships between parts of a language are studied at a particular moment
in time. He thus laid the foundations for that French intellectual orthodoxy
known as Structuralism in which, over the last twenty-five years has been
developed in anthropology: Levi-Strauss (23), in cinema: Christian Metz (24),
in pistory: Gaboriau (25), politics: Godeller (26), la Mode; Roland Barthes
(27), travel guides, wrestling and strip tease, not to mention costume,
catering - and architecture - also Barthes (27).

The range in fact now covers almost every aspect of culture. The International
Association for Semiotic Studies had its first inter-disciplinary congress at
Milan in June 1974, at which an extraordinary range of applications was
discussed, from theatre to scientific languages, literature, music, visual
arts and communications, cinema and film even psychopathology. Roman
Jakobson, the grand old man of semiotics presented a magisterial survey of
the field, also available in paperback form (28) whilst Martin Krampen reviewed
in detail the development of architectural semiotics. He ranged - as we shall,
from the most speculative of structural approaches to the most trivial of
empirica 1 studies (29).

We have already seen that signification - or symbolising - is one of the


unavoidable "functions" of architecture and there is no doubt that between them
Peirce and Saussure offer an extraordinarily rich set of conceptual structures
against which it can be discussed. There is no doubt also that for society as a
whole, one of modern architecture's greatest failings lies specifica lly in this
area; despite what the "functionalist" said, that architecture does symbolise,
but its symbolism is bleak and sterile. Yet most of us still find it difficult
to discuss architecture symbolism directly because the functionalists insisted
for so many years that it was quite irrelevant - the province of those who
80 / DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS

wanted to make architectural monuments to themselves. Because of this, the


old language of aesthetics within which such matters used to be discussed no
longer seems relevant; it has also been discredited, on the one hand by the
findings of perceptual psychology and on the other by the gestures of certain
rather cynical artists such as Marcel Duchamp.

Let us start with the speculative aspect of meaning studies: as we shall see, the
language of semiology and, more particularly that of semiotic are excessively
complex and turgid. One would expect specialists in linguistics to be particularly
skilled in devising a vocabulary but the language they have devised turns out
to be equalled in complexity only by those of computing and the space program!
It happens however that one of the basic concepts was anticipated by none other
than Vitruvius himself who wrote (20):

" ... 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."

Saussure's concept of a sign is exactly like this. He thinks of it as a two-


part entity, consisting of a signifier and a signified, formally united by
social contract. The signifier in this case consists of some material representa-
tion- the speech-sounds, marks on paper and so on from which, maybe, a word is
formed whilst the signified consists of the concept to which that word refers.
Initially, the relationship between word and concept was quite arbitrary. There
was no particular reason why the English should call a certain animal "bull"
the French call it "boeuf" whilst the Germans call it "ochs". A particular
animal which happened to be grazing on the Franco-German border might well be
called by both names, simultaneously. But because the relationship between
signifier and signified initially was arbitrary it must be respected by everyone.
No one can change it unilaterally; a social contract now exists between all
English speaking people that we shall use the word "bull" whenever we want to
refer to that particular animal; if one of us used some other word, or coined
a new word for the purpose, no one could understand him; he would have broken
the social contract. 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. The "functionalists" as we have
seen broke the verbal social contract; they used the word; "functional" in
quite a new way and this had two effects. It meant, at the lowest level, that
society as a whole simply could not understand what they were talking about;
but it was more than a linguistic matter. It was symptomatic of the way in
which they formed themselves into a precious in-group of architects (and
planners) self-consciously different from the rest of society and anxious to
communicate only with each other. That, more than anything else, has led to
that tragic alienation of architects and planners - from society as a whole
which even now is having such disastrous effects.
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 81

=:~ers since Saussure have developed his concept of sign in various ways.
=sden and Richards for instance (30) felt his two-part entity to be by no means
s.::equate; they took his signifier (they called it ~) and his signified
-,;hich they called thought or reference) and added a third element the referent,
-,,:-:ich is the actual object, person or event to which one is referring, hence
:heir semiological triangle:

thought or reference
(Saussure's signified)

/\
symbol
(Saussure's Signifier)
referent
(the object, person or event to
which one is referring)

~his has gained a certain currency in linguistic circles but Hjelmslev (31)
felt that it also was inadequate. He postulated the sign as four-part structure
~;hich takes the following form (I have plotted equivalents in the Saussurean
and the Ogden/Richard's schemes):

Rjelmslev: Saussure: Ogden & Richards:

form signified referent


Plane of content: ~tance thought
Plane of expression: substance reference
form sigt:l ifier symbol

There may be advantages in splitting the concept which links signifier and
refere~in this way because it allows for a process of encoding between one's
immediate thought about the object and the way one chooses to refer to it by
means of words or other signifiers.

Buildings undoubtedly can be read as signs in the way that Saussure intended;
the possibilities for a semiology of architecture were first explored by
Italian theorists such as Gamberini (32), Bettini (33), Koenig (34), Brandi
(35), de Fusco (36), Tafuri (37), Eco (38), Scalvini (39) and others who spent
a considerable amount of time disagreeing with each other as to the levels at
which concepts from the analysis of language should be drawn into the analysis
of architecture. De Fusco and Scalvini, for instance (40) equated the exterior
of a building (Palladio's Rotunda at Vicenza) with Saussure's signifier and
the interior with his signified, a simple scheme which they develop with some
subtlety. Eco, however, (38) took quite a different view, the signifier for
him might be a staircase signifying the act of walking up - which thus
becomes the signified. Both of those interpretations add something of value
to architectural debate and I have suggested a third (41), following Ogden
and Richards, that any building, at any time, can be signifier, signified,
referent - or all three, simultaneously - in their three part scheme. The
Parthenon exists obviously, as a referent, an object, still standing on the
82 / DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS

Acropolis in Athens, but it also exists as a signified - by photographs,


diagrams and words - in any book which describes such buildings. And for many
people still it is also a signifier of all that was best in ancient Greek
democracy. We ought to make sure, in discussing it, whether the Parthenon as
signified actually is that arrangement of stones - a partial reconstruction
which currently exists on the Acropolis, the building in its former, more ruined
state - familiar from photographs of the 1930's, or the Parthenon as built by
Ictinus and Callicrates in its pristine form, with garishly coloured sculpture,
gliding and so on. Or is it - for many people - a "symbol" or perfection in
architecture which never actually existed?

But the most useful concept from Saussure probably is his fundamental distinction
between language "a sum of impressions deposited in the brain of each member of
a community ... the whole set of linguistic habits which enable an individual
to understand and be understood" and speech - "the personal choice which each
of us makes from what is available in the whole of language when we are making
personal utterances". Parallels have been drawn into architecture at several
levels. At the lowest level, it throws a new light on concepts such as style
in architecture, for any given style - such as the Greek ionic order or -a----
prefabricated building system - can be seen - metaphorically - as a language,
a set of parts and a set of rules for using them, whilst the use which an
individual architect makes of it can be seen as his personal speech.

There is much more to Saussure than I can possibly discuss here, but one further
distinction should be mentioned; that between diachronic linguistics - the
ways in which language changes over time and synchronic linguistics - the
structures by which words - and other aspects of language - are inter-related
at a particular moment in time. I have suggested elsewhere (41) that certain
of the mechanisms, such as the use of analogy - by which languages change also
account for changes in architecture, although the parallels need not be pressed
too far.

Peirce's semiotic is much more complex than Saussure's semiology. At one time,
Peirce identified 56,056 different classes of signs which he later consider-
ably reduced in number. There are scattered references to them in
various of his collected papers (22) but they are difficult to quarry out.
The papers themselves are often confused, ambiguous and self-contradictory; in
addition to these, Peirce presents us with two other difficulties. Firstly he
was an inveterate "trichotomizer" grouping everything taxonomically into sets
of threes and secondly, he constantly flouted Saussure's social contract,
coining a new word or term for every concept which occurred to him. He wrote,
for instance of firstness, secondness and thirdness; of abstractives,
concretives and collectives, of Phemes, Semes and Delemes; of Potisigns,
Actisigns and Famisigns, of qualisigns, sinsigns and legisigns. Of all his
trichotomies, however that which classifies signs into Icons, Indices and
Symbols has proved to be the most fruitful.
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 83

Peirce's icon is an object which exists in its own right but which has certain
elements ~ommon with some other object and can therefore be used to represent
that object. Maps, photographs and algebraic signs are icons in this sense,
so are architect's drawings. Unfortunately, though, Peirce's definitions of
icons are so ambiguous that a generation of semioticians is still concerned
with trying to unravel what he actually meant by an iconic sign: Eco (43),
Volli, Maldonado Broadbent and others have contributed to this
particular debate (43).

Peirce's index is rather more straightforward; it is a sign which indicates


some particular object or circumstance, in terms of a physical relationship.
A pointing finger indicates which way to go, the pole star indicates North, a
weather vane indicates which direction the wind is blowing from, and so on.

Most large buildings contain indices of this kind - in the form of notices -
and it could be argued that a building which fits exactly round a set of
functions - such as a nuclear power station - is an "index" of those functions.
Peirce' s ~ is even more straightforward: it is a sign which "carries"
some general meaning, thus a badge symbolises the fact that someone belongs to
an organisation, a railway ticket symbolises the fact that they have paid to
travel. Ordinary words, in Peirce's terms are symbols in this sense. A church
obviously symbolises Christianity - Peirce's ~ has the specific quality
that whatever relationship exists between the symbol itself and the entity which
it symbolises, has to be learned, both by the user of symbols and those whom
its meaning is important. In this sense it closely resembles Saussure's sign,
a signifier and a signified with a learned relationship between them.

Buildings again can be signs in Peirce's senses. The gothic cathedral obviously
is a ~ of the Christain faith; most of us in the Western cultures have
learned the essential relationship between a building of that form and the
religion which it symbolises; we even share a social contract as to conventional
church form. As for buildings as indices; one can think of many art galleries,
museums, exhibition pavilions and even houses, such as Le Corbusier's
Maison la Roche of 1923 which are planned about a set route (41); such buildings
indicate to us which way we should go in moving around them so certainly they
are indices. The "functional" building also was intended to be an index,
indicating by its form the functions which it houses. OccaSionally, it was
succesful, as in the case of certain power stations but most so-called
"functional" buildings are merely symbols of modernity. As for building as icon -
any drawing, model or photograph of a building is an icon in Peirce's sense, but
the building itself also may be an icon - if it "reminds" us of something else.
I have described elsewhere certain buildings which were designed by visual
analogy - with forms from nature, as in the case of Le Corbusier's crab-shell
roof at Ronchamp or the hands in prayer which suggested the roof-form of
Wright's Chapel at Madison, Wisconsin (1); with modern painting as in the case of
de Stijl architecture and so on (41). Such buildings obviously can be iconic ~
of the forms from which they were derived, one of the clearest, obviously is
the poultry stand on Long Island, to which Robert Venturi has drawn attention,
(44) shaped like a duck.
84 / DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS

As we have seen the Saussurean, Structuralist approach to semiolgy has been


developing in many fields over the past twenty years but there are indications
now that nothing much new is emerging from this area. That, certainly, was one
of the major findings of the lAAS conference in Milan. Dmberto Eco detected
another major tendency in his masterly summing-up; away from the descriptive
analysis of sign-systems towards the study of how sign-systems are generated.
In a sense, of course, that is what design method studies have been about up to
now but they have been concentrated much more on the physical functions of
designed objects rather than on their semiotic implications.

A few theorists however have attempted to draw parallels between the generation
of objects and the generation of language; they have drawn, naturally, on the
generative and transformational grammars of Naom Chomsky (45).

Each of us, according to Chomsky (45) possesses certain basic understandings of


our relationship with the environment - including other people, which he calls
deep structures. In the art of speaking, or forming sentences, we apply certain
generative rules - of which we have an inborn understanding - so that a sequence
of actua 1 words emerges in the form of a surface structure. The sentence - "I
see the girl" is such a surface structure through which one can easily perceive
a deep structure - the fundamental relationship between me and the girl. As the
sentence emerges, we might also subject it to transformational rules converting
it into the negative - "I cannot see the girl" the passive "the girl is seen by
me" and so on.

Several things emerge from this attempt to draw parallels between architecture
and Chomsky's Grammar, I have suggested elsewhere (45), that deep structures
of the kind which seem to underly the generation of languages do not, and cannot
exist for architecture, because man's fundamental relationships with the environ-
ment exist - and always have existed - whether buildings were there or not. But
Eisenman actually has used generative and transformational rules for the
derivation of architectural form (46) and buildings now exist which demonstrate
this point, see Gandelsonas (47).

Such theorising of course is highly speculative but it is already contributing


to a shift of opinion in which questions of symbolism and meaning are again
taken seriously in architecture. Already there have been conferences on the
subject at Casteldelfels (1972) the purpose of which have been edited by
Llorens (48), Dlm-Donau, Krampen (49) and Paris MMI (50). Practising
architects, such as Ricardo Bofill (51) Charles Moore (52) -
and the designers of Disneyworld (53) have tried, deliberately, to build meanings
into their buildings, Venturi: perhaps the best known of them, has actually
suggested that studies in "semeiology" (sic) and meaning, should render such
approaches even more effective (54).
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 85

But whilst they may become increasingly useful at the design-conjecture stage,
it is unlikely that they will ever be very helpful in design - refutation.
Perhaps empirical studies will help us at this stage; already there has been
a certain amount of empirical research in these areas which has taken the
following form:-

1. Attempts to correlate the performance of specific buildings in spatial,


environmental and other terms with the user's verbal response to those
buildings. Pioneered by Wells and then Canter of the Pilkington Research
Unit at Liverpool (see various publications edited by Manning - 55)
Building Performance Research Unit at Strathclyde, and discussed extensively
by the latter in various publications (56).

2. Attempts ~o establish user attitudes to possible built forms at urban,


whole buildings or individual room scale by measuring verbal response
to photographs, drawings, models and so on. Pioneered at Strathclyde
under Canter's direction by Lau, Wools and others (64).

A vast mass of work in these areas has been published in the journals and in
various conference proceedings, such as those from Dalandhui in 1969 (edited
Canter - 56) from Kingston in 1970 (Honikman - 57) not to mention four meetings
of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) at Chapel Hill.
N. Carolina (Sanoff and Cohn - 58), Pittsburgh (Archea and Eastman - 59),
Los Angeles (Mitchell - 60) and Blacksburg, Virginia (Preiser - 61). I have
suggested elsewhere ( 62 ) - and been taken to task for suggesting it (Lee - 63) -
that attitude scaling, on its own, may tell us very little that is useful about
designing. If I draw on Canter (64 and 65) that is because he has
produced so much work in the area that naturally it includes some very clear
examples. Given the problem of deciding which noises in the school classroom
a child finds most disturbing, he shows that 5-point Likert scales, ranging from
"cannot hear them at all" - to "they are very loud" may - given also the battery
of statistical techniques by which such scales can be analysed - enable us to
pinpoint the major causes of disturbance and thus to make design decisions by
which they can be minimised. But in using similar techniques to separate the
classrooms in which teachers feel "central" from those in which they feel
"remote" (65), or those seats in a tutorial room which students prefer
from those which they try to avoid (64), he throws up information
which may be "interesting" for the psychologist but which cannot actually be
used by the designer. For any "real" plan contains a mixture of such desirable
and undesirable locations. There is nothing the designer can do about it, he
cannot design a plan which just has the "good" spaces, although such information
may be useful to "management" or "administration" of the building in use as
described earlier.
86 / DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS

Hershberger (66) draws on Osgood's technique of Semantic


Differential ( 67 ) and tried to establish a basic thesaurus of concept scales
for use in environmental research whilst Acking ( 68 ) and Honikman ( 69 )
devised such scales and put them to different uses. Acking displayed a number
of interiors to his subjects in the form of projected photographs and asked
them to mark each one against his concept scales. He then extracted no less
than ten factors from his concept scales including feelings of comfort and
security, estimations of social status, physical appearance, degree of
originality and so on. Honikman also asked his subjects to look at pictures
or rooms and to rate them against some 25 Osgood scales: bad/good, dirty/clean,
dark/light and so on. He extracted only four groups of factors- descriptive/
evaluative potency; spatial quality and mood/atmosphere. One obvious limitation
of Osgood's approach is that the concept scales are devised by the experimenter
himself but the concepts in which he deals may be of no interest or relevance to
his subjects. The repertory grid technique first described by Kelly (70) and
developed by Bannister (71) and Mair (72) presents an ingenious way of
circumventing the problem; it enables the "experimenter" to establish the
"constructs",by which individual subjects "construe" their environment,especially
other people and to "ladder" those constructs in order of importance. Honikman
(68) and others have adapted this technique so as to establish the constructs
against which individuals construe the build environment or - in this case -
photographs of rooms.

One of his subjects construed the photographed living rooms against a "range"
of such constructs from inoppressive/oppressive, spacious/crowded and informal/
formal, to centre of focus fireplace/no fireplace and books/no books.

Such work is obviously fraught with difficulties inherent in the methodology,


Some of the researchers blandly assume that one's response to a picture is the
same as one's response to a real room: the majority certainly have been more
cautious and some have even attempted to measure the degree to which the one
correlates with the other (see for instance Bonsteel (73), Lau (74)
Howard (75), Kubler (76), Acking (68) and so on). Lau ( 74 ) found that his
lighting studies "to some degree" showed that "scale models are assessed in
a simi lar manner to full-size rooms" whi 1st Howard (75) reports that "our
subjects' affective response to slides were not the same as other subjects'
responses to the actual environments". How could they be, given that the "real"
environment stimulates much more than the sense of sight (see Broadbent (l?
This reduction of environmental response to a simple visual matter seems to me
dangerously misleading.

Yet even if it were not, or one's studies were the real environment rather than
simulations of it, there would still be a fundamental problem of applying the
results. Suppose we could establish - for a particular population that a
particular room type, or house form, was overwhelmingly more popular than
another, should we then build the preferred example to the exclusion of any
other? Of course not, for once it became ubiquitous, it could no longer be
the preferred type. Yet semantic differential and repertory grid techniques
may be useful for quite different purposes, in establishing the degree to
which architect and client, student and teacher, or even architect and
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 87

psychologist agree or disagree, on fundamental issues concerning architecture.


Abel (forthcoming) has done a certain amount of work in this area already with
architectural students and teachers, but in the context of design refutation. In
other words, he has attempted to relate students architectural constructs to the
designs they a,ctually produce and the tutor's construct to the ways in which they
criticise those designs.

It should be clear from all this that semiotic studies already have given us new
ways of describing and comparing buildings, whilst empirical studies have provided
us with ways of assessing buildings qualitatively. But the main question is; how
far can either of them help the architect in the process of designs? I suggested
earlier that design, like theory-formation, is a matter of conjectures and refuta-
tions of a Popperian kind rather than of analysis and induction. I also suggested
that the "five-function" model of what a building does might provide a useful
structure for our refutation procedures, taking a building as: that which encloses
space, filters out the external climate, is a cultural symbol, changes the values
of land and material, disturbs the existing environment.

Techniques are available already for predicting the fit of activities to space
(16), for predicting the performance of the building as an environmental filter
(19), and for predicting its costs (77). Techniques are also being developed for
predicting the effect a new building will have on the existing environment but, so
far, little has been done to predict the effects it will have as a cultural symbol.
A major difficulty here, of course, is that the architect's symbolic intentions -
if he has any - are likely to be construed differently by those who perceive his
building. Some of the empirical techniques we have been discussing at least help
us to establish the differences which exist between the architect's value system
and the users! They may even help us to quantify such differences as Honikman
(69), Abel (7S) and others have attempted to do. But it may be that in a conjec-
tures and refutat ions approach, the des igner (s) simply need to present their
design conjectures as simply and directly as possible - in the form of drawings,
perspectives, models and so on, which can then be subjected to systematic refuta-
tion by everyone who is going to be affected by the building in any way. Presented
in this way, the conjectural designs can be refuted by anyone whatever their
interests - physiological, psychological, sociologicaJ, anthropological, environ-
mental, structural, historical and so on, not to mention potential users, those
whose environment is going to be disturbed by the building, people passing on the
street. They, too, will have some extremely relevant. points to make in the refuta-
tion of the design: it certainly should not be built until they have had their say.

One thing is certain - that just as no design ever emerged - by processes of induc-
tion - from the analysis of information provided by specialist physiologists,
psychologists., structural engineers and so on - so no design will ever emerge - by
analogous processes - from an analysis of what the cornmunitywants. Conjectures
simply do not arise by consensus, they arise in the creative imagination. Saussure
himself (21) describes a number of ways in which new words have been formed - by
phonetic changes, by analogy, by "folk etymology", by agglutination and so on.
These are remarkab 1y similar to the four i'types" of design which I have described
(1) as the bases of architectural creativity.
88 / DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS

In deference to Peirce, I have renamed the second of them (79) so they now read:

Pragmatic - in which the materials with which one is building help determine
the form (cf Saussure's phonetic changes).

Typologic - in which one repeats an established building type (cf Saussure's


"folk etymology").

Analogic - in which one draws visual or other analogies in generating the form
(cf Saussure's analogy).

Canonic - in which the form is determined by some geometric system.

Now clearly, anyone in the act of generating architectural form can (and will!)
utilise these modes of thinking, but the architect is (or should be) skilled in
their use. It is his responsibility to show new possibilities; if he cannot do
that, he is not really an architect! Many people these days assume that because,
in the era of "functionalist" architecture, certain rather extreme possibilities-
such as the Ville Radieuse-were presented by their authors as imperatives - with
the disastrous results which we see all around us - that henceforth the architect
should be suppressed - at most he should take the role of technician, helping the
community to realise,in 3-dimensional built fo~ some democratically derived con-
cept of what the environment should be. When it has been offered the opportunity
by advocacy planning (80), participation (81), "charrette" (82), etc., the community
has shown itself to be highly effective in criticising, and even rejecting, the
designer's conjectures. It has also fed back, most effectively those things which
are wrong with the environment already built. The community thus has a vital part
to play in the process of (slow) evolution by typo logic design.

Slow evolution also does take place in all living organisms but, to carry the
analogy further - biological evolution also has its "sports" - random mutations
which result in new, or distorted organisms. Most of them die but one of them
occasionally proves to function better - in the given environment - than the origi-
nal organism ever did. It survives, reproduces and even replaces the original form
Design by evolution of a given building type takes a minimum of 10 years; some of
us cannot wait that long. We believe that - like the world of living organisms -
the designed environment also needs its random mutations - conjectures for built
forms which people never dreamed they could have. The architect offers conjectures
which the community then tries to refut~using, perhaps, the procedures we have
been discussing. As for the conjectures themselves; there is no doubt in my mind
that the architect is - or should be - the person to offer them, and an understand-
ing of how architecture "carries" meaning to the community will help him to offer
more acceptable conjectures.
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 89

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(72) Bannister, D. and Hair, J. H. M. THE EVOLUTION OF PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS,


Academic Press, 1968.

(73) Bonsteel, D. L. and Sanoff, R. "An Investigation of a Televised Image in


simulation of Architectural Space", ARCHITECTURAL DEVELOPMENT SERIES NO.6,
University of Washington, 1967.

(74) Lau, J. J. R., "Differences Between Full-Size and Scale Model Rooms in the
Assessment of Lighting Quality" in Canter, D. V. (ed.) ARCHITECTURAL
PSYCHOLOGY: PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONFERENCE held at Dalandhui, RIBA London,
1969. (See 56).
Lau, J. J. H., "Use of Scale Models as a Stimulus Mode" in Archea, J. and
Eastman, C. EDRA 2, PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2ND ANNUAL ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN
RESL~RCH ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh,
Penn., October 1970.

(75) Howard, R. B., Mlynarski, F. G., and Sauer, G. C., "A Comparative Analysis
of Different Responses to Real and Represented Dwellings" in Mitchell, W. J.
(ed.) "Environmental Design: Research and Practice" PROCEEDINGS OF THE
EDRA 3/AR8 CONFERENCE, California, 1972.

(76) Kuller, R. A SEl'lANTIC MODEL FOR DESCRIBING PERCEIVED ENVIRONMENT, Lund,


Svensk Byggtjanst, 1972.

Kuller, R. "Beyond Semantic Measurement", PROCEEDINGS OF ARCHITECTURAL


PSYCHOLOGY CONFERENCE, Lund, 1973.

(77) Seeley, I.H., BUILDING ECONOMICS, London, MacMillan, 1972.

(78) Abel, C., THE LEARNING OF ARCHITECTURAL CONCEPTS, Portsmouth Polytechnic,


(mimeo), 1974.
FUNCTION AND SYMBOLISM IN ARCHITECTURE / 95

(7:;) 3roadbent, G. "Building Design As An Iconic Sign System" FIRST CONGRESS


OF THE INTERl'1ATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR Sm-lIOnC STUDIES, Milan, June 1974.

(:_ Davidoff, P., "Advocacy Planning" in JOUR.~AL OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF


PLANNERS VOL. 1 NO.4, November 1965.

::) Cross, N., (ed.) DESIGN PARTICIPATION, London, Academy Editions, 1972.

':2) Shelton, A. J., "Public Participation in Practice" in ARCHITECTS I JOURNAL,


13 October 1971.

~he following also contain extensive bibliographies on architectural semiotics:

3unt, R., "Architectural Semiotics, Index to Packaged Material provided for


Course Students" London, ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION (mimeo), 1974.

Bunt, R., Jencks, C. and Llorens, T. on the Meaning of the Built Environment, A
Bibliography of sources in English Language, to be published in Versus 8,
~'lilan, Bompiani ..

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