Meaning of space and architecture of place
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Pierre Pellegrino
Abstract
This article reviews and evaluates some aspects of the semiotic heritage from a fundamental treatise on architecture. It shows how the system set in place by Vitruvius at the dawn of our era is being today brought up to date by contemporary architects, yielding a projection know-how that can contribute to the design of virtual worlds.
The question is therefore, how can space make sign. According to the Saussurean conception of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified and Hjelmslev's concept of connotation, the semiotic of space answers this question and clarifies the various approaches to description of meaning production developed in the theory of architecture. In this way the semiotic theory can give an explanation of the modernist function-oriented conception of the world, as well as of the post-modernist communication-oriented one. For this purpose it questions the concept of generative grammar that the contemporary architects have developed starting from the works of Chomsky.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
