Reviews for Words and buildings

The average rating for Words and buildings based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-21 00:00:00 Rodney Walker A rather rare piece of architectural theory that's well written, critically informed. More when I finish it - just about to start the second section. The first section looks at the key metaphors used to understand architecture, whilst the second part breaks down into key pieces of terminology and unpacks them in order to interrogate their full meaning and implications.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-02-24 00:00:00 Paula Sims The chapter on 'Language Metaphors' was my go to starting place, and it opens with the notion that these are some of the richest and most contentious metaphors in architecture, triggering deep debate across the field. One of the debates surrounds the idea that we 'read' a drawing but that does not mean that the building is automatically a linguistic sign. Forty states that there are three main distinctions that can be used as reference points. First, that architecture is like language, not that it is language. In other words, it has similar attributes and conventions, but it is not the same thing. Secondly, language has two parts which; semantics (meaning) and syntactics (eg grammar) each of which can be used as a frame. Thirdly, architectural metaphors can be based on literature-language or linguistics-language. [The former are those designs inspired by texts by Kafka, Woolfe and so on, and the latter relates more to 'semantic' architecture, for example Eisenman and Tschumi.] Language Metaphors have been used in the past used to show that architecture was a liberal art like literature, or that its parts were representative of the whole, to explain the ways in which buildings communicate or attempt to depict origin stories. It could also be used to emphasise the comparison with grammar or semiotics. These, Forty suggests, are the overriding categories of language-metaphors used in architecture. Each approach was framed by the readings and writings of the time and influenced the collective thinking about art, literature, and architecture. As with the question regarding whether we 'read' buildings, is the secondary debate; whether it can be 'read' like a narrative to external events, or whether it is just there, being itself. The first approach relates to most mannerism styles and the latter to early modernism. [Although of course modernism created its own narrative that was then used to be 'read' by its adherents]. Goethe suggested "that architecture, like language, was not simply a medium of individual expression, but more importantly expressed the entire collective identity of particular peoples, the Volksgeist." Barthes, the original master of mythological signs, came to realise that no meaning could be eternally fixed, that even metaphors have chains of associated metaphors attached to them. Trying to reduce a sign to a single meaning was impossibly reductive. Similarly, after the semiologists had their turn at trying to turn everything into a science of symbols, Lefebvre wrote of how Gothic churches were made before they were read, and not even made to be read, they were simply spaces for living people with bodies and lives to live in, in their own particular urban context. As such, Forty suggests, it is now more fashionable to condemn linguistic analogies rather than to support them. However, he notes: "…this reaction seems excessive. Even if architecture is not a language, it does not lesson the value of language as a metaphor for talking about architecture." In other parts of the book he explores the gender-metaphor and notes that it was a selection device for hundreds of years, and then suddenly, post WWII the distinction disappeared. Partly he thinks this is because Modernism wanted to be different and partly because of a political sentiment that saw the work of Fascism (Nazism and Communism) as being particularly 'masculine'. Forty notes however that "The absence of metaphor may not mean that the distinction has altogether ceased to exist." He suggests that form, materials, movement all come loaded with covert suggestiveness that replace the more literal gender tropes. In the end I read the whole first half of this book and gained a lot of useful information and some powerful insight into the language-metaphor and to a lesser extent the science-metaphor.