Abstract
Buildings are meaningful parts of the environment; and when they are architecture (as over “mere buildings”), they aspire to greater meaning. Several accounts of architectural semiosis have been offered based on analogies to biology and language. These are critiqued. Critiqued, too, are accounts of semiosis generally that use systems-theoretical concepts and language. The essay goes on to outline what could be a contribution to biosemiotics from the work of perception psychologist, J. J. Gibson, as brought through architecture in the form of isovist field theory. This theory is not treated as an example of systems thinking as it usually is, but, with the help of philosopher Martin Buber as well as Jesper Hoffmeyer, as a way out of it—able to describe the meaning of objects and space phenomenologically and ecologically at once.
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Notes
Collins (1965 [1998]), in Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture lists four analogies, going back to the 18th century: the Mechanical Analogy (a building is like a machine), the Biological Analogy (a building is like an organism), the Linguistic Analogy (architecture is like a language), and the Gastronomic Analogy (architecture is like cuisine). Collins does not treat architecture’s likeness to music (“architecture is frozen music”), sculpture, or social being, the latter as we do here.
Primates do many things to impress and to maintain their reputations over their lifetime. But the desire to be (well) remembered after death, however, is exclusively human.
What does “mean” mean? The question is self-referential, of course, which is a problem. But as we also know, no single word that we “understand perfectly well” when we use it in context do we understand better when it stands alone. Indeed, its meaning multiplies, fuzzes out. We best know what “mean” means when we engage in precisely the kind of interdisciplinary exercise were are engaged in here.
By “astral event” I mean things like windows aligned to equinoctial dawn, Stonehenge style. In “How Buildings Mean,“ in Reconceptions in Philosophy, Nelson Goodman (1998, pp. 31–48) proposes that buildings mean in four ways: (1) by denotation (i.e. semantically), (2) by exemplification (being what we admire or want to be), (3) by metaphorisation (presenting an image of Nature, say, or of the Law), and (4) by mediated reference (participating in actual social and political events). I do not use Goodman’s taxonomy here, although conclusions similar to his pop up all over this text.
I certainly did when I wrote Deconstructing the Kimbell: An Essay on Meaning and Architecture (Benedikt, 1992).
By “age-superiority” I mean their saying: “I’m older than you, and wiser. I’ve seen things you’ll never see. And I’ll be here long after you’ve gone.“ Some buildings are better at projecting this Ozymandian message than others.
They can deceive on both scores, however, the second (i.e., wealth) more easily faked than the first (taste, with is association to social class).
I would argue that the ability to deceive intentionally is the hallmark of language. Consider: sounds issue from all kinds of things that creatures do, and these in turn can be significant (semiotic) to many other creatures. But only when an animal takes control of a sound, detaches it from its natural expression, and makes it in order to gain some advantage (voicing a snake alarm, say, when there is no snake in order to scatter rivals), does a usually-automatic, involuntary call or gesture (whatever it might be) break free of its proximate stimulus to become a tool, an agent of change, a word. The discovery was accidental. Its repetition was not. To this day, we tell of what is not evident to the senses. We can speak the truth only because we can lie.
It’s not that explaining architectural meaning with “straight” semiotics hasn’t been tried. See for example Gerard Lukken and Mark Searles (1993), Semiotics and Church Architecture. On the basis of such efforts, one fears that the complexity of the theory, the explanans, exceeds the complexity of the explanandum. Reidar Due’s (2017) essay “Semiotic Naturalism in Architecture Theory” does not have this problem. He deploys Wittgenstein’s pragmatism with respect to language to undo any purported “natural” connection between architectural construction, style, and ideology. Architecture means what architecture does, to and for.
Hoffmeyer (1996, pp. 61–62), Signs of Meaning in the Universe. “I should be very surprised if the driving force behind evolution did not prove…to be the…creativity and flexibility…accorded to…systems engaging in ever subtler forms of semiotic interplay. …Semiotic freedom refers not only to the quantitative mass of semiotic processes involved but even more so to the quality of these processes”.
“It should also be noted that the term (freedom) refers to an activity that is indeed free in the sense of being undetermined by the constraints of natural lawfulness. Human speech, for instance, has a very high semiotic freedom in this respect, while the semiotic freedom of a bacterium that chooses to swim away from other bacteria of the same species is of course extremely small” (ibid., p. 187).
The idea that x means what it means only because it is connected to all the not-x’s and like-x’s in the world is the hallmark of Saussurean linguistics and the movement called Structuralism.
See Barbieri (2009) for a full explanation of Biosemiotics beginnings.
The general rule seems to be: the simpler the signifier the greater the number of things it could signify, and vice versa.
Hoffmeyer (2008, pp. 82–83), Biosemiotics. Computers are nothing if not systems. Indeed, they are the crown jewels of system theory’s takeover of our world view. Note that everything we bring to them must first be converted into the language they understand, a language which I believe Hoffmeyer’s writing, perhaps in spite of himself, takes us towards.
On the difficulty science has providing a clear definition of what is alive and what not, see Zimmer (2021), Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.
It’s not that he didn’t lament the effects of economic Darwinism; he did. But I think he believed that system theory’s categories are innocent, inevitable, and without alternative in the sciences.
A building exists not only on its lot, but everywhere it can be seen from: across, and up and down the street. It exists also wherever its shadow falls, its fumes drift, or its garage empties. A building may be privately owned, but its effects are (nearly always) public and so subject to community approval or disdain. Buildings, economists would say, generate “externalities.“ The fact is, everything does. Hoffmeyer (2008, p. 25) meditates on “distributed existence” briefly in Biosemiotics.
See for example Biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer, 2008, pp. 65–62).
“An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.“ J. J. Gibson (1979 [2015]), p. 121.
One could here refer to the contemporary philosophical school called Object Oriented Ontology. For OOO thinkers, inanimate objects interact with other objects’ affordances too. And, like us, they never interact with (or “have access to”) all the properties of—all the affordances of, or the full reality of—the other. Kant’s noumenal world is inaccessible to all entities, not just inaccessible to humans and philosophers.
A great deal follows from realizing that perception-ability follows from action-ability. Ecological psychologists like Michael Turvey find over and over again that the neural structures that take care of perceiving X are the very same as those take care of producing or altering X. We understand speech with our “mouth circuits,“ not just our ears. We understand mass dynamics visually by using our throwing-and-catching-things neurons. Creatures live in species-specific umwelten (‘around-worlds’) selected not only by their sensory capacities but their action capacities—the things they are capable of physically doing—and these two capacities are neurologically paired.
Cary Campbell, Alin Olteanu, and Kalevi Kull (2019, pp. 352–381).
Remote sensing device.
This rule excludes the new visual information that can be brought in by video screens.
Gibson pointed out the importance of shear in the optic array. Array shear is the “indexical sign” of occlusivity in the environment, and it is detected through self-motion, and/or motion in the environment, and/or stereopsis, and/or abrupt changes in retinal resolution.
The original paper introducing isovists was by this author: “To Take Hold of Space: Isovists and Isovist Fields,“ (Benedikt, 1979).
See Hoffmeyer and Favareau (2009): 25–30.
For a fuller treatment of “m-branes” see Chap. 17 of my Architecture Beyond Experience (Benedikt, 2020).
It seems that the Middle Temporal (MT) and the Medial Superior Temporal Area (MST) areas of the brain are where isovistic depth information is extracted/abstracted from transformations in the optic array, combined with signals coming from the inner ear (which register the head’s inertial accelerations). These depth- or distance-information extraction mechanisms work tirelessly and swiftly beneath consciousness. See Hyangoo R. Kim, et al. (2016).
I shall not presume to describe tensor fields, or property of vector and tensor fields, called curl, which isovist fields do not have.
Some organism’s bodies can travel in any direction, of course, if usually horizontally, and their bodies have minimal asymmetry on that plane. (I’m thinking starfish and amoeba.) But the asymmetry is rarely zero. Even octopi have fronts in addition to tops and bottoms. Our heads are held high to better the view. Like meerkats. And our eyes and our feet mostly point in the same direction.
This speed is shared to some extent by primates, but the latter only track other’s head direction, not eye direction (see Tomasello 2014, p. 77).
The literature of human eye-movement studies is large. I cannot go into it here. With one exception I know about, never in that literature are “eyebeams” visualized crossing through 3-dimensional space: only “fixation points,“ “saccade lines” and “’heat’ maps” (total duration of fixation) plotted on 2-dimensional displays of the usually 2-dimensional “stimuli” (pictures) looked at.
Benedikt (2020, Chap. 14). The description Gibson gives of how vision works is scientific, indeed thrilling, when understood, but it is not natural. “Natural” are the vision-as-touch beliefs of children, and the vision-as-retinal-picture-interpretation beliefs of most college-educated adults.
In real cloud chambers, many subatomic particles leave curved and spiral tracks. This is because of magnetic fields. With glances, however, all “tracks” are straight lines, although they may bounce off mirrors or be refracted in prisms and lenses.
Concealed ones aside, cameras have immense power to intensify the strength and consequence of lines-of-sight. Among humans, the presence of a single camera can totally reorganize what I will soon call “formations.“ The metaphor of shooting is interesting too. It is the similarity between lenses and rifle shafts added to the notion that cameras are cannons (Canons) of eyebeams? For more on the effect of cameras and screens on social-spatial organization, see Benedikt (2020, pp. 102–104).
Formations receive a much fuller treatment in Benedikt (2020) Chap. 16. The choreography of Pina Bausch is an education in formation formation.
When he wrote this in 1964, he could have been writing about Facebook, now Meta: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we won’t really have any rights left.“ McLuhan (1965, p. 76). His interview in Playboy chills even more: https://fs.blog/2011/07/marshall-mcluhan/.
Martin Buber (1958), I and Thou, first page. Here one must read “man,“ “he,“ and “his” as “human being,“ “they,“ and “humankind’s”.
Buber’s account of his meeting with a tree in I and Thou (op. cit.) p. 7 cannot be improved upon. But see also La France (2015), “When you give a tree an email address.”
Many associate Buber’s I-You with Christian, agapeic love, which makes the last claim this: a life lived without love is sad and mechanical. Which may very well be true. But I-You is not synonymous with love. It may be precursory to love, but it is precursory to many attitudes and relations too, including pity, curiosity, obedience, even (studied) indifference. Omitted from this list is hate, since hate depends on not seeing the fullness of the other (which is necessary to I-You) but rather only the other’s obstruction value, which is I-It, to one’s own aims.
Coming close to this view is Graziano (2013) in Consciousness and the Social Brain. Some might think the Turing Test (based on John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment) does this already. Can we be convinced by a “bot” that we are talking to (actually, typing to, big difference!) a human being? It seems we can for quite a while. Buber would find Turing’s test a step in the right direction nevertheless.
It is common knowledge now that the brain does not function like a computer. Less contemplated is the thought that the brain might not function like a “system” either.
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Benedikt, M. Things, Organisms, Buildings, You: Meaning and Agency in the Built Environment. Biosemiotics 15, 235–259 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09499-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09499-3