Architecture

Since the 1960s, semiotics has expanded to examine spatial concepts like space, place, landscape, architecture, urban space and built environment, focusing on their interpretation and meanings beyond historical, political or socio-economic aspects. Since the 1970s, architectural semiotics emerged as the pioneering endeavour to develop a semiotic framework for understanding the built environment’s capacity to convey meanings (Barthes 1970; Arnheim 1977; Preziosi 1979a; Zeitoun et al. 1979; Broadbent et al. 1980; Rénier 1982; Eco 1986; Lotman 1987). In this context, Umberto Eco (1997) proposed viewing architecture as a system of signs comprised of spatial, denotative and connotative elements. He argued that while architectural objects primarily serve functional purposes, they also communicate through their form and function. Subsequent scholarly works have furthered this exploration, delving into semiotic analyses of architecture (e.g., Muntañola 1999; Hammad 2003, 2010; Pellegrino 2010; Levy 2006; Rénier 2008; Pellegrino and Jeanneret 2009; Guerri 2016; Tchertov 2019)^[1].

Alexandros Lagopoulos (2020) redefined Eco’s semiotic theory of architecture, proposing a urban social semiotics aiming to explore the collective processes involved in city planning, ultimately striving to develop a cohesive model for the future city. Already since the 1980s, Gottdiener and Lagopoulos (1986) embarked on a semiotic exploration of urban space, pioneering the field of urban semiotics. This discipline delineates the fundamental criteria that define a space as urban within precapitalist and contemporary societies (e.g. Krampen 1979; Duncan 1990; Hammad 2010). This approach involves analysing existing urban spaces and their representations, resulting in a plethora of semiotic analyses that offer diverse perspectives on the city (Volli 2009; Marrone 2013; Marrone and Pezzini 2006, 2008; Pellegrino 2007; Pilshchikov 2015; Giannitrapani 2017)^[2].

Since the end of the 1970s, the field of architectural and urban semiotics had begun to hone in on a specific aspect: the built environment (Preziosi 1979b; Rapoport 1982). The built environment comprises the human-altered surroundings, encompassing structures and infrastructures like buildings, objects, landscape design, transportation and telecommunication systems, energy and water supply facilities and so on. In more recent times, interdisciplinary approaches have emerged, blending semiotics with other fields to analyse the built environment, such as cultural geography (Bellentani 2021), urban planning (Remm 2016) and linguistics (Wang & Heath 2011). Scholars in this field widely acknowledge that the built environment transcends its physicality, functioning as a form of discourse suggesting that, through intentional design, the built forms can convey specific meanings and wield influence over a community of interpreters (Nanni and Bellentani 2018). This research has predominantly centred once again on the built environment of urban spaces, with a particular emphasis on structures and infrastructures intentionally erected for political, social or cultural reasons such as monumental buildings, squares, monuments, memorials, museums and national landscape designs (e.g. Violi 2014; Abousnnouga and Machin 2013; Huebner and Phoocharoensil 2017; Bellentani 2021).

A tentative taxonomy of the foundational premises guiding the semiotics of architecture and the built environment might comprise five primary paradigms. Firstly, the semiological paradigm, rooted in de Saussure’s work, conceptualises built forms as sign systems and instruments through which meanings are articulated. It seeks to elucidate the principles governing the signification of urban space, drawing parallels with text and language to expound upon social relations within urban life. A second approach follows the generative model by Algirdas J. Greimas and the Paris School (Greimas 1970, 1983). Generative semiotics posits that texts evolve through three levels of signification, each representing a progression from abstract to concrete. Applied to the built environment, the generative paradigm examines these layers within and beyond the textual realm. More recent semiotic theories have aimed to transcend the semiological and generative paradigms, seeking to establish more nuanced connections between spatial expressions and meanings. Within this trend, scholars have delved into the parallel study of representations, power dynamics, social structures and memory within urban landscapes and the built environment (Lindström et al. 2014). The third paradigm traces its roots to the Tartu-Moscow School: research in this realm revises the textual paradigm, providing a pragmatic understanding of built forms and extending the discussion to urban planning (Remm 2016). Drawing inspiration from Charles Peirce’s model of semiosis, the fourth paradigm advocates for a interpretative approach to understanding the habits of individuals and groups within the built environment (Arnesen 2011). This approach extends semiotic analysis to the physical environment and living systems. Guerri et al. (2016) have proposed the Semiotic Nonagon model, utilising theoretical categories from Peirce to analyse various conceptual objects, including architecture and the built environment. Biosemiotics constitutes the fifth paradigm, viewing biological and physical processes as sign systems ripe for semiotic analysis (Cobley 2001; Kull 2005). Scholars are now developing a biosemiotic approach to understanding urban space and the built environment (e.g., Bellentani and Arkhipova 2022; Ireland and Cobley 2022).

This body of research highlights that the semiotics of architecture and the built environment remains a diverse field of study, characterised by a lack of complete unity in both research and theory. Architects, geographers, semioticians, anthropologists, landscape designers, historians employ various approaches to look at the meaning-making and interpretations of various built forms. Here, an approach that bridges semiotics and cultural geography is introduced, offering a framework for exploring the interpretative dimensions of the built environment’s meaning-making (as elaborated in Bellentani 2021). Semiotics provides tools to decipher changing meanings in the built environment, while acknowledging that these spaces are shaped by and reflect cultural contexts. The built environment cannot be analysed separately from its geographical and cultural context: culture affects how built forms are produced and interpreted; in turn, built forms convey new cultural meanings in space. This section explores how design strategies create culturally specific spaces and how various groups interpret them, considering four key dimensions: visual, interpretative, intertextual and cultural.

1. The visual dimension

The visual dimension of architecture and the built environment encompasses its material forms, divided into two interconnected levels: plastic and figurative (Greimas 1989). Both the plastic and the figurative level are visually perceptible and thus they can be grouped under the visual dimension. The figurative level is recognised on the basis of a correlation with objects of the world. It regards the visual representations and the conventional symbols embodied in built forms. The plastic level refers to physical aspects such as shapes, materials of construction, colours, topological distribution and sizes.

Traditional visual semiotics distinguished between expression and content, aligning them with the plastic and figurative levels respectively (Thürlemann 1982). It has therefore conceptualised expressions as ontological entities regarding the physical and visually perceptible aspects of texts. As such, expressions have become meaningless substances to which intangible meanings correlate. Considering expressions as having an ontological status led to the assumption that meanings can be extracted from the materiality of visual texts without any active interpretation process. However, the plastic and the figurative level cannot be automatically associated to expression and content respectively, rather they should be considered in a more participative way (Paolucci 2010), i.e. based on a more complex, context-dependent relationship, allowing for a dynamic understanding of meaning in both plastic and figurative aspects.

2. Designers and users

Interpretations of built forms, like textual interpretations, balance between designers’ intentions and users’ interpretations. Eco (1984) highlighted the debate in textual interpretation between authorial intent and reader interpretation, later proposing an intermediate ‘intentio operis‘ (Eco 1990) that merges author and reader intentions. This concept, transcending the idea that valid interpretations must align with the author’s original intent, acknowledges that texts guide but don’t dictate interpretations. Eco introduced the Model Reader concept (Eco 1979). According to this model, empirical authors craft texts with assumptions about the social background, education, cultural traits, tastes and needs of their readership. Consequently, these authors anticipate and shape their readership, accentuating certain interpretations while concealing others (Eco 1979; Lotman 1990). Despite authors’ attempts to steer interpretations, texts are not merely “communicative apparatuses” meant to directly impose meanings on readers (Eco 1984: 25). Instead, texts evolve into dialogic spaces where authors and readers engage in ongoing negotiation of their interpretations (Ricoeur 1983; Rénier 2008). This model extends to the built environment, where designers, akin to authors, anticipate user responses, guiding interpretations while allowing room for diverse interpretations. Marrone (2009) describes Model Users as those individuals who adhere to the designers’ intentions and develop behaviour patterns consistent with the envisioned function of built forms. However, despite designers’ efforts to steer interpretations, users may interpret and utilise built forms in ways that diverge from the intended design. These unanticipated interpretations and practices significantly contribute to the meaning-making of built forms.

3. Intertextual relations

Architectures and built forms cannot be analysed in isolation from their interactions with the surrounding built environment. Within linguistic and semiotic research, the concept of intertextuality has been employed to describe how texts establish connections with other texts (e.g., Kourdis 2018). Post-structural geography has used “intertextuality” to describe the relations that built forms establish between them (Duncan 1990: 22–23). Similarly, in the semiotics of architecture, “intertextuality” has been used to study architecture as part of a broader series of works developed over time (Muntañola 2004: 38). Pellegrino and Jeanneret (2009) explained that spaces are created through a combination of layered and distinct locations, entwined and intersecting, both open and closed to each other. These locations provide virtual positions that are organised through the partition and composition of spaces, defining their connections and disconnections. This perspective emphasises that built forms are not isolated entities but are shaped by the interplay with other built forms. As texts reinterpret other texts (Eco 1984), newly erected built forms actively affect the interpretation of the existing built environment. The location of a built form significantly shapes its meaning, while the building itself contributes to the significance of its location. The built environment often undergoes reconstruction or redesign to suit new structures, with such spatial modifications influencing the meanings of pre-existing buildings.

4. Cultural context

Architecture and the built environment is deeply intertwined with cultural context. Culture shapes both designers’ and users’ interpretations, influencing actions and interactions. In turn, built forms infuse space with cultural meanings, affecting cultural evolution. Semiotics views culture as multi-layered, encompassing both global knowledge and local routines. Eco (1984) coined the concept of Encyclopaedia to indicate the stock of shared signs that interpreters use during their interpretative processes. At the global level, the encyclopaedia contained all the potential interpretations circulating in culture. At local levels, it included the routinised set of instructions to interpret specific portions of the socio-cultural space. Eco (1984: 2–3) called this routinised set of instructions “encyclopaedic competence”.

Torop (2002: 593) defined culture as a “mechanism of translation” characterised by the constant interaction between its global level and its local manifestations. Lotman (2005) further elaborates this through the semiosphere and the centre-periphery hierarchy, where central cultures set norms but are often reshaped by more adaptable peripheral cultures. At the centre of the semiosphere, there are the “most developed and structurally organised languages, and in first place the natural language of that culture” (Lotman 1990: 127). Central cultures continuously attempt to prescribe conventional norms to the whole culture. The majority of members of culture embodies the norms of the legitimate culture: in this view, culture consists of a set of meanings that are essential and valid for a society. However, contestation of cultural hierarchies and conflicts over the meaning of the legitimate culture are a norm in any society (Bourdieu 1984). Peripheral cultures can always arise and variously refashion the central norms. In doing so, they are vital sources for the definition and the development of the central culture itself. As more developed and organised, central cultures are rigid and incapable of development (Lotman 1990). Conversely, more flexible peripheral cultures continuously refashion the more regulated central cultures.

The centre–periphery hierarchy by Lotman can be useful to explain the meaning-making of the built environment. Every planning culture defines its own spatial and design models to convey its symbolic vocabulary in space, promoting the kinds of ideals it defines as “central” and wants users to strive towards. However, the ways in which the built environment is designed can elicit a range of different interpretations at the societal level, placed at different distances from the one defined by the central culture. In this framework, the built environment is a manifestation of cultural meanings, influenced by various ‘interpretative communities’, each one having its way to frame social reality based on specific cultural traits, political views, socio-economic interests as well as contingent needs (Yanow 2000). Interpretative communities interpret and use differently the built environment on the basis of their shared stock of knowledge, associable to the concept of “encyclopaedic competence” (Eco 1984: 2–3).

^[1] For a review of the semiotics of architecture, see Loeckx and Heynen 2020.

^[2] For a review of urban semiotics, see Bellentani et al. 2024.