Posted by raj on September 30, 2001 at 08:43:34:PETER EISENMAN –
Architecture has traditionally been a strong form discipline. This is usually taken to mean that there is a one-to-one corelation between meaning and structure, meaning and form. As a strong form discipline, architecture is a very problamitic discipline, because it is a weak condition of sign: in other words it does not have a system of explicit signs. It is difficult to express happiness, sadness, goodness, badness – any emotional or philosophic concept. What language can deal with architecture cannot. Language is also a strong form system. Language also has a symbolic connotation, where there is not a one to one correspondence between word and sign. Literature and poetry try to make opaque the transperent relationship between the sign and the signified. On the other hand, in journalism when we read the newspaper we read for clarity. It is edited for clarity for a strong relationship between the sign and the signified. When we read literature, like Shakespeare, we are not reading for clarity but for possible opacity. Language has a very clear way of representating opacity, in literauture and in poetry. But in architecture, sign and signified have always been merged, not seperated, wheras in traitional views of language they have been seperated.
In architecture, to find a transperency in opacity, in order to have a possibilty of meanings, one has to pull the sign and signifier apart. One has to pull apart the one-to-one relationship between structure, form meaning, content, symbolism etc, so that it is possible to make many meanings. This pulling apart can be termed as displacement.
The question is, why do we want to displace architecture today? Why is it neccessay to separate function and structure from symbolism, meaning and form? Because in the past architecture always symbolised reality. In other words, while language has one kind of reality, poetry another, music another, architecture was perhaps the ultimate condition of reality, because it dealt with physical facts , with bricks and mortar, house and home. It was physical place, the fundamental condition of reality.i would luv to have a discussion about peter eisenman or zaha hadids works
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