The Semiotics Of The Built Environment

This volume analyses the interpretation of the built environment by connecting analytical frames developed in the fields of semiotics and geography. It focuses on specific components of the built environment: monuments and memorials, as it is easily recognisable that they are erected to promote specific meanings in the public space. The volume concentrates on monuments and memorials in post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Estonia. Elites in post-Soviet countries have often used monuments to shape meanings reflecting the needs of post-Soviet culture and society. However, individuals can interpret monuments in ways that are different from those envisioned by their designers. In Estonia, the relocation and removal of Soviet monuments and the erection of new ones has often created political divisions and resulted in civil disorder. This book examines the potential gap between the designers’ expectations and the users’ interpretations of monuments and memorials. The main argument is that connecting semiotics and geography can provide an innovative framework to understand how monuments convey meanings and how these are variously interpreted at societal levels.

Cognition and the Built Environment argues that interacting with our built environment, as users and as architects, is a cognitive process. It claims that architecture, in its form and meaning, is a basic, embodied level of human cognition. The assumption is that we and our built environment together form an intelligent system, a cognitive feedback loop between us and the world of which we are part. With this as a vantage point, the book discusses the meaning and intelligence of concrete architectural environments as well as the agency of the architect, of his client and of the user. The inquiry oscillates between abstract thought, topological models and cognitive semiotics, between pragmatist philosophy and the professional practice of planning cities, developing projects and using objects. Architecture serves more complex purposes than our caves, paths and landmarks did. Written for students and academics of urban design, urban planning and architectural theory, Cognition and the Built Environment argues that human cognition feeds on the interaction between thought, agency and built environment, and that architecture is the spatial form of this interaction.

Drawing upon the literature of landscape geography, tourism studies, cultural studies, visual studies and philosophy, this book offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the interaction between urban environments and tourists. This is a necessary prerequisite for cities as they make themselves into enticing destinations and compete for tourists' attention. It argues that tourists make sense of, and draw meaningful conclusions about, the places in which they tour based upon the interpretation of the signs or elements encountered within the built environment, elements such as graffiti and lamp posts. The writings of the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce on interpretation provide the theoretical model for explaining the way in which mind and world, or thoughts and objects, result in tourists interacting with place. This theoretical framework elucidates three applied studies undertaken with foreign visitors to the Hungarian capital of Budapest. Based upon extensive ethnographic field work, these studies focus on tourists' interpretation of the urban landscape, with particular attention paid to the encounters with national culture, the role of architecture and the importance of the prosaic in urban tourism.

This book provides an extended exploration of the multimodal analysis of spatial (three-dimensional) texts of the built environment, culminating in a holistic approach termed Spatial Discourse Analysis (SpDA). Based on existing frameworks of multimodal analysis, this book applies, adapts, and extends these frameworks to spatial texts. The authors argue that choices in spatial design create meanings about what we perceive and how we can or should behave within spatial texts, influence how we feel in and about those spaces, and enable these texts to function as coherent wholes. Importantly, a spatial text, once built, is also a resource which is then used, and an essential aspect of understanding these texts is to consider what users themselves contribute to the meaning potential of these texts. The book takes the metafunctional approach familiar from Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) and foregrounds each metafunction in turn (textual, interpersonal, experiential, and logical), in relation to the detailed analysis of a particular spatial text.

Design is a means of communication and the conduit for transmitting a message between designers and users of their built work (Fiske, 1990). The design work resembles the cultivated construction and carrier of a message as a language. The designer encodes the message or information into design elements through his/her built work, and the user decodes it. Therefore, designers convey their intentions by incorporating them into the patterns of shape, structure, material, and landscape of the site (Krieger and Saunders, 2009). A design element has no intrinsic meaning. According to Manning (2004), a design element "is something that makes sense in the mind of some person, [and it] may be seen usefully as the connection between an expression and a content" (p.567). Accordingly, design work can have a penumbra of meanings, depending on who is interpreting them. No observers have exactly the same background and point of view. In order to understand how people construct a meaning from the interpretation of the built environment, this research examines the relationship between the designer's intentions and the user's perceptions. The theoretical background of this study is semiotics, an examination of how designers and users interpret design elements as non-verbal communication. Semiotics is a transparent and appropriate tool that offers a suitable framework for the study of meaning transference in places (Krampen et al., 1987; Rose, 2007; Gottdiener, 1995). Meaning is not something apart from function, but is itself a most important aspect of function. Additionally, semiotics offers a very full box of perspectives for taking a built environment apart and tracing how it works in relation to broader systems of meaning and how people explain design elements of new urbanism projects. This study explores the relationship between designer's intentions and users perceptions in new urbanism project. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate and explore how transference of meaning into the built landscape represent and organized those intentions through the perspective of Addison Circle and Austin Ranch in North Texas. This research uses the qualitative research method, supported primarily by face-to-face interviews with in-depth, open-ended questions. Data from the interview were transcribed and analyzed according to Taylor and Bogda's grounded theory approach (1998). The results indicate that meaning is an active process. When people start generating meaning through the use of elements from the places, a signification system is an autonomous occurrence (Danesi, 2007, p.180). This process can have three levels of meaning, including denotative meaning, connotative meaning, and deeper connotative meaning. Denotative meaning refers to the common-sense or the obvious meaning. Connotative meaning is the extended meaning of the design elements. Deeper connotative meaning is a catalyst for appropriation by designers and users. Consequently, the incorporation of meaning in the design work can revive the users' senses and stir their subconscious to create an environment that will facilitate personal association for an individual and a community.

Brought together for the first time - the seminal writing on architecture by key philosophers and cultural theorist of the twentieth century. Issues around the built environment are increasingly central to the study of the social sciences and humanities. The essays offer a refreshing take on the question of architecture and provocatively rethink many of the accepted tenets of architecture theory from a broader cultural perspective. The book represents a careful selection of the very best theoretical writings on the ideas which have shaped our cities and our experiences of architecture. As such, Rethinking Architecture provides invaluable core source material for students on a range of courses.

Language, as one of the semiotic systems, encounters culture on the one hand, and has interrelationship with the people who live in that lingo-society on the other. According to several scientific experiments "Language" and "Environmental Perception Process" are also shaping a unique phenomenon. So one can say that language can be considered as one of the most important tools/processes by which people can understand or communicate with the constructed environment. Accordingly, one of the methods that can be used for perceiving the depth of people's culture and beliefs is to refer to their language in a framework of cultural semiotics. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and some other theories have demonstrated the mutual relationship between language and people perception. Therefore, it can be argued that every language provides a framework for thinking and experience. In this day and age, if we want to achieve the sustainable environment, we must know more and more about man's perception and factors involved. Language and words are among these factors. In this book we want to show this interrelationship and explain how it works. To achieve this purpose, first, the relationship between language, culture, perception and built environment and also some rationalists' views will be studied. Then we will discuss the signs and culture, especially in the philosophy of structuralism and post-structuralism. Finally, in the second part, five semantic fields in Persian language will be reviewed as case studies: 'space and place', 'communal living spaces', 'connectional spaces', 'artificial green spaces' and 'residential spaces'.