Agrest, Diana; Design versus Non-Design; 1974 … Criticism has failed to truly incorporate the ‘cultural’ problematic of architecture into its domain of concern… Practicing architects and critics of architecture have repeatedly emphasized the need to relate architecture to its social or cultural context… Colin Rowe,… for example, speaks of an architectural contextualism that situates the object of design in its physical-historical surroundings in terms of formal elements and relations; Venturi and Scott-Brown speak of the need to recognize mass culture as the necessary cultural product of our time and as a new source of inspiration for designers. However,… [it is possible] to investigate the mechanisms of the built environment [at the current] historical moment… [There are] 2 distinct forms of cultural production: Design: That mode by which architecture relates to cultural systems outside itself… Non-design: The way in which different cultural systems interrelate and give form to the built world… It is unnecessary to compare one type of architecture to any other type of architecture… Rather, one must oppose the notion of architecture (design) to the notion of… non-design… Design and Culture Design… is in effect a closed system… Within [design,]… a set of practices… is unified (architecture, urbanism, industrial design,…),… [because of the] specific characteristics [it possesses]… [At the edge of design, there is] a certain level of controlled, regulated permeability towards other cultural systems… Culture, on the other hand, is… a system of social codes that permit information to enter the public domain by means of appropriate signs… Design [may be] articulated as a ‘cultural system’ in relation to other cultural systems, at the level of codes… Specificity … Three types of codes regulate interpretation and production in design: Specific: Those codes which may be seen as exclusive to design, such as codes establishing relationships between plans and elevations or plans and cross-sections. Multiply specific: Those codes which are shared by cultural systems, among which design is included (ie spatial, iconic,…). Non-specific: Those which, while crucial to one cultural system (such as rhythm to music) participate in another (such as architecture) by virtue of a shared characteristic (in the case of rhythm, the temporality of sequence, auditory in one case and visual in the other)… The specificity of a signifying system is not defined solely by the specificity of its codes, but also by the form in which those codes are articulated… (an example of specific articulation is found in classical theories of harmony that utilize [non-specific] musical codes and arithmetical proportional series for the invention of [proportion-defining] architectural codes)… This mechanism allows for the articulation of design with some systems and not with others (according to the ‘internal’ determinations of design)… This process of articulation might, however, take place according to ‘external’ determinations (the forces of economics, politics, or other ideologies foreign to design)… Metaphoric Operations in Design … [At the boundaries of design,] filtering… takes place by means of certain processes of symbolization… An equivalence of sense is produced by restricting the access of certain codes and figures from other systems into architecture… [In this,] metaphoric and metonymic [operations]… are the mechanisms of opening and closure… The relation of similarity [is underlined by] the metaphor, and the relation of contiguity [is determined by] the metonymy; [the 2 semantic-syntactic lines along which] any discourse… may develop… [This is seen in functionalist applications, such as] the well-known nautical metaphor in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye… Here, 2 different signifying systems are related: dwelling and ocean liner. The necessary condition for this relationship is provided by the existence of an element common to both, [such as] the window. Through a metaphoric operation, a figurative substitution of the signifying element… is produced,… carrying and transferring codes from one system to the other. The new form is thus loaded with the new meanings [that can be employed in a]… new architectural ideology…
Functionalist Metaphors … At the building scale, Le Corbusier establishes a connection between architectural systems and other systems… based on similarity of function… The Critique of Functionalism With the waning of the enthusiasm for functionalism in the late 1940s, a series of works appeared which… were explicitly concerned with the cultural rather than the functional aspects of design… [In] the work of Team 10,… new openings and closures were produced by means of metaphoric operations… [In accounting for urban form, the city is related] to nature (a tree;… given qualities of growth, organicity, movement, [and understood formally to possess] a stem, branches, and leaves)… [At the building scale, building corridors acquire the qualities of urban streets]… Despite the explicit intent of Team 10 to open the system of architecture to culture, however, the result does not, in the end, differ much from the reductive system they criticize… The systems to which architecture is supposed to be actively linked (life or nature) are… filtered and reduced through the metaphor of architectural forms…(the metaphoric operations, rather than functioning to open the design system beyond its limits, in fact operate as filtering mechanisms which precisely define those limits)… Design/ Non-Design … In the world of non-design,… an internal analysis of single systems is revealed as inadequate… Here there is no unique producer, no subject… Instead, there is a complex system of intertextual relationships. The opposition between design and nondesign is fundamentally defined by 3 questions: Institutionality: … Design may be defined as a social practice that functions by a set of socially-sanctioned rules and norms… (an institution)… [It has] normative writings and written texts… that fix its meaning… [But there is an] absence of a normative written discourse in non-design… Thus, the defining aspects [of design] are lost in… non-design. Limits and specificity:… [If the] articulation… between different cultural systems… [is approached] at the level of codes,… it is possible to discern modes of articulation,… to define… the process by which culture is woven into [the built environment]… Subject: … Design [seeks a]… historically-determined individual subject,… [while] non-design [refers to social subjects such as] the delirious, the carnivalesque, or the oneiric… Fragments of Reading … The urban environment as the object of reading is not a closed, simple unity, but a set of fragments, or ‘units of readings’. Each of these units may be replaced by others; each part may be taken for the whole. The dimension of the built environment depends upon the density of meanings, the ‘semantic volume’… (certain types of configurations, like public spaces,… are ideal… not only for their ‘semantic volume’, but also for their signifying complexity)… [In this reading, metaphorical connections are now considered in terms of chains and shifters, in an overall process of ‘miseen-séquence’]… Condensation and displacement are the 2 basic operations in the work of elaboration of dreams… These 2 operations… are 2 ways of displacing meanings… (produced by… metaphor and metonymy, where the metaphor corresponds to condensation and metonymy to displacement)… Chains: A metaphor… replaces the referential codes in a signifier of departure with another code… Once an intersemiotic metaphor… is produced,… a chain of signifiers along the codes and subcodes of that cultural system is organized by ‘natural association’ (metonymically)… [In the case of ‘theater’, for example, one may connect, in sequence, to the] scenic, gestural, decorative, textual, verbal, etc… Shifters:… [At some point,] some signifier becomes [a new] departure signifier,… [towards] other cultural systems like film, fashion, etc. These signifiers which open to other systems may be called ‘shifters’… Shifters… are the conditions of the probability of producing different readings… They are not concerned with signification but with the linking of signifiers… [They articulate] the subject of the reading, the laws of the unconscious, and the historico-cultural determinants…