Architectural Signs and Their Meanings

The analysis and interpretation of signs, complexes, and processes in the context of communications of all kinds is the object of semiotic research, and in the semiotic study of architecture, the analysis and interpretation of architectural elements, situations, and objects play a correspondingly central role. Even if, in this context, the theory of interpretation is often emphasized more than its practical application, it is nevertheless still possible to find a few representative applications from which typical procedures of semiotically oriented interpretation can be derived. Generally speaking, one can say that, from the semiotic point of view, architecture is based upon a conception of sign via which the given interpretation can be developed, e.g., the following "triadic" conception based upon widespread approaches:

                                       1.Form 

                                         (Material, Construction, Shape)       

         2. Function                                                  3. Meaning                              

            (physiological, psychic, mental)                     (emotional, practical, ideal)

In this model, the practice of analysis and interpretation consists of determining the relationships between the forms, functions, and meanings of architectural signs and, if possible, uniting them in a synthesis; in doing so, the differentiation of individual aspects of the given sign referent has an important role. While in traditional modern architecture the path to meaning necessarily should proceed from the function, and then the form, in late and post-modern architecture, this relationship has been relaxed, and form has taken on a life of its own to such an extent that it can communicate meaning independent of function or sometimes even in opposition to it; this is the case especially with buildings with open or artistic functions, but is increasingly seen also with in functional buildings of all kinds.

Primarily the following three aspects can be considered for the semiotic approach to interpretation:

In this contribution, these approaches are to be presented, explained, and demonstrated on the basis of several examples.

Bozen-Bolzano is one of the cities in which Mussolini’s Italian state systematically built in the 1930s and 1940s. From a small town of some 25,000 inhabitants, an influx of heavy industry caused it to grow in just a few years into a city of 100,000 people. This transformation of the former Austrian provincial town into an Italian border city with a symbolic character can be observed in its architecture.

After long years during which the architecture of those times was regarded by the German-speaking population of South Tyrol as a sign of oppression, the 1980s saw a revaluation of the formal qualities of these buildings (see Oswald Zoeggeler, Architektur für ein italienisches Bozen). Apart from some buildings, for example the city’s pathetic victory monument, the prevailing forms are developed from Bauhaus rationalism. For all the brutality (in town planning terms) with which this architecture was imposed, it does have considerable qualities. A positive example of urban development was the building of a more monumental and consciously modern row of arcades along the Freiheitstrasse-Corso della Libertà on the other side of the River Talfer in contrast to the central row of arcades in the middle of the medieval town. Large ensembles were created, for instance at the Siegesplatz-Piazza della Vittoria, which is still today reminiscent of the metaphysical images of Giorgio Morandi, or at the Gerichtsplatz-Piazza del Tribunale, which lies on the south-facing axis formed by the Italienallee-Corso Italia and Romstrasse-Via Roma.

This architecture is the expression of a society whose elites saw themselves as standing at the pinnacle of progress and who intended to march on to a yet more glorious era. It however also expresses the fact that, here, the individual is of only limited significance. While the arcades in the city are on a human scale, the 1930s arcades in Gries are consciously larger. Under these arcades, with their right-angled rather than rounded forms, the individual cuts a small figure: it is the times that are great. The buildings are also noteworthy for their detail: their entrance doors, their stairwells with marble stairs and curved handrails, the fine woods used to manufacture the doors with their stone frames, the arrangement of the generously-sized housing units – everything manifests a style that is all the more visible when compared with the relentlessly faceless architecture of the period after the Second World War.

The Italian architecture of the 1930s (and the 1940s) is characterised – and not just in Bozen-Bolzano – by its systematic integration of sculptures that often assume the heroic poses that are expressed in architecture as monumentality. As in Bauhaus, the idea is to unite the arts under the hegemony of architecture. As for example at the Siegesplatz-Piazza della Vittoria, sculpture is again and again supplemented by means of ideological statements chiselled in the stone, filling the architecture with the implicit content. So much for the symptom of architecture, to which also belong design and art.

The Gerichtsplatz-Piazza del Tribunale has a special story to tell: the law courts stand opposite a structure conceived at the time as a party building. This latter, today used by the state tax authority, is adorned by an enormous frieze, at that time one of the largest in Europe, if not the largest. It shows the history of the Fascist party in two sections, one above the other with, at the centre, Mussolini high on his horse with his famous saying: credere, obbedire, combattere [believe, obey, fight]. This recounts the most important steps on the way to power and the subsequent deeds while in possession of power (including the Abyssinian war). Remarkably, Hans Piffrader, a German-speaking South Tyrolean artist, was selected to laud policies that in South Tyrol conflicted with the interests of the German-language majority. By no means the only artist to select the dictator Mussolini as the subject of his work, Piffrader’s model was Trajan’s Column in Rome. Strangely enough, the work would only be completed in 1957, around a decade and a half after Mussolini’s fall from power. A high-ranking deputation was due from Rome and the authorities wished to avoid presenting an incomplete façade: the artist was thus requested to use the missing stones that had in the meantime been warehoused. The work indicates the relationship between art and power. Moreover, the work remains – if differently from the Victory Monument – an object of discussion and protest. We can thus to an extent speak of an entirely current symptom that makes a statement about the state of health of South Tyrolean society.

Some two years ago, a politically auspicious moment seemed to have arrived. The then Minister of Culture granted the South Tyrolean regional authority what had for a long time been regarded as impossible, namely permission to cover the embarrassing frieze. The official explanation was to avoid the glorification of fascism. Part of the media (and of the population) revolted: the real aim here appeared to be an attempt to cover up the Italian history of South Tyrol. When the authorities tendered for bids to cover the frieze in an artistic manner, numerous South Tyrolean artists responded with proposals. Their participation was an indirect indication of their opinion that a frieze in celebration of fascism must be covered up. It should thus – in contrast to the demands of a group of historians – no longer be visible and not historicised by means of communicative measures that would of course not necessarily be a pleasant experience for either the Italian-speaking or the German-speaking populations of South Tyrol. Furthermore, through their participation in the tender process, the artists showed that via their interventions they would be prepared to cover up the work of another artist. So much for the symptom of art.

This paper intends to investigate the functioning and efficacy of visual design in everyday urban life, by exploring the strategies of prescription and negotiation of behaviours employed by a particular corpus of subway posters. In September 1974 the Tokyo Metro subway company spread a series of posters which invited, in a humoristic style, to respect the “good manners” inside its stations and trains in service in the Japanese capital. The name assigned to these adverts was Manner Poster. From then on, this initiative was repeated every month, by changing every time messages and images, but maintaining an annual format.

The three editions from 2008 to 2010 are particularly striking for their irony and visual impact. Produced by the graphic designer Yorifuji Bunpei, they depict – in a comic-strip style and using white, black and yellow colours – narrative situations inside the subway stations and trains, where one or more persons perform, under the astonished eyes of the other passengers, actions considered as “ill-mannered”. The images present a large variety of such situations, ranging from occupying priority seats for elderly people and pregnant women, to rushing to board as the doors are closing, from throwing waste tissues on the ground, to blocking entrances with suitcases and backpacks. But the range of “ill-mannered behaviours” becomes quite wide. Indeed, it also includes eating food inside the trains, applying makeup, talking on mobile phones, pouring water on the other passengers while shaking the umbrella, falling down drunk and doing gym exercises in the metro. The images actually suggest paradoxical narrative sequences, visual hyperboles which exaggerate actions considered as impolite, trying to emphasize the negative effects on the other passengers. The bad-mannered subjects are visually distinct from the other passengers and from the portrayed settings according to different colors, positions and traits, in order to indicate the improper character of their behaviour. The victims, depicted with large bulging eyes, are active agents who perform through their gaze the negative sanction of the ill-mannered action, presenting an universe of values which has to be adopted, in order to guarantee the good functioning of the social relations. And the messages written above the images do not leave any doubts about the target of the posters: “Please do it at home”, says the one above the instant ramen (noodles soup) devourer, “Please do it at the office” says the message over the businessman engaged in writing notes while talking on the phone in the train. Manner Posters are first prescriptive and then proscriptive: they tell you what you “have to do”, in order to make you understand what you “have not to do” when using the subway. Posters are characterized by a written message (“Please do it at home”) which, according to the same author Yorifuji, conveys “the repressed frustration of the typical commuter” who is emotionally affected by the impolite behaviour. These posters, in other words, construct a form of identity for the metro passengers, posing everyone under the gaze/judgment of the other commuters, and prescribing situations and places which are appropriated to take specific courses of action. They are “regulators of the social life”, which charge everyday actions with positive or negative values, according to their spatial-temporal localisation.

An analysis of this “subway etiquette” discourse and of its development along the three editions, reveals a particular linguistic and visual differentiation of identity, which points to models of behaviour and sociality very different between each other, according to the Japanese or foreign origin of the passengers to which the poster’s persuasive action is directed. I will therefore try to demonstrate, on the one hand, how the interactions between poster-actors and human actors try to define distinct regimes of political enunciation (Latour 1999), on the other hand, how parodic translations of the Manner Posters – which immediately proliferated on web-sites and magazines in Japan – also lead to modes of negotiation of the values and social bonds prescribed.

On Visible and Invisible Design

It is unavoidable that the term "design" is taken to mean not only the symbolically effective form of products, but also the invisible shaping of the experiential profiles of their users. There is both a visible and invisible design at the object as well as visible and invisible design at the user. That is the starting-point of my thesis.

It creates a framework for speculations with the help of which one can practice design-philosophical thought and gain distance to one's everyday activity. I am talking about relations between the design-object and the user-subject. No one should be dissuaded from the challenge of thinking in a design-philosophical manner, from attempting it in actual practice, and from placing oneself in the role of an observer who recognizes that he, himself, and also others are in design-determined action fields on a daily basis – and from asking: What is design? What visible an invisible properties does it have? What does it do to and with its users? What experiences does it impart?

Of course, a fundamental ontologist like Heidegger, with the instrument of his elaborated philosophical logic, would first ask what a ding (or design-object) is at all or what conditions the "ding-ness of the ding" imposes. On the other hand, we can make use of our own observations and experiences. A practicable method for laymen to approach, on an everyday basis, the topic of design shall be proposed: What does this design intend and what does it effect?

As thinking users accustomed to handling and operating things, we can ask: What forms of objectification does one, oneself, experience nowadays? What experiences does one have when interacting with the tangible and the virtual? What does it mean to be culturally situated by technology and design?

Modern technology has or is such a powerful self-design that, as early as the middle of the 20th Century, the philosopher Günther Anders expressed the fear that "technology as a subject of history" could possibly disenfranchise its users. That was an assumption to which, today, must give rise to thoughtfulness.

On the basis of actual practice in coming into contact with dings, half-dings, non-dings, in-dings, and über-dings, the question arises as to what our position is in current product-cultural behavioral and experiential spaces. This lecture focuses on these spaces and is intended to animate its listeners to undertake a phenomenologically based practical exercise. Some pointers on this are provided in parts 2 – 6 of the paper.