The art of building with a preliminary plan is not just to create shelter, but to convey meaning. Very rarely do purely human activities or artifacts serve one purpose or perform one function, they are usually multifunctional. Clothes, cars, houses, and cities – everyone illustrates this point in their own way. By wearing these clothes or driving this car, one often, if not always, produces a message, though not always consciously.
In addition, our artificial environment, from the small niches over which we exercise very little control (the rooms in our homes), to the vast spaces formed by the merging of countless forces (neighborhoods and cities), truly express our lives in their own way. order to express ourselves through our lives.
The semiotics of architecture exploits the specific way in which the artificial environment provides sources of expression and, in addition, the ways in which the environment itself becomes an expressive force, structuring the way we move, see, and even feel.
This exploitation is closely related to aesthetics, proxemics (semiotics of space), zoosemiotics, and undoubtedly to other disciplines (some obviously semiotic in their view, others not).
This approach is most seriously taken by Roland Barthes, who moves from a metaphorical discussion of the “language of the city” to an analytical and systematic study of the identification of architectural signs and codes.
Ferdinand de Saussure in his “Course in General Linguistics” and later Ludwig Wittgenstein in his “Philosophical Studies” compared language to a city.
In the semiotics of architecture, the comparison is reversed – the city as a configuration of buildings and other artifacts is perceived as a language.
