Revision as of 11:49, 10 April 2008

Semiotics in the Liberation of Function from Form

... ours is not the environment for heroic communication through pure architecture. Each medium has its day, and the rhetorical environmental statements of our time – civic, commercial, or residential – will come from media more purely symbolic, perhaps less static and more adaptable to the scale of our environment. The iconography and mixed media of roadside commercial architecture will point the way if we will look. Housing for the elderly on the Oak Street Connector, if it had to be a monument, would have been more economical, socially responsible and amenable as a conventional apartment building,lost by the side of the expressway, with a big sign on top blinking, I AM A MONUMENT. Decoration is cheaper. - Robert Venturi,"Learning From Las Vegas," 1972

When Robert Venturi looked to the vernacular architecture on the Las Vegas strip in the late 1960's, he saw a resurrection of symbolism in the built environment that had seemed destined for extinction in the wake of architectural modernism. Whereas the Bauhaus' legacy in modernism had stripped buildings of ornament in an attempt to unify form with function, Venturi was amazed to find a Las Vegas strip dotted with generic buildings differentiated only by elaborate ornamental signs designating the unique functions and identities of otherwise identical spaces. The Vegas strip not only violated a progression away from decoration (which led many to credit Venturi's text as having launched architectural postmodernism) but brought more clearly into focus the impact of the automobile upon architecture that needed to be identified from greater distances over shorter durations of time. Whereas the heroic communication of pure architecture had in the past led to buildings and forms which - albeit imperfectly - communicated activities contained within them through forms and function through forms and facades designed to embody the activities contained within them

The purpose of any space is determined by both the symbols used to designate where one is (ie an open for business sign), and the practices that take place there. In "Learning From Las Vegas," Robert Venturi takes a close look at how the Vegas Strip (in the late 60's) consisted of buildings that were differentiated primarily by flashy signs decorating unoriginal buildings (what he called the "decorated shed." He traced the phenomenon to the impact of speed on architecture - mainly that in a landscape where one drives past buildings, signs enable one to differentiate one space from another at a faster speed than differentiated architectures could (which is why signs matter so much for businesses on highways).

What makes this so interesting is that when semiotics are reintroduced into architecture, communicating the specific use of a generic space, buildings enter a mediated realm - And I think that's key here - that when people believe they're in a market when they see a "market" sign, it enables the use of a spatial semiotic to successfully mediate the entire space provided that the same activity occurs - which is really just to say that the Las Vegas strip is this intermediate phenomenon whereby we all can find what we want in foreign places, and that's precisely the mechanism by which we can create a market without the actual space of a market (a shopping cart icon does the trick!).