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Furthermore, semiology looks on the relations holding between signijiers and signijieds, as having been established arbitrarily, or non-isomorphically. For instance, it is not necessary for the purposes of communicate -n, that the signifier 'tree' be the most 'tree-like' signifier to describe the phenomenon 'tree'. So long as once a tree is called a 'tree', eneryone involved agrees to call it that (or at least to call it that sufficiently frequently that occasional ironic, or humorous exceptions will still make sense). Alternatively, it is this same non-isomorphism that accounts for the simultaneous precision and flexibility of a signifier such as 'spring', which can, depending on its context, have as its signified either 'the season of the year following winter', 'a natural source of fresh water', or 'a mechanical device for providing flexible support for weight'. In short, semiological theory holds that the relations of signifiers and signifieds depend on both a conceptual arbitrariness and an operative non-arbitrariness. And that means, of course, that it is exactly the extent to which signs are capable of misinterpretation, that they are also capable of re-interpretation. To return to the case of architecture, it is just this fact that enables Aldo van Eyck to say that 'it is not merely what a space sets out to define in human terms that gives it place-value, but what it is able to gather and transmit'. ~1

We can now see why the beliefs underlying the Gesamtkunstwerk and life­ conditioning both entail such an aversion to ambiguity, such an incapacity for ever sustaining irony. In so far as either conception still allows any appreciation of the fact that the environment consists of a set of signs, it involves designers in an attempt to cut through all that, to 'get to the bottom of the situation' in exactly the fashion I have just described as impossible.

Take the case of Saarinen. In assuming that the 'ultimate reality' which he intended his design to reveal depended so completely upon its 'directness' and 'simplicity', he would obviously feel that he could not afford to leave any part of the detail of that design 'unsimplified', that is to say unclear or less than utterly straightforward. On the other hand, in taking for granted the capacity of the Thinkbelt to unfold itself in I'mman experience 'as it in itself really is', Price would obviously see no reason to concern himself with such 'ephemeral' matters. The life-conditioner, like the Gesamtkiinstler, always sees ambiguity as compromise, and irony as .hypocrisy.

The irony of ironies is that there is no ambiguity less controlled, no irony less sustained, than that which follows from these naivetes. But to show that requires two further tenets of semiological theory. I have already quoted Merleau-Ponty to the effect that what we perceive is 'the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people's intersect and engage each other like gears'. In other words, not only are we able to perceive only in terms of a past and present context, but we inevitably do perceive in such a context, if we perceive at all. Semiology takes account of this by positing that the signs which make up the langue of

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test bfd lone road /rail transfer

Section through the Madeley Transfer Area in Cedric Price's' Thinkbelt' project showing the particular organizational principle as­ sumed. Lateral layering of areas occupied by specific functional activities, including a 'zone' for 'social exchange'.

FRAMPTON: It is difficult to see how the CBS building could not also be regarded as ~ an act of repuction from the pre-existing norm of the skyscraper. However, the paucity of metaphorical content is all too evident. Saarinen's simplicity is empty and perverse. Man goes 'down' and 'not 'up' into a building imbued with a falsely honorific aura. The total suppression of the act of entry, EIiade's 'rite of passage' can only be regarded under the circumstances as an anthropomorphic denial, reminiscent of the extremes of utilitarianism.

a social phenomenon carry meaning through the fact of their total mutual inter­ relatedness. It is in this sense that Colin Cherry said: 'signals do not convey information as railway trucks carry coal'.2" That is, any individual sign in a code has a particular meaning by virtue of its distinctiveness from every other sign in that code. To understand a sign means in this sense to be aware of the set of alternative possible signs from the code that could conceivably take that sign's place. This dimension of meaning Saussure characterized as 'the relation­ ship of substitution' between the signs in the code.

However, the distinctiveness of all the signs in the code-one from another­ needn't be absolute. For a sign, or to be more precise, a signifier, can stand for, or substitute for, a range of signifieds, the precise reference to be established through the actual context of the sign in question. (Recall again the example 'spring' discussed above.) To understand a sign in this sense means to be aware of the extent to which the signs surrounding a particular sign qualify its parti­ cular significance. This dimension of meaning Saussure characterized as 'the relationship of contiguity' between the signs assembled in' any particular message,

Saussure illustrated this distinction by an actual architectural analogy him­ self, saying: 'Each linguistic unit is like a column of an antique temple: this column is in a real relation of contiguity with other parts of the building, the architrave for example; but if this column is Doric, it reminds us of the other architectural orders, Ionic or Corinthian; and this is a relation of substitution', 2:]

Jakobson has subsequently argued that Saussure's distinction between contiguity and substitution is capable of further elucidation. ~.; While, in Saussure's sense of the distinction, any message would necessarily be defined in terms of both contiguity and substitution, Jakobson thought that at the level of 'style', one could point to a possibility of emphasis on one or other of the two poles. He claimed that certain works of art were characterized primarily through relations of substitution (metaphor, in his terminology) while others were characterized more through relations of contiguity (metonymy, in that termin­ ology). Thus, he saw romanticist and symbolist poetry, and Chaplin's films, as emphasizing the pole of metaphor, and realist literature and Griffith's films as emphasizing metonymy. In architecture, one can point to a work like Mies' Farnsworth house as emphasizing the pole of metaphor, not only because of the reductive substitution from the norm 'house' which that design involves, but also because each element which remains is thereby super-charged with metaphorical significance. On the other hand, works like Carlo Scarpa's renova­ tion of the mediaeval palace of Verona, or an interior by Alexander Girard, emphasize the role of metonymy, since they do not substitute reductively from their norms, nor powerfully metaphorize their individual elements, but rather build up their significance out of the assembly of relatively diverse parts.

When however, in this perspective, we get to designs like CBS and the. Thinkbelt, we encounter what can only b~ described as a radical polarization between metaphor and metonymy, The Thinkbelt makes a radical substitution, both reductive (through the complete elimination of anticipated academic ele­ ments), and non-reductive (through a major shift from academic to industrial iconography); from the norm 'university'. CBS on the other hand, undertakes a radical intensification of the assembly of all its diverse elements (from the details of the window wall right down to the relations of the already-mentioned ash trays and potted plants),

It is this radical polarization which results first in the uncontrolled ambiguity and unsustained irony and eventually in the impoverishment of the existing cultural situation, which I referred to above. The first result occurs because

. polarization has the effect of eroding the occupants' capacity for detecting in the particular design itself any very helpful evidence of its relation to the historic and present context in which it has taken its place. Thus, the occupants are obliged all by themselves to bring to their experience of the environment that awareness of alternative possible environments on which that particular environ­ ment's whole distinctiveness rests. Far from being perceptually transparent

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