To establish a meaning-oriented practice of architecture and eventually to build meaning-oriented buildings first requires understanding what architectural meaning is. What are its limits? Its ambitions? In other words, is every memorable experience in or of a work of architecture an instantiation of architectural meaning or is there a qualitative threshold between architecture and mere buildings or between notable experiences and meaningful ones that entail a special kind of artifact or experience? And does the suggestion of a qualitative threshold, or a special kind of experience, necessarily throw us back into Truth language?
Surprisingly, these questions have been asked only vaguely and never answered.
Many architectural theorists have written philosophically around the topic (Christian Norberg-Schulz and Dalibor Veseley, for instance) and philosophers as astute as Gaston Bachelard and Martin Heidegger are famous for having written poetically around the topic – one might say they wrote poetry on the topic – but there is little that has been written that can be read and understood with the degree of precision necessary to ground action. It is prudent to start over. Set aside the standard philosophical terminology (Being, Dasein, Cogito), the dualisms (Being and Time … and Nothingness … and Event, Identity and Difference, Difference and Repetition, Subject and Object, Mind and Body, Self and Other, even Immanence and Transcendence), and particularly the Heidegger-influenced architectonic cosmos, and consider the hypothesis above at face value and in ordinary language:
Architectural meaning is the experience of an experience in and of architectural space.
What does this actually say? And is it complete – that is, comprehensive – without being so broad that non-meaningful experiences might breach the definition?
Read casually, it doesn’t say much. It says something like “experiences of architecture that are potent enough to be noticed constitute experiences of architectural meaning.” Obviously, this reading leaves the definition of meaning open to almost any experience of architecture – a lovely, if Pollyanna, notion that does not further meaning-oriented practice. Instead of discarding this hypothesis, however, it is worth analyzing it further. By parsing it into its constituent elements, perhaps its limitations and potentials will become apparent.
Seeing as “architectural meaning” is what is being defined, it makes sense to set this phrase aside for the time being as an unknown – along with the “is” which functions here like “=” in a formula. Beyond the “is,” the remainder of the hypothesis is composed of three constituent phrases – “experience of an experience,” “in and of,” and “architectural space” – each seemingly straightforward but enigmatic on closer inspection.
The following three meditations address each phrase in isolation. General thoughts as to the meaning of each are reframed twice – once from the perspective of my first encounter with the Pantheon and a second time from the near-archetypal experience of my grandparents’ basement. Untangling these enigmatic phrases and shoring up the specificity of the language should allow the statement of a new hypothesis and the formulation of axioms of architectural meaning.
Architecture is Fiction 