ABSTRACT
Linguistics is the science of language. It was launched with the publication of Ferdinand De Saussure’s 1907 to 1911 lecture notes entitled A Course in General Linguistics (Palmer, 1997: 14). Saussurian linguistics became the core interest of the structuralists fifty years later. It was also co-opted by mid-twentieth-century architectural avant-garde critics as the antidote to a mute and uninteresting modern architecture. These post-modernists hoped that by restoring a language of architecture that the public could find meaningful, architecture would become popular again. After all, there had been an understood classical language in architecture, as documented in John Summerson’s erudite The Classical Language of Architecture (1963). The 2,000-year-old classical language was discarded by the modernist purge of architectural history. That purge is now regarded as a mistake, as was argued by Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). This single publication was the watershed event that marked the shift in architectural sensibilities from function to meaning. Jencks’s lively The Language of Post-modern Architecture (1977) was the response to Summerson. Architectural post-modernism was eventually devalued by its popular success. Third-rate designers found it too easy to arbitrarily slap a classical portico on a fast-food restaurant, causing the movement to become discredited in the eyes of the critics and the informed public.
