Introduction

This chapter talks about architectural language. Approached stylistically, architectural elements are treated analogically as parts of speech and its systems of organizations as grammars. In classic information theory, communication is diagramed as five essential elements. These are: the source possessing content to convey; the transmitter; the channel or space through which the signal moves; the receiver; and the destination to whom or which content is conveyed. These classic components in addition to noise, which is an element ubiquitous but external to communication proper, constitute the totality of information transmission and hold true whether the topic is talk radio, print journalism, or architecture. The four-fold nature of language remains unexplored in architectural circles. Only surface faults of this deeper structure have been studied and described as if causal in their own right: formalism vs. phenomenology, conceptualism vs. sensuality, instrumentalities vs. poetics, science vs. art, productivity vs. creativity, etc.