ABSTRACT
Values emerge from meanings but are not communicative restatements or translations so much as attempts to stabilize the admittedly relativistic character of meanings. Values are attempts to fix the exchange rate and make meanings comparable in the "marketplace of ideas". Such economic metaphors will prove useful to understanding the transitional milieu of post-Romanticism and the underpinnings of Modernity. In Aristotelian terms, physical language is formed matter. Marx, in turn, might say that formed matter is memory made material: "objectified human labour". Some people believe that humanity shared a single unchanging language in which meaning and values were firmly grounded in the mythic primordial time before Babel. The problem of values in architecture is essentially the problem of the interrelation of pledge to slippery concerns such as character, increasing desirability of objects, and the diminished affect resulting from the construction of numerous buildings that do not, as a whole, point to the existence of a common vocabulary.
