ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, Europe and the Americas experienced remarkable cultural, political and social changes. In the social sciences, those changes manifested with the surge of structuralism. The theoretical premises of structuralism were initially advanced by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,2 who, inspired by the linguistics and semiological studies of Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 1916), developed an epistemological approach capable of identifying the inner structure and relationships between fundamental elements. Lévi-Strauss argued that human behavior is defined not by what is perceived but by the “structures” that underlie
those actions. Because of its transdisciplinary qualities, structuralist methodology became very influential in the works of diverse thinkers, such as Roland Barthes (literary criticism), Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis), Michel Foucault (critical history), and Louis Althusser (Marxist theory). As noted by Alan Colquhoun,3 structuralism suggested a novel understanding of architecture, where meaning doesn’t arise from appearance, but from the latent and intangible “structures” present in any particular system.
