ABSTRACT
This question of the dependence of connotative systems on logically prior notative systems has raised a fair amount of difficulty for many semiologists. In Scalvini's recent book on architectural semiotics (1975), for example, the question is treated as if there were instances when 'architecture' (as the connotative level of different styles of architectural conception) will be superior to 'tectonics' (as the notative level of mere construction). What this disregards is the fact that choosing to design a building as 'mere construction' is just as much a style as any other. That this particular style will be in opposition to more deliberately 'artistic' styles is a foregone conclusion, but does not alter the fact that 'architectural' and 'tectonic' styles are both connotative with respect to a specific set of properties of building functions. The fact that one cannot conceptualize a way of doing something, for example a style, without first conceptualizing what one intends to do, seems to have become confused with the fact that a particular style of doing something can be transfunctionalized to serve an additional purpose, such as artistic or political communication. An architect may, for example, transform the occasion of the design of a building into an occasion for artistic communication. Similarly, the design of an official government building by a Nazi architect may become an instrument of political rhetoric, including perhaps such rhetorical devices
as metaphors ('the rhythmical march of the columns') and hyperboles (the exaggeration of empty space, repetition, and size to provoke a sense of being lost as an individual). In both cases the style becomes a 'pretext for communication' and thus belongs in the semiology of communication (cf Markuzon, 1972). Scalvini's criticism of her use in the past of linguistic analogy in the semiology of architecture also remains incomplete as long as no attention is paid to Eco's (1971) warning against the 'aesthetic fallacy' of the semiology of architecture, namely where preoccupation with 'architecture' becomes analogous to literary criticism, while the environment becomes filled with 'tectonics'.
