ABSTRACT
Steen-Elier Rasmussen, Maurice Broady, Juan Pablo Bonta, Amos Rapoport, and many other mid-century theorists worked against the exclusion of an interest in meaning from post-war architectural mentalities. The term meaning is intended to convey a sense of the cerebral and other human processes through which the individual is situated within built environments. Aesthetic characteristics provide basic or sensory meanings from which other forms of meaning may be spun through an ongoing process of association. In contrast, and in the spirit of Bourdieu and Deleuze, popular music and amateur photography are now seen as fields within which complex and dynamic networks of signs are carried by the aesthetics of everyday rhythms, forms, spaces, and compositions. The proposition that there are social meanings is evidenced by the significant interest within various disciplines in environmental signs that are associated with social, cultural, socio-economic and political structures.
