ABSTRACT
In his essay ‘Function and Sign’, the semiotician Umberto Eco studies architecture as a language. A utensil, in addition to its use value, writes Eco (1986: 59), ‘communicates the function to be fulfilled’. Moreover, the utensil also promotes and signies a specic way of use, of doing or making. Signifying the function and a way of doing takes place even while the utensil is not used, and perhaps has never been used, or would never be used. In other word, the signication is independent of the actual use of the specic utensil in question. Eco writes that ‘what our semiotic framework would recognize in the architectural sign is the presence of a sign vehicle whose denoted meaning is the function it makes possible …’ (Eco 1986: 60).
