Architectural Perception

“The experience of architecture is by no means the simple matter that it may appear to be”.

Although semiology attempted to bring a rational analytic approach to architectural meaning, it failed to account for how we perceive meaning in the actual experience of architecture since it failed to connect the signified from mental concept to the world. Phenomenology, while emphasizing the first-person experience of architecture in the world, failed to give an objective or communicable account of the meaning being perceived by the architectural subject. In this paper I will contend that there is a theory of architectural understanding that both achieves a broader framework from which to evaluate structuralist, phenomenological, and post-structuralist theories as well as provides a thread of continuity through them. This alternate theory relies on the idea of imaginative perception/experience, which is founded in both Kant’s philosophy and a Wittgensteinian theory of mind, action and meaning, resources unavailable to the non-philosopher. This theory was introduced into the realm of architectural theory by the analytic philosopher Roger Scruton in his 1979 publication of The Aesthetics of Architecture. I will outline how this theory works and then describe how I feel it better describes our actual experience of architecture than either semiological or phenomenological theories of architecture. Indeed, many criticisms of semiology presented by post-structuralists are confirmed by this approach. It should be noted that this approach will not tell us how to build, but it will establish a framework by which we may better understand how architecture is perceived and also how architectural judgments can be articulated in the public sphere.

Roland Barthes, in his essay “Semiology and The Urban,” states that “Symbolism…is no longer conceived today…as a regular correspondence between signifiers and signified…the signifieds are like mythical creatures, extremely imprecise, and at a certain point they always become the signifiers of something else…”3 To use Derrida’s term, if it is the case that there is a slippage of meaning in how a building signifies, and that meaning cannot be objectively tied to its visual or formal content, then perhaps we should look in the direction of how we as subjects of architecture actually process the experience of architecture to derive the meaning we do from it. Perhaps a key to this slippage can be found in the way we actually experience architecture, or more accurately, what role we as subjects contribute to multiple readings inherent in any one work of architecture.