Blur Building. Blossom House. The Gherkin. Names greet, introduce, define and differentiate architectural works. This literature review locates a discussion on the connection between building name and building meaning in relation to established knowledge. In this paper, name refers to the title given to a building by the architect or a title which becomes common to social discourse, and which does not refer solely to the ownership of the building. To ensure that the name remains embedded in its larger context of signification I conceptualise a relationship between myth (narratives that supply frameworks of meaning) and symbol (visual abbreviations of those narratives) in conjunction with which name can be defined as a visual metaphor in which meaning can reside. Literature is sourced from linguistics, semiology and architectural theory. The paper identifies and critically reviews relevant literature surrounding major architectural concepts of language, representation, sign, and metaphor in order to determine a position for future comment on the act of naming buildings, and to suggest a framework for theorising the name.
on the language-architecture foundation
The theoretic development of the built environment has often considered architecture as language. (Summerson 7) Engagement with this paradigm from the divergent post-critical paradigm we are currently situated in requires a tentative return to a moment in history when architecture still had philosophical ambitions and held language up to itself as a mirror. Fundamentally, the language-architecture association examines how architecture meets and knows itself. The literary gaze of architecture traces two pathways. The first aims to understand language’s laws of operation as a scientific system and guide architectural production. It is exemplified by Derrida’s Grammatology. (Derrida, On Grammatology 27) The second explores the premise that all social practice can be understood as meanings, significations, and systems of exchange between objects and is manifest in architectural evaluation. (Coward and Ellis 1)
Manning sets out to bridge the gap between thinking/speaking and doing/creating, and in doing so, to challenge the active/passive model of speaker/listener or artist/spectator. One of the major projects on which the book is based, Housing the Body - Dressing the Environment, unpacks the gap between thinking and doing through aligning with Henri Bergson's definition of Embodied Cognition. According to this critical theory, the relation between perception in all its modes is one of reciprocal read-and-return. Manning writes that 'the cross genesis of action and perception opens into thought.' In other words, every perception: a thinking action. Every act: the perception of thought. Furthermore, this relation can be modified via the environment. Architecture not only houses the body, buit also creates modes of embodied experience and thought.
The questions Manning poses range from how does thought work? where does creation begin? what constitutes novelty and what might a politics of movement do to the ultimate question of how can thinking through movement alter the force of thought?
