تصور ساختمان: طراحی معماری بعنوان ساخت و ساز نشانه شناسی

Reporting on three days of observation and recording in a Canadian architects’ practice, the authors display the progress of the collaborative design of one element of a large building as a ‘design stream’ into which various influences flow, affecting what is being constructed. That construction is seen in semiotic terms as a complex of signs in which three components can be distinguished: a ‘virtual building’, an envelope of considerations and a network of associated references and meanings. The primary product is thus not the drawings and written specifications but an ‘idea’. ‘Maps’ of the sequence of design events show the semiotic transactions that take place, and attention is drawn to the role played by different semiotic (or symbolic) modes, and especially to that of spoken language.