Per Aage Brandt

FORM AND MEANING: THE MEANING OF FORM. A FOREWORD1

This book written by an architect is about what form means. Meaning is the
immaterial substance that human individual and social life is made of, and it is
either the result of what nature offers us to perceive and understand or what we
offer each other to conceptually experience through the signs we share. In art,
design, and architecture, we may say that both sources are simultaneously at work,
since works of art, design, and architecture – as all esthetic objects (in space) or
performances (in time) are obtained by an interaction of what nature offers and
what human agents manage to do with it. Such works are partly materially
conditioned by what we know or discover in the given world and partly conditioned
by the shapes and constructions we invent and materialize.

When agents create artifacts, the process runs through four canonical phases
of agency that we need to take into consideration. First, we must consider the phase
of choice of material; the quality of this move depends on the agent’s knowledge of
the properties of the material relevant to obtaining the intended artifact; and of
course it depends on the agent’s access to such material. Second, we have to
consider the choice of technique to display in order to configure the artifact; again,
the quality of the choice depends on the technical culture and the competence of the
agent. Third, there is no way to avoid the choice of form, that is, of scales,
dimensions, proportions, articulations, shapes and contours of the artifact; these are
never entirely determined by the two former phases and choices. There is always a
free, that it, still not entirely determined aspect of the object to materialize, and
correspondingly, however specific its materiality and technicality, an aspect of the
final presentation of the artifact which excedes the previous determinations and
must be seen as determined by… the morphological decisions of the creative agent.
This part, the artifact’s form as such, is in general the aspect that most immediately

1 To appear in Karl Christiansen, Tectonics, Ed. Systime, 2015.

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appeals to the observer and experiencer of the materialized artifact; since it cannot
be attributed to anything else, neither to the material nor to the technique
employed, it signifies in itself. It expresses an intended meaning – functional or
symbolic – and it calls for interpretation: it communicates. In a fourth phase, which I
will here call conceptual, the creative agent therefore has to anticipate the
interpretation of default observers, experiencers, and users, and edit the emerging
form2 so as to prevent its conceptual meaning from going in unwanted directions. As
to these directions, we have to distinguish two main categories: the concepts
triggered by the formal aspect of the artifact may target either an auto-referential or
an allo-referential entity. Either a form-generated concept signifies some idea of the
artifact itself, by auto-reference, or it signifies some idea existing in discourse
outside of the artifact, by allo-reference: in the urban or rural context, history, art
history, etc.

The following graphic model summarizes the phase structure in question:

Form – the particular formal properties of the aesthetic artifact, signed by an agent –
will always trigger a concept and thereby a reference. The idea of giving privilege to

2 This editing act is what sometimes, with an analogy to literature, is called l’écriture of the work, as a
tribute to Roland Barthes (Le degré zero de l’écriture, 1953). This concept differs from that of style, of
course, and represents a nice challenge for art critics.

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pointing referentially back to the material chosen and to the technique employed is
a core motive of our author’s tectonics. It is also an important theme in modern
architecture and especially in functionalism.3 The most prominent example of auto-
referential conceptualisation in early modernism may be Gustave Eiffel’s 1889
lattice tower in Paris (let’s not forget the other members of the creative collective
agent: the engineers Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, and the architect
Stephen Sauvestre). When criticized, Eiffel argued as follows:

"Do not the laws of natural forces always conform to the secret laws of harmony?"

This is the auto-referential argument. Earlier, in 1885, he had also used an allo-
referential defense of the project:

"Not only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and
Science in which we are living, and for which the way was prepared by the great
scientific movement of the eighteenth century and by the Revolution of 1789, to
which this monument will be built as an expression of France's gratitude."4

3“Form follows function’, according to Louis Sullivan, the “father of skyscrapers”. Actually, Sullivan
wrote this in a poem from 1896:
It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human, and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.
By contrast, we might say that post-modern architecture is semiotically defined by its emphatic allo-
reference. Earlier, pre-modern, styles were all ‘historical’.
4 Both quotes from Loyrette, Henri (1985). Gustave Eiffel. New York: Rizzoli. Under the first balcony,
Eiffel had engraved 72 names of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians – as a response to the
many artists and writers, incl. Bouguereau, Maupassant, Gounod, and Massenet, who had publicly
protested against the project:
“We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched
beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French
taste, against the erection ... of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower ... To bring our arguments
home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black
smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the
Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this
ghastly dream. And for twenty years ... we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of
the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.”

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As we can see, symbolic reference to Science and Technology, as well as to the
(philosophical) Enlightenment and the (political) French Revolution, are not
excluded by such a work’s even very demonstrative reference to its own
construction and its own particular internal dynamics.

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 A pure auto-referential situation might be an ideal; the ‘honesty’ of a
construction might be a normative tectonic principle of reaching a conceptual
elimination of all external references and only signifying the construction’s own
‘truth’. But it is worth noticing that strong auto-reference yields the opposite of this
result: namely, as in the Eiffel example, a reinforced allo-referential effect.5 How do
we explain this?

My phenomenological suggestion is the following. Art as such is certainly

auto-referential, almost by definition, in the sense that its formal display invites its
readers, viewers, listeners to attend to its making. The fact of thus sharing attention
with the maker creates in the ‘receiver’ a strengthened intentional awareness of the
art work as the source of this feeling of sharing something which is somehow well-
made. However, since that something is not only a formal whole but includes the
concept of this whole, the strengthening of the presence of the concept gives rise to a
referential urge, so to speak, which excedes the closed circuit of auto-reference.
When sufficiently strong, auto-reference therefore spirals out of its circuit and
naturally becomes allo-reference.

There are three classical ways to signify by solliciting concepts that point to
specific discourses. One is to situate the artifact in a specific socio-spatiotemporal
context; in architecture, the use of the building is such a contextual clue: a bank, a
temple, a factory, a political institution… Pragmatic ideas will then orient the
reading of salient properties of form (halls, staircases, offices, etc). This type is
indexical, since the artifact is considered in its causal contact with social powers,
instigators, financing instances, owners, and users. The second way to monitor the
artifact’s allo-reference is by observing its obvious formal analogies, or similarities,
with existing works that already are commonly interpreted as to their meaning
(columns, towers, light effects, etc.). This type is iconic; to the obseerver, the artifact
‘looks like’ X, which its creator must have known; he must therefore ‘mean’ this
reference. The third way is of course to explicitly inscribe the artifact in a particular

5 L’art pour l’art, art for art’s own sake, immediately became an emblem of social elitism.

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discourse by adding or applying explanatory text to its surface or in its presentation;
monuments and pictorial works most often do this. Such ‘monumentalizations’
pertain to a symbolic type of control, orienting or monitoring the meaning of the
work. It is easy to see how the Eiffel tower exemplifies all three of these allo-
referential modes.

Indexically, the tower is related to the World Exposition in Paris 1889. It

takes on an evident domonstrative meaning in this context. Iconically, by being a
tower, it challenges all such shapes in the surroundings, including of course the
religious towers. Symbolically, inscribing the names of the scientific heroes of Eiffel,
it adds an explicit, textually exposed, reference to the rational authority of secular
knowledge, of which it calls for recognition. If an impressive tower like this does not
collapse, it is due to the good work of these competent people.

Basically, however, the tower has to refer to itself. This is the condition for its
conceptual significance in these respects. Tectonics in the sense of this book is a
study of auto-reference in artifacts, the motor of meaning in objects staged as means
of communication in our human world. Auto-referential semiotics is often – also in
this book – characterized as reference by pure and simple ‘truth’, contrasting all
external references, which may be felt as more or less postulated and ‘lying’,
because they are semiotic (signs can lie)6; but auto-reference is in itself a semiotic
relation. Consider again the Eiffel example: the visible steel lattices. However,
showing is creating a concept; even if this concept is intended as an image of what is
really going on in the internal artifactual dynamics, and not an unconnected
decoration, it is still iconic and could be delusive, and in principle it would never
show the underlying engineering exhaustively, but could only hint at it.
Philosophically and ontologically speaking, what things look like can never be what
they are. Otherwise science, engineering, mathematics etc. would be superfluous.
Auto-reference may be a confusing relation, because it iconically displays properties
that symbolically idealize the much more complex principles they refer to, as if they

6 What is shown by the artifact’s form ‘is’ what really, truly, constitutes the essential dynamics of the
artifact… So the truth is revealed, it seems.

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wanted to teach or impose them, even triumphantly (that’s their provocative
aspect); and in such a way that at least some of what is shown is the causal result of
some operation pertaining to the process of production, and thus is indexical. Auto-
reference is therefore to be understood as indistinctly iconic, symbolic, and
indexical.

The most direct analogy to this phenomenon may be the manner in which
persons present themselves to other persons: Be yourself! Be true to yourself! Be
authentic! Act naturally (versus theatrically)! The problem being that we cannot
show the real complexity of our selves, and what we know can never be what we
show. The idea that auto-reference escapes semiotics altogether, to become pure
presentation and revelation of truth7, could be derived from this existential and
moral8 analogy, where the mistake is already made. The part of our author’s tectonic
analyses that display a certain emotional exaltation triggered by auto-reference
concerns a core aesthetic property of artifacts; given the choice I would call that part
a concern for obtaining beauty rather than a concern for telling truths. Beauty in the
aesthetic sense is the intense auto-referential experience of objects or events that
are brought into being by processes of intense interaction between material
conditions and human arrangement. Human artifactual and therefore also aesthetic
activity is a predominant part of our lives, as we are intensively attentive to
inventing and discovering things – discovering things that allow us to invent, and
inventing things that allow us to discover. In this dialectic dynamics lies the beauty
of life.

***

7 I am here recalling the term that Jacques Derrida used, in his critique of metaphysics, parousia, in
the sense of pure presence or coming into presence of truth. (De la grammatologie, 1967). Semiotics
is not a ‘parousian’ existentialism, and meaning is not a matter of revelation.
8 Morally, persons that lie are reprehensible, so being true to oneself often does not mean much else
that not lying to oneself; but this is a considerable weakening of the idea of truth, because it does not
presuppose much self-knowledge. It does not imply real research and inquiry, since the self-lying
person is supposed to have conscious access to and therefore know what is being hidden
(dissimulated) and what is being shown (simulated). Strangely, the French call this bad habit of self-
lying la mauvaise foi (bad faith).

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