Semantics: The Fight for Meaning

Charles Jencks wrote for the 1980 Venice Biennale’s exhibition The Presence of the Past:

“We have more styles and ideologies than they did and they probably mean less; have less conviction and semantic meaning. Gothic Revival is now a-religious and doesn’t carry Pugin’s moralistic fervour; Stirling at one time had Gothic arcades for his Stuttgart Museum before they were changed into Romanesque. In our musée imaginaire, in our museum city that has recapitulated world history, styles have lost their overall meaning and become, instead, genres – classifiers of mood and theme. This is a major point of Radical Eclecticism; it substitutes a time-bound semiotic view of architectural form for the monolithic view of the past, the Modern and Neo Gothic view. Its approach to style and meaning is relativistic, related to the context of the culture being designed for, and this entails changing those styles and meaning perhaps after they have swung too far one way, or, by contrast, need support or confirmation. The two ideas behind this are plenitude and pluralism, the idea that, given the choice, people would rather have a variety of experiences and that, as history proceeds, a plenitude of values, a richness is created on which it is possible to draw… A Radical Eclecticism should be founded on requirements of function, hints of the place and the desires of symbolism; it should respond to the tastes of the users while, if it is radical, extending and challenging them with new meaning.“

Full essay:

https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Towards_a_radical_eclecticism