Re: importance of architecture

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 12:36:57 -0400

Architecture and activity was a passing interest of mine at one time (in
the 70s mostly), and I happen for no very good reason to have looked into
some of the debates about the architecture of asylums, sanitariums, and
schools. I think that there really is and has been a lot of attention
devoted to such matters, but they are no longer in the domain of _public_
debate; they have been professionalized into a domain of expertise. That's
probably a mistake insofar as not discussing them publicly lets people
think they are not all that important, or are being done as well as they
can be, given 'the bottom line'. But there are radically different sorts of
arrangements that can be built for exactly the same cost.

There is interesting work on architecture and semiotics being done by
people at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Refs not handy, but may
try to find some.

In the broader context of CHAT or eco-social semiotics, I certainly agree
with Yrjo that the historical dimension needs to be integral to analysis,
and that the micro activity has links to the macro social relations --
often still poorly understood in particular cases, and poorly theorized in
general.

But I do like Jean Lave's emphasis on the dialectic of subjective and
objective views of setting. The affordances and saliences of a materially
constructed place for the actors in that place are a function of what they
are doing there (cf. Umwelt), including the tools that are both extensions
of them as actors and equipments of the place. We could possibly take
'setting' as a term for the _lived-setting_ relative to activities and
actors. We would then need another term for the material arrangements,
themselves mainly the products of other activities (and so with histories
linked to wider histories), which are more stable or invariant across
activities 'within' them. This is something like the place/space
distinction I refered to earlier. And it gets us closer to the complexity
of the intertwined histories of (a) activities in spaces, which
co-constitute them as places, and (b) activities that make and change
spaces, under the guise of _their_ places. As Yrjo notes, activities (a)
and (b) certainly overlap, and both contribute to longer-term eco-social
processes whose trajectories give the historical dimension.

Perhaps it is useful to think about settings as a means of articulation
between different activities that (a) occur within them and (b) that affect
them, linking materially across the different time scales involved.

JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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