Prologue: MaKiNg MeaNiNg

For millions of years—ever since our distant ancestors began to fashion
simple stone tools—human beings have, simultaneously, been makers
of things and makers of meaning.
We are programmed to extract meaning from just about everything.
I’m no sociobiologist, but I am convinced by abundant evidence that
this is part of our genetic endowment—a capability derived from evolu-
tionary advantage. It is not hard to imagine that the cavemen who sur-
vived and reproduced were the ones who could most accurately read the
opportunities and threats offered by terrain, weather, and other living
creatures.
It was a short step from reading nature—which is utterly indiffer-
ent to human needs and purposes—to reading artifacts. And artifacts
do have intentions behind them. They are made by particular individuals
and groups  for particular purposes, and they often communicate those
purposes. Someone might shape a stone to serve as a weapon, and then
pick it up to convey a threat—one that is not hard to understand.
In general, then, the artifacts that people produce, circulate, and use
play dual roles in daily life. They both serve physical purposes and carry messages from their makers. We are adept at reading these messages,
and the information that we receive in this way guides our actions.
Furthermore, artifacts do not act in isolation. The physical functions
of elementary artifacts can be composed to form systems of interre-
lated parts such as machines, while their meanings can be composed
to form more complex expressions such as pictures and works of archi-
tecture. For example: mechanical engineers compose mechanisms to
produce needed motions; structural engineers compose members to
produce frames that transfer loads to the ground; figurative sculptors
compose pieces of shaped metal to represent kings and generals; and
flower arrangers compose cut blossoms in water-filled vases, according
to established conventions, to decorate rooms. The world of artifacts is
organized into hierarchies of elements, subsystems, and systems—all of
which both serve utilitarian purposes and signify.
From a narrowly focused engineer’s perspective, physical function-
ality is what’s important; selecting, shaping, and composing elements
and subsystems to produce useful systems is the intellectually engaging
game; and the messages carried (perhaps inadvertently) by these compo-
sitions are a relatively incidental matter of “aesthetics.” It doesn’t much
matter to the engineer whether a column is Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, or
Corbusian so long as it supports the roof.
From a cultural anthropologist’s viewpoint, though, physical function-
ality fades into the background. The roles of artifacts as signs, symbols,
and emblems, components of more extended and elaborate symbolic
constructions, and transmitters of culture become crucial. Anthropolo-
gists, architectural historians, and cultural critics recognize that the
need to hold up the roof does not fully determine a column’s form—
many combinations of material and section modulus would suffice, so
the significance of the designer’s particular choice of form and materials
is what engages their interest.
The most commonplace messages carried by artifacts are announce-
ments, by virtue of resemblance to other things whose functions we
know, of what they are for: “This is a handle for opening the door.” Without these sorts of announcements, we would not know what to do
with the things we encountered, and we would hardly be able to func-
tion ourselves. When door handles are broad and flat, for instance, they
announce that they are for pushing, and when they are shaped for com-
fortable grasping they announce that they are for pulling. When design-
ers choose handle shapes that are ambiguous, or—worse—that send
messages that are inconsistent with the way the door actually swings,
they create confusion.
To make sure that their announcements of intended use get through,
designers often rhetorically heighten them. Thus push bars on doors
may be broader and flatter than they really need to be to accommodate
the user’s palm, while handles for pulling may exaggerate their fit to the
contours of grasping and pulling fingers.
Where elements play visible roles in larger systems, designers fre-
quently employ similar rhetoric to show us how these systems work.
In a pin-jointed roof truss, for instance, some members will be in
tension and others will be in compression. The structural roles of
these members become clear, and the way they work together to form
a functioning truss becomes legible, if the designer makes the tension
members dramatically thinner and the tension members visibly thicker.
This principle is carried to a vivid extreme in tensegrity structures,
where tension members reduce to wires and compression members
become rigid rods.
Designers may also try to convey positive associations, and hence gen-
erate desire to acquire and use or inhabit their products, through the
devices of metonymy and synecdoche. They often employ natural mate-
rials—Carrara marble, Norwegian wood, rich Corinthian leather, and so
on—both to provide necessary functionality and to evoke highly regarded
places of origin. On college campuses, architects may reuse recogniz-
ably classical or medieval architectural elements—either actual relics
or modern fakes—to suggest connections to canonical past eras and
the continuity of tradition. And product designers are often required to
adhere closely to the brand image guidelines of “trusted” corporations—which is why BMWs are instantly recognizable as BMWs, and Prada bags
(real or fake) as Prada bags.
Finally, to conclude this brief and far from exhaustive catalogue,
designers may deploy emblems and visual metaphors to refer and
allude to other things. Within the language of classical architecture, to
take a well-known example, designers can choose from a well-defined
lexicon of Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite columns.
Tuscan and Doric are sturdy, while Ionic, Corinthian, and Compos-
ite are increasingly slim and elegant. To those who are versed in this
language, the thicker, stronger columns carry allusions of masculin-
ity, while the daintier columns are feminine. Even more specifically, by
tradition, each column type refers to particular gods and goddesses in
the Greek and Roman pantheons. Furthermore, capitals sculpturally
represent things—volutes, acanthus leaves, sometimes flowers—that
have mythic significance. Selection from among the alternatives, then,
is largely governed by considerations of decorum—of producing evoca-
tions that are appropriate to a building’s context and use. The classical
orders might seem lost in the dusty past, but the iconography of, say,
fashionable sneakers—in masculine and feminine versions, with care-
fully constructed references to sports heroes, and powerful conventions
of cool and uncool usage—isn’t so different.
Not surprisingly, the dual service of artifacts as functional objects and
as carriers of messages continually generates difficulties for designers,
who have to keep the requirements of both roles in mind. A column may
need to be beefed up in order to support the roof, but the rules of the
Corinthian order may require it to be slimmer. A sneaker shape may be
functional but no longer in style. The old slogan “form follows function”
may express a sometime aspiration, but in practice the requirements
for efficient functioning and effective communication of a message in
a given context are not necessarily the same. Even worse, the syntax that
guides composition of physical functions does not necessarily match the
syntax structuring composition of meanings. So designers struggle to
find ways of reconciling the two, often-conflicting sets of demands.Even when they succeed in this, their victories may only be temporary,
since the functions and meanings they intend may not be the functions
and meanings that are subsequently assigned by users. A flat, rectan-
gular wooden slab intended to serve as a door might, for example, be
repurposed by some user as a tabletop—one that is emblematic of a
casual, bohemian lifestyle. An innocent two-by-four, designed to serve
as a structural member, might be picked up and used as a weapon. As
Marcel Duchamp realized, a toilet fixture might be removed from its
usual context, declared a “fountain,” and exhibited in an art gallery. Any
relationship that a designer establishes between function and meaning
is therefore unstable. Often, as a result, artifacts announce their previ-
ous or alternative functions rather than their current ones. Or, under
critical reading, they may disclose ironies, tensions, and contradictions
in their messages that their originators had been unaware of.
Furthermore, material signifiers, unlike spoken words cannot be
chosen freely from a mental stock. They are subject to the exigencies of
supply chains, making some of them common and inexpensive in any
given context, and others rare and costly; you might want a finely crafted
table of solid wood to lend dignity to your dining room, but you might
have to settle for a plywood door on trestles from Home Depot.
In the world of physical artifacts, then, functions and meanings are
entangled in varied and complex ways. Sometimes designed objects pri-
marily play physical roles, in which case we tend to think of them as
engineering components or subsystems. Sometimes they serve mostly
to communicate, in which case we tend to think of them as advertise-
ments, fashion statements, art objects, or decoration. Most often, they
are complex blends of physical functionality and significance, in which
the designer has chosen some tradeoff point between satisfying the
requirements of one versus satisfying those of the other.
To reduce the need for making difficult tradeoffs, it helps to have some
way of separating physical and symbolic tasks. In other words, we need
systems of abstract, dematerialized, cost-free artifacts that can serve, in
efficiently specialized ways, almost entirely as carriers of messages.This articulation of tasks resembles the modernist architectural strat-
egy of separating the structural and weatherproofing roles of traditional
masonry walls. Load-bearing columns provide structure, while a glass
curtain wall provides weatherproofing. The columns can then be opti-
mized for their more specialized, structural purpose, while the curtain
walls can serve solely as a transparent, waterproof membranes—allow-
ing them to become vanishingly light and thin.
Robert Venturi’s well-known polemical distinction between a restau-
rant in the form of a duck and one treated as a decorated shed illus-
trates the point even more clearly. In the ducklike building, the outer
shell must serve both as enclosure and as a sign advertising what is to
be found inside—Long Island duckling. But it isn’t so easy to jam res-
taurant seating and a kitchen into a supersized duck, not to mention
that ducks don’t have doors, windows, or loading docks. In the decorated
shed, by contrast, the functions of the enclosure and the sign out front
are separated, so that each can have the form and materials appropri-
ate to its role. The shed can be shaped pragmatically, in response to the
internal space needs. It doesn’t have to  say much. The sign—perhaps
showing a painted duck—can be large but inexpensively constructed,
prominently located, and vivid. Apart from conveying information, it
doesn’t have to do much.
Spoken language first met the need for a separate, extremely light-
weight system of artifacts optimized for communication. You can think
of spoken words as transient signs out in front of your face. They enable
you, for instance, to shout a threat instead of picking up a stick. They
certainly aren’t entirely ephemeral—shaped by the physical capabilities
of our vocal apparatus, and needing to exist, transiently, as vibrations in
the air—but they have proved to be much more convenient and flexible
for message transmission purposes than solid objects that must also
play other roles. Talk, indeed, is cheap.
Words have also turned out to possess wonderful combinatorial prop-
erties. They can be composed in our heads to form infinitely many
sentences and narratives. This enables the rapid mental formulation of ideas and plans—intellectual construction without physically doing.
Thus language provides building blocks for thought, and many philos-
ophers have argued that it also shapes or constrains thought—notably
Nietzsche, who saw it as an inescapable “prisonhouse.”
The residual materiality of spoken-aloud words is not entirely unim-
portant, though. Sometimes you have to speak up, or slow down, to get
your words through to a listener. If you are sensitive to language, you
will look for words that not only convey what you want to say, but also
sound right. You will think of words both as carriers of information and
as physical events that produce more or less pleasurable vibrations of
our eardrums. If you are a lyric poet you will go even further, treating
the human voice as an instrument and trying to organize words into
musiclike sound structures that have internal rhymes, rhythms, and
harmonies.
Written language followed the spoken version. Written words have the
obvious physical advantages of persisting over time, and of being com-
pactly storable. Written texts can therefore be lengthy, and they can easily
transcend the constraints of memory—enabling the routine construc-
tion and circulation of complex narratives and arguments. Writing is not
just a mechanical process of transcribing thoughts, but also serves for
testing and shaping them. Similarly, reading is not simply the sequen-
tial input of text to our brains, but is often a subtle, complex process of
exploring a text and considering its possible interpretations.
Written and printed words are not completely immaterial either, since
they depend upon substrates, marking materials, containers—from file
folders to the Library of Congress, and means of physical transportation
from place to place. Graphic designers do have to take careful account
of material properties, constraints, and costs when they format and
produce documents. Still, a crucial benefit of written and printed mes-
sages is that they are not unnecessarily weighed down. And, as docu-
ments have evolved from inscribed tablets to parchment and eventually
laser-printed pages, they have continued to shed bulk and weight.In the particular case in numbers, it is easy to see how this process
of dematerializing signifiers might have worked. According to the story
usually offered by archaeologists, numbers and arithmetic began with
the practice of keeping uniform physical tokens—shells, or beads, or
some such—in heaps or jars to represent collections of other, bigger,
heavier things, such as sacks of grain. Arithmetic was then a matter of
physically adding and subtracting these tokens. (The modern abacus
is a sophisticated descendent of those ancient heaps.) After a while,
even lighter, more easily manipulated marks on surfaces—numerals—
replaced discrete, three-dimensional tokens. From this beginning,
increasingly sophisticated written notation systems evolved.
Origami and paper airplanes aside, sheets of paper exist almost
entirely for the purpose of carrying information, so we tend to think of
them as neutral substrates. We rarely interpret marks on paper as refer-
ences to the paper itself. But when we see text, characters, and images
on artifacts that serve other purposes, we generally interpret these marks
as labels that do refer to their carriers. Natural objects do not come with
labels, of course, but these days, most physical artifacts do. That is, their
designers have chosen to shift part of the burden of communication
from the form and materials of the artifact itself to lightweight surface
symbols. So, for example, a designer of door handles might not worry
about communicating their affordances through their shapes, but might
simply inscribe them “push” and “pull.”
In the nineteenth century, written language would have seemed to
mark the end of the story. But the twentieth century unexpectedly added
another chapter. It saw the emergence of electronically encoded mes-
sages—first in analog form, and then digital.
Digital information exists electromagnetically, weightlessly (unless you
want to consider it at the quantum level), and invisibly. It depends for
its usefulness upon devices that encode messages into that form, store
them, and then decode them as required—in other words, that demate-
rialize and then rematerialize them. Programmable output devices such as computer displays differ dramatically from inscribed and printed arti-
facts since the messages that they present are not fixed, but variable.
This new surface dynamism seems unremarkable on the screens of
laptop computers, which are emblematic products of the digital era and
have never been any other way. But it is more startling when it destabi-
lizes familiar things, such as the facades of buildings. As Times Square
demonstrates, these can now be designed as programmable displays, so
that relationships of the public faces of structures to the activities accom-
modated inside them can change in an instant. If you want to advertise
duck on the menu, you don’t even have to paint a sign, now; you can
just display the message for a while.
Electronically processed bits and packets take the dematerialization of
messages about as far as it can go. They cost very little to produce and
process; they can be stored in immense quantities on disks and servers
for practically nothing; they can be copied in an instant with no deg-
radation; and they circulate around the world, in high-bandwidth chan-
nels, at the speed of light. They now fly through the air with the greatest
of ease. The social, economic, and cultural effects of this—as became
evident during the dotcom boom of the nineties—have been profound.
Still, bits do not create a separate realm of cyberspace, as many argued
at that time. They add a new, highly specialized, digital layer to the long-
evolving, intricately interconnected system of physically functioning
artifacts, spoken words, and written words.
Understandably enough, linguists, logicians, and philosophers devote
most of their attention to messages in the abstract. They pay little atten-
tion to the complex interactions of these messages with the physical
functionality of the artifacts that carry them. They tend to dismiss the
additional functions of physically embodied messages, such as news-
papers that serve for swatting flies and lighting fires, as irrelevant to
their concerns. Similarly, literary theorists generally don’t much care
whether the texts they study appear on paper or on screen, in hardback
or paperback, large type or small, as long as the messages get through. For designers, though, it’s different. They cannot ignore the specific
embodiments of messages in material, potentially useful artifacts, or the
potential of physically functioning artifacts also to carry messages.
From a designer’s perspective, then, doing things with words is a
special case of doing things with things. The limit case of language in its
various lightweight and agile forms—spoken, written, and digital—has
emerged from a much more solidly material, physically constraining
background of artifacts and systems that must accomplish other pur-
poses in addition to communicating.
There is insufficient evidence to support any definitive account of
how this happened, but it seems likely that it occurred about 50,000
years ago, at the generally agreed dawn of human culture—perhaps,
as Richard Klein has suggested, as the result of a genetic mutation.
Human ancestors had made and used primitive stone tools for mil-
lions of years before that, and no doubt had communicated by means
of simple sounds as well, but at this point they developed systems of
artifacts of widely varied forms and functions, and they probably began
to speak the sort of rapid, extensive, grammatically structured language
that we would recognize as human today. In other words, they created
wide ranges of different things suited to different physical and symbolic
purposes, and they learned to combine these things—words to construct
sentences, blades and hafts to construct axes, and eventually chunks of
differently shaped materials to construct buildings.
However we may have arrived at this point, though, the communica-
tion systems that we now encounter and use in daily life clearly lie upon
a pretty continuous spectrum from the densely and stubbornly material
to the flexibly dematerialized, and they all work together. In any setting,
there is some division of communication labor among more and less
material artifacts, and among more and less physically functional com-
positions of them. Speaking and writing are specialized ways of making
things, just as fabrication and assembly are specialized ways of saying
things. Designing is always a matter of simultaneously crafting the required
functionality and the intended messages, subject to physical and eco-
nomic constraints. Well-designed artifacts succeed on both levels at
once. Often, today, they do so by participating in multiple systems of
production, circulation, purposing and repurposing, and communica-
tion—thus forming complex hybrids, as when manufactured products
carry labels and brand marks from the world of written text, and iPods
serve as fashion accessories while translating downloaded digital files
into audible speech and music or video displays.
Forms, themes, and conventions spawned within particular systems
of artifact production, circulation, and interpretation frequently migrate
to other systems and take up residence there. Architectural settings are
indispensable in films and video games, for example, while film tech-
niques and game engines now structure the presentation of architecture
in computer graphics fly-throughs. These boundary crossings may seem
obvious when pointed to directly, but the common critical practice of
focusing exclusively upon architecture, film, product design, literature,
or some other consistent category of artifacts and practices continually
obscures them. Mixtures, intersections, adulterations, and contamina-
tions of these “pure” media provide much of the density and complexity
that is characteristic of today’s cultural settings.
The essays in this book are snapshots, taken over several years in the
middle of the first decade of the 2000s, of the now-global operation of
these interwoven, inextricably dual-purpose systems of meeting practi-
cal needs and communicating by designing, producing, and circulating
artifacts of diverse kinds in various combinations and hybrids. They give
particular, but not exclusive emphasis to buildings and cities, and to the
discourses and product ecosystems that cities support. They continue
the investigation initiated in my earlier book  Placing Words, and they
have mostly appeared as regular columns in various journals.

coNteNts
Prologue: Making Meaning   vii
1  KicKiNg the Bottle   1
2  PaPer woNders   5
3  ViVa VeNturi   9
4 siN No More   13
5 loVeliest of trees   17
6 alBerti’s aNNiVersary   21
7 the Net has a thousaNd eyes   25
8 surVeillaNce cooKBooK   33
9 forget foreigN wars   37
10 eVeryday low   41
11 texas chaiN store   45
12 right Place at the wroNg tiMe   49

13  Best Practices   53
14  MaMa doN’t taKe My MegaPixels  57
15 iNstruMeNts aNd algorithMs   61
16 theory of BlacK holes   65
17 elegy iN a laNdfill   69
18 theory of eVerythiNg   73
19 deeP focus   77
20 daPPled thiNgs   81
21  MorPhology of the BioPic   85
22 little Blue couPe   89
23  Bicycle socialisM   93
24 faux BooK   97
25  MaN of steel   101
26 it’s Not easy   105
27 iMagiNed wall street   109
28 the eagle flies   113
29 architectural assassiNatioN   115
30 urBaN PlastiNatioN   119
31 ciVic iMMuNology   123
32 world’s greatest architect   131
epilogue: writing and the web   135
index   139