ABSTRACT
Architecture is here theorized with respect to its contribution to societal progress, namely its performance regarding the innovative spatial ordering of increasingly complex cooperative social processes. Social ordering involves the aspects of coordination and control, respectively involving spatial integration and seclusion. As social processes become more diverse, complex and intricate control must increasingly rely on self-control of increasingly free and self-directed actors. Accordingly, the architectural ordering must increasingly shift its mode of operation from the use of controlling physical barriers to the use of communicated thresholds. Architecture’s social performativity thus depends on the information richness and communicative capacity of its products. This posits the task of designing the built environment as a system of signification employing a designed spatio-visual language. Architectural semiology becomes the key to the upgrading of the discipline’s social performance. A particular design research project is presented to illustrate how architecture can perform as a coordinated matrix of social communications.
