Umberto Eco

Italian semiotician Umberto Eco (b. 1932) is a thinker of great versatility, whose interests span from the mediaeval world of aesthetic theory to contemporary debates about semiology, and whose publications address topics as diverse as the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas and the sociology of jeans. He is also well known for his fictional writing which is informed by his academic work. As a semiotician Eco adopts a middle ground with regard to language, and avoids an understanding of language as either univocal or deferring to infinite meaning. He therefore develops a model of an ‘ideal’ reader alert to the possibilities of language, if not to the infinite possibilities of language. Eco bases his semiotic theory on codes. He draws the distinction between specific and general codes, where specific codes refer to the language codes of particular languages, while general codes refer to the structure of language as a whole. At the same time he stresses that codes must be viewed within their cultural context. Thus he introduces a certain flexibility and a temporal dimension to an otherwise heavily structural understanding of language. In his article ‘Function and Sign: Semiotics of Architecture’ Eco applies his general semiotic theory to the question of architecture and the built environment. Architecture, Eco notes, presents a special case as it is often intended to be primarily functional and not to to be communicative. Nonetheless, architecture does function as a form of mass communication. Eco draws the distinction between the denotative and the connotative. He therefore distinguishes between the primary function—architecture as functional object—and the secondary function—architecture as symbolic object. He notes that in both categories there is potential for ‘losses, recoveries and substitutions’. Eco concludes that architects must design structures for ‘variable primary functions and open secondary functions’. In the extract ‘How an Exposition Exposes Itself’ Eco applies this theory to the context of the 1967 Expo World Fair. Such expositions, Eco observes, present extreme examples, in that the primary function of the pavilions is minimized while their secondary function is exaggerated. The pavilions serve less as functional buildings than as symbols of the values of their national culture.