Semiotic Thought And Architecture Design

In China, with the urban construction advancing quickly, more and more architects realize the importance of architecture creation theory. However, because of many reasons, we have not completely researched the creation theory. As an architect, if he don't have a scientific design thinking, he is hard to create an excellent woks, even suffering from the crisis in our architectural creation practice. Thus we need the frame of theory which could induce our thoughts and mind, and direct our design practice. The topic of thesis tries to discuss the relationship and the impact of Semiotics to architectural form creation, to construct some basic design techniques. Semiotics is a subject forming in 20th century and has much relation with constructivism and philology. After 1960's, architectural semiotics has solved "the meaning crisis" the modernism facing with. Also it becomes the cornerstone of post-modernism. This paper concisely and systematically introduces the concept of semiotics and architectural semiotic theory. Meantime, it extends the theory with the trend of contemporary architecture and semiotics aesthetics. Moreover, the dissertation introduces the theory on how to make up new architectural symbols (Archetypics, Gestalt,Typology)and almost forms a complete semiotic system. Architectural semiotics involves syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Syntactics cares for architecture forms, and semantics emphasizes architectural aesthetics must born from abstract human culture, in the end, pragmatics pays attention to the semiotic affect on human deeds. Upon the above basis and through the basic structure of Semiotics and its studying levels, it mainly discusses the general organizing regulation of the architectural form and its control factors; the meaning of the architecture and the function of symbols through examples. And it also analyses the affection on architectural creation by these factors. By the analysis of foreign architectures and contemporary Chinese architectural works, the paper concludes the semiotic thinking to 21th century not only should inherit traditional good culture and symbols, but also dares to create new symbols and design popular and favorite architectures.