Structuralism and communication systems. The historiography of architecture in Italy and semiological criticism: 1964-1984

The interpretation of architectural phenomena through the semiotic methodological approach was brought to the attention of scholars in Italy starting in the mid-1960s, when some intellectuals and historians – such as Giovanni Klaus Koenig, Renato De Fusco, Umberto Eco, Maria Luisa Scalvini, Vittorio Gregotti, and others – began to take part in the ongoing debate on the problem of ‘evaluativity’ and on the notion of ‘value’ in the aesthetic field, including the historiographical dimension. At that time, linguistics applied to architecture had become a field of study of the more general science of signs. Some architectural historians assumed that the scientific discipline devoted to cultural phenomena, seen as communication, also included architectural disciplines, destined by their nature to modify “reality on a three-dimensional level”. This paper deals with the ways in which such semiotic themes were addressed, as ‘operative criticism’, toward the foundation of a theory of architecture, increasingly intertwined with the history of architecture, also thanks to the journal Op. cit., founded in 1964. In particular, the paper offers an analysis of the writings of Maria Luisa Scalvini (1934-2017), one of the leading exponents of Italian ‘semiological criticism’, who entered the heart of the debate with the publication in 1968 of the volume Spazio come campo semantico. The semiotic themes were presented – as in many of her other writings – in a clear way, convinced as she was that the structuralist approach and the metaphorical use of linguistic analogy were fundamental to an understanding of the semantic contents and symbolic values of historical architectural signs, including those in an urban context.