Finding a Foothold: Architectural Meaning in the Post-war Period Part 1 Dissertation 2004 Chris Foges London Metropolitan University | UK This dissertation is concerned with what and how architecture might mean. While many early modernists asserted that architecture could and should only ever talk about itself, in the post-war period calls grew for a redefinition of the terms of modernism, to include a wider role for meaning as a function. In this context, Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, itselfdescribed by James Stirling as evidence of a crisis of rationalism, epitomises the central concern of the age. Here, it is used as a case study through which contemporary ideas on meaning and architecture, drawn from linguistics and philosophy, are assessed.In the second part of the dissertation, post-war British modernism is considered. Here again, it is arguable that concerns over how and, moreimportant, why architecture might carry meaning is the focus of dispute in an architectural landscape Charles Jencks has described as a scarred battlefield. Pitted against one another are, on one hand, an architecture so committed to the avoidance of monumentality, or the possibility of embalmed meanings, that it aims for complete dematerialisation, and on the other, a new commitment to fixedness, place, and identity.Both positions were informed and underpinned by an understanding of architecture and society that was intensely political and specific to a particular period in time. In conclusion, therefore, the dissertation explores the relevance of such a debate to contemporary architectural practice, and considers the possibility of an architecture that is responsive to changing needs while acting as a support for both an individual and a collective sense of identity - an architecture that responds to the human experience of being in place and time. This dissertation’s sense of its own form is subtle and self-assured. Seen retrospectively, the sequence of subjects is not surprising, but as they happen the individual moves all contain the unexpected. None of the regular players, Reyner Banham, say, or Cedric Price, plays quite the role we are used to. The student knits together projects and contemporary statements about them in an effortless way; anyone who has tried to do this knows how difficult it is. There is much more to say about meaning in architecture, of course, but he is consistently provocative in his forays into the territory and sets a large number of interesting ideas in motion in the short space.
