Costanza larach

Architecture of Meaning The Eiffel Tower- Roland Barthes Constanza Larach K.

“The Tower looks at Paris. To visit the Tower is to get oneself up onto the balcony in order to perceive, comprehend, and savor a certain essence of Paris.”1 The Eiffel tower is the monument of the city of Paris; it is the image of the city, an unavoidable element of Paris but it is also a construction of the mind of the idea we have of this city. The significance it may have could be multiple and depends on your relation with it, by being part of Paris and seeing every day as daily object in the city, by being a tourist that travels and sees it as the “Universal image of Paris”, or even a as the place you go to gaze at Paris from the top. The tower becomes an icon and a fantasy, a sign of the city that allows the imagination to take form and to fill it with significance. This “empty monument” that has nothing inside of it, becomes a reference and a view of the city, and because of this lack of useful function it becomes an element that can be filled with outside meaning.

In the definition Roland Barthes gives of the Eiffel Tower as useless monument, and its relation to the city and the world, he elaborates a discourse where architecture becomes a language that communicates in direct relation to the experience that we have of the architectonic object. Through the object of the Eiffel tower, Barthes outlines the idea of architecture is a sign that by being in relation with men and by being an object part of the city, is a receptor of significance.

“The tower is there; incorporated into daily life until you can no longer grant it any specific attribute, determines merely to persist, like a rock or the river, it is as literal as a phenomenon of nature whose meaning can be questioned to infinity, but whose existence is incontestable”2 The role of architecture is not just of a functional building in Barthes terms, but it is also a “language of the city” and in this sense, the Eiffel tower is “function and dream”. The object (building) is something that is there in a concrete fixed way because of its material structure, but it can be abstracted and constructed by the mind where it becomes flexible and it is open. The meaning can change according to different personal perceptions, but the object is still there. Roland Barthes defines this as “Concrete abstraction” where the building becomes a “corpus of intelligent forms” and in the relation of the sign and the meaning attributed to it, an image is created3.

As Adrian Forty explains, for Roland Barthes architecture consists of a three-part system composed by the building, its image and its critical discourse, where language is an important part of this system.4. Language provides synthesis and abstraction in relation to the building and the creation of an image.

In the attempt to create the boundaries or definition of the architecture discipline, by being a means of communication it also establishes itself as a cultural phenomenon

1 Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Reprint edition. University of California Press, 1997.p8 Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Reprint edition. University of California Press, 1997.p3 3 Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. First Paperback Edition edition. Thames & Hudson, 2004. P 13-14 4 Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. First Paperback Edition edition. Thames & Hudson, 2004. P 13-14 2

that can be read because it possesses the qualities of a language, starting from the physical elements to the construction of a representation of an idea of it.

The text (language) and the built construct a flexible abstract representation that can change with time. It is an “Infinite chain of metaphors” that constructs an urban discourse5. In this sense, the drawing has less power as part of the cultural abstract representation because it becomes a finite and limited description of a particular person and a particular time. The drawing comes after, as secondary element and it is a consequence of the metaphor. We can draw because of the discursive language and because of the interpretation of the signs, which leads to the creation of a mental image that can be translated into paper.

The construction of the “metaphor” or idea of a city comes from the interchangeable relation between the object and the language, and this metaphor as Barthes presented is there to act as a mode of thinking. That is why language becomes an open element, it is not a definite signification, but it is in constant transformation.

“The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak to our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it. Still the problem is to bring an expression of “the language of the city” out of the purely metaphorical stage”6.

In the failure of establishing an absolute universal description of a phenomenon because of this constant transformation, language becomes an important part of architecture, but not the totality of it. The Eiffel tower is a universal symbol, which in its symbolic openness and by absorbing the multiple meanings it is given, becomes a representation in constant change. It becomes a Myth.

It is part of the culture and of the experience, but as a myth it cannot become a universal meaning. We change, architecture change and the relation that we have with the world is in constant change as well. As a means of communication, architecture in Roland Barthes definition becomes a tool to analyse society and social trends. The signs of the city and the people in it become an entanglement of a particular culture, where ideologies and subjective expressions can be found.

“Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of convenience”7

Leach, Neil. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Routledge, 1997.p170 6 Leach, Neil. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory-“Semiology and the Uban”. Architec Routledge, 1997.p168 7 Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Reprint edition. University of California Press, 1997.p6

5

Les Tour Eiffel dans les boules neigeuses- Robert Doisneau (1949)

Bibliography: Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Reprint edition. University of California Press, 1997.

Cosmopolitanscum. “Taste And The Tower.” Cosmopolitan Scum, November 10, 2011. http://cosmopolitanscum.com/2011/11/10/taste-and-the-tower/.

Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. First Paperback Edition edition. Thames & Hudson, 2004.

Leach, Neil. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Routledge, 1997.

Miller, Felicia. “A View from the Tower: Barthes and the Aesthetic Tradition.” Pacific Coast Philology 20, no. 1/2 (November 1985): 80. doi:10.2307/1316521.

Weber, Caroline. “Lightning Rods and Sideshows.” The New York Times, May 31, 2009, sec. Books / Sunday Book Review. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/books/review/Weber-t.html.