Multimodality in the Built Environment

Spatial Discourse Analysis

Louise J. Ravelli, Robert J. McMurtrie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415716185
• eBook ISBN: 9781134747979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Architecture General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides an extended exploration of the multimodal analysis of spatial (three-dimensional) texts of the built environment, culminating in a holistic approach termed Spatial Discourse Analysis (SpDA). Based on existing frameworks of multimodal analysis, this book applies, adapts, and extends these frameworks to spatial texts. The authors argue that choices in spatial design create meanings about what we perceive and how we can or should behave within spatial texts, influence how we feel in and about those spaces, and enable these texts to function as coherent wholes. Importantly, a spatial text, once built, is also a resource which is then used, and an essential aspect of understanding these texts is to consider what users themselves contribute to the meaning potential of these texts. The book takes the metafunctional approach familiar from Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) and foregrounds each metafunction in turn (textual, interpersonal, experiential, and logical), in relation to the detailed analysis of a particular spatial text.

1 Foundations

This book aims to develop a robust and critical analysis of the built environment in terms of its meaning-making potential, and in terms of how the multimodal resources that constitute the built environment combine to make meaningful texts. The built environment is by its nature part of everyone’s social environment, and contributes to it in multiple ways: practically, aesthetically, and politically. It would be an understatement to say that the built environment of the contemporary world is under pressure. As populations increase, as technology brings both great advances and great challenges, as communities become ever more diverse through population movements, the built environment must change and be adapted to meet many demands. Part of meeting these demands is understanding the social meanings of the built environment, and this book provides a particular set of tools to facilitate such an understanding.

The analyses we propose in this book examine different ways in which the built environment can ‘mean’. This may seem to be quite a strange activity to undertake, but the built environment does make meaning, as evidenced by how people respond to it. Some aspects of the built environment are admired, some are despised, while others are just simply not noticed, perhaps because they are so much the part of everyday experience that they are taken for granted. So we perceive the built environment as being constituted of meaning-making texts, embedded in social context, combining many parts to form a unified whole.

The texts that we analyse are primarily buildings, though in fact, it is not just the physical sense of ‘building’ that is at stake here. Rather, we analyse the spatial texts of which buildings are one component. Spatial texts are thus more fully the synthesis of building, space,¹ content, and user. We use the term spatial text when referring to the architectural structure (the building) in addition to the internal and external space and the content within that structure, and the people and their interaction and engagement with the material and non-material aspects of the building and its content (cf. McMurtrie, 2013: vi–vii). That is, we examine both the built structure, its overall form and space, what is put inside and outside the building, and how it is used by people. The aim is to understand how spatial texts make meaning and contribute to socially constructed knowledges. This book develops Spatial Discourse Analysis as a new field of exploration, which can be considered a region of multimodal discourse analysis.

Spatial discourse analysis necessarily starts from the basis that the texts to be analysed—spatial texts—are multimodal; that is, they are made up of a multiplicity of communicative resources. As McMurtrie (2013: 34) notes:

Multimodality is a transdisciplinary approach to meaning-making in multiple modes (Unsworth, 2008: 8), and is concerned with the development of theoretical and practical approaches for the analysis of meaning created through the co-deployment of various semiotic resources in discourses.

(cf. O’Halloran, 2008: 443–444; see also Jewitt, 2009: 12; Iedema, 2003: 39)

Spatial texts make meaning through more than just the materials with which they are built; they are more than bricks and mortar. Many other resources contribute to meaning-making in spatial texts, including non-material resources such as dimensionality (how big is it?), layout, or light. Also, decoration, texture, furnishing—even regulations (signs, padlocks)—can be material signifiers within a spatial text. Rather than delimit such resources at this point, we will describe them as relevant throughout the book, emphasising here that spatial texts are inherently multimodal (cf. Bateman and Schmidt, 2012: 75–76). Spatial discourse analysis foregrounds users as part of the meaning-making process, and thus is complementary to aspects of Multimodal Interactional Analysis, a branch of mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 1998, 2001), as it perceives the interaction of people with their environment as co-constructed (Norris, 2004: 4; Norris, 2009: 81; Norris and Jones, 2005).

For the majority of readers, spatial discourse analysis will be a novel approach, and most certainly a strange one. It sits alongside, but does not replace, familiar forms of analysis from architecture, where history, style, form, and meaning may be discussed. See, for example, Ching’s (2007) comprehensive book on form, space, and order; Unwin’s (2009) perspectives on the concepts of stratification, social geometries, transitional space; Hertzberger’s (2005) ‘lessons’ in architecture; Leach’s (2010) account of architectural history, as well as Forty’s (2000) work on the vocabulary of modern architecture. As McMurtrie (2013: 57–58) notes, “Paradoxically, much of architectural theory has lain outside the discipline of architecture”, including theorists working in the fields of cultural studies (Grosz, 2001; Kracauer, 1997), philosophy (Benjamin, 2009; Lefebvre, 1991), phenomenology (Heidegger, 1997), sociology (Simmel, [1909] 1997), and semiotics (Eco, 1972, 1977, 1997; Preziosi, 1979). All these aspects are important and potentially contribute to an overall discourse analysis of spatial texts.

Our approach builds on particular analyses of language and image, where the notion of ‘text’ is more familiar, especially the work of Michael Halliday (passim) on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and of Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006). Kress and van Leeuwen’s book has inspired much further exploration of multimodal texts, including the analysis of music and sound (van Leeuwen, 1999), toys (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006), film (Baldry and Thibault, 2006; O’Halloran, 2004; Pun, 2005), CD-ROMs (Zammit and Callow, 1999), children’s picture books (Painter et al., 2013), websites (Djonov, 2006, 2007), hairstyles and haircuts (McMurtrie, 2010), news discourse and photojournalism (Caple, 2013; Caple and Knox, 2015), and Japanese street fashion (Podlasov and O’Halloran, 2014), to cite just a few examples.² The built environment has also begun to be examined using Kress and van Leeuwen’s approach, including by Alias (2004); Doyle (1991); McMurtrie (2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2012b); Pang, (2004); Ravelli (2000, 2006, 2008); Ravelli and Stenglin (2008); Stenglin (2004, 2009a, 2009b, 2011); van Leeuwen (2008); and Ventola (2011). Related analyses of the built environment include O’Toole (2004, 2011), Bowcher and Yameng Liang (2014), and Aiello and Dickinson (2014).

A social-semiotic approach to spatial discourse analysis is distinguished by seeing ‘meaning’ as being multi-pronged; that is, there isn’t simply one meaning or even one type of meaning to consider, but several types, all working together to create the whole. Moreover, these meanings arise in and from social and cultural contexts, simultaneously contributing to those contexts also. In the words of Kress (2010: 93), “[M]eanings are socially made, socially agreed and consequently socially and culturally specific”. That is, communication is seen as a meaning-making potential, embedded in social practice (cf. Halliday, 1978: 192; van Leeuwen, 2005a: 3; Hodge and Kress, 1988). A distinguishing feature of a social-semiotic approach to discourse analysis is that all analyses of meaning must be tied to specific meaning-making resources; that is, meaning is not just something that is revealed by those with a ‘gift of insight’, but it is something that can be related to specific resources, and therefore, be analysable and explicable.

We hope to show that spatial discourse analysis is a productive way to think about the built environment: it is a critical approach that can cast light on important issues, such as how buildings can make meanings about social class, how their functionality and purposes are indicated, how comfort might be created, or how directionality and flow within a building might be indicated.

This is not, however, a ‘how to’ book. It does not provide ideas on how to design or build; it does not suggest any formula for sensible layouts that maximise wayfinding efficiency, nor the golden rules of decorating to achieve maximum appeal. What it does do is demonstrate a framework for thinking about the texts of the built environment in a new and different way, one that explores meaning-making as a potential—a range of interconnected resources that can be pulled apart and analysed to enable novel insights, thus providing a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the interrelations between texts, contexts, and users. This may lead to specific outcomes, such as “the development of new semiotic resources and new uses of existing semiotic resources” (van Leeuwen, 2005a: 3), but such outcomes are not the primary purpose of this book.

In terms of the built environment, we mean particularly buildings, be they large, small, corporate, public, or private: office blocks, homes, libraries, shopping centres, sports stadiums, and so on. They may be vernacular structures, or architecturally designed. And we mean both the exterior of these buildings—the impressions they make from the outside—as well as their interiors: what they are like internally, how they unfold visually as they are walked through, how they make people feel, and how they indicate their functions and purposes. The focus is on observable elements of construction, not hidden components.³ Our analysis does not explicitly cover the built environment in terms of the bits that glue such buildings together into the larger landscape: the transport corridors, outdoor spaces, public signage, and so on (cf. Lynch, 1960), but the elements of our approach are applicable to these components also.

We will focus in this book on a small set of specific buildings: two high-rise apartment blocks, a library, a shopping centre, and an art museum. These are the buildings we analyse in detail, examining each for particular aspects of meaning, to show how to apply the concepts. Each of these texts is located in Sydney, Australia, our own home, so there is a distinct local bias to the selection of these texts. But apartment blocks, libraries, shopping centres, and museums are found more or less the world over, and thus, our approach should have wide applicability elsewhere also, as well as applicability to other kinds of spatial texts not addressed explicitly in this book. Certainly, specific cultural resources and meanings will need to be taken into account in different places and for different kinds of buildings, and the analyses adapted accordingly, but the fundamental framework will still apply.

Readers will find a lot of terminology in this book. For many, this may be a challenge, and certainly, terminology has the potential to obfuscate rather than reveal. But for us, the value of terminology is in making a particular perspective explicit. It may seem to obscure at times, but mastery of it provides the scaffolding for a theoretical framework that is sufficiently rich to be applicable to a very wide, if not infinite, range of texts.

Do we need to analyse the built environment? The approach we describe here will not stop buildings from falling down, nor help them be repaired. People can continue to design, build, and use buildings without making use of any of our framework. But yes, there is a need to analyse the built environment in critical terms.

Spatial discourse analysis contributes a small but significant thread to the complex fabric of our larger social world, and we believe that this approach has particular value in a world where the built environment must meet the needs of increasingly diverse populations, where it needs to adapt to social and technological change, and where the resources with which it is made are becoming increasingly precious. In addition, as cultural theorists Thwaites, Davis, and Mules (1994: 69) argue, it is important to consider a wide range of communicative forms as texts, so that “we break through any façade of naturalness [they] may have”. As Lacey (1998: 56) also notes, “One of the great strengths of a semiotic approach is that the reader is encouraged to look at familiar objects and ideas in a fashion that makes them appear strange; nothing is taken for granted”. A critical perspective on any social text is a way of standing outside of it (no pun intended) and understanding it in greater detail. This is “a form of enquiry… [that] does not offer ready-made answers. It offers ideas for formulating questions and ways of searching for answers” (van Leeuwen, 2005a: 1). There are thus two slightly different ways in which we address the multimodality of spatial texts: considering the many multimodal resources that combine to make one spatial text, and considering spatial texts as a whole as a multimodal resource worthy of examination.

As the authors of this book, we both came to an interest in the built environment via the study of language, as strange as that might seem. In Louise’s case, her academic background in linguistics was strongly centred on systemic-functional linguistics, particularly education and academic literacy, and this took her to consultancy work to improve the language of exhibition texts (wall labels) of the Australian Museum, Sydney (Ravelli, 2006; Ferguson, MacLulich and Ravelli, 1995). Clearly, museum exhibitions are much more than their written texts: the selection of exhibits and the overall design of the exhibition are fundamental, and through SFL and a knowledge of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) work, Ravelli extended her analysis to that of the built environment (2000, 2006), including her semiotic analysis of the John Niland Scientia Building (Ravelli, 2008). Robert, an experienced teacher of the English language, turned to linguistic study to further his professional knowledge, but his own interest in meaning-making generally, especially in films, also brought him to SFL and multimodal discourse analysis, and his honours and doctoral study explored the built environment from these perspectives (2008, 2013). He is now using this multimodal, social-semiotic approach to write the curriculum of, and teach students in, design communication in the architecture and design diploma course at the University of Technology, Sydney: Insearch. Thus, we are not architects or designers, nor even students of those disciplines; we do not claim whether a building is well built (or not), nor do we judge whether it is aesthetically pleasing (or not), nor evaluate whether it meets national standards of safety (or not). But as social semioticians, we do propose what it can mean to use a particular space, what a building can communicate to us, and what implications the design and use of a building might have for our understanding of broader ideological issues, such as societal values that are promoted by the design of a particular space.

1.1 Meaning

‘Meaning’ is a slippery beast, and questions of meaning are often hotly contested. Who knows exactly what something ‘means’, least of all something that borders on the artistic; that is, the highly subjective? In our framework, meaning is as slippery as anywhere else, but there are solid, specific ways to approach it. There are different kinds of meaning, different experiences of meaning, and different kinds of things that can ‘mean’.

The question of ‘what does something mean?’ is perhaps better rephrased as: ‘in what way does something mean?’ or ‘how does it mean?’ (cf. Halliday, 1992 [2002]). Following the work of Michael Halliday on the study of language and communication, we identify three fundamental types of meaning, or metafunctions, with a fourth, interrelated type. The three main types of meaning are representational, interactional, and organisational meanings, and the fourth is relational. The first of these, representational meaning, is the focus of Chapter 2. Representational meaning is perhaps the most common understanding of ‘meaning’; that is, it refers to what something is, what it is about, what it is for. Is it a house or an office block? Is it a hospital or a play space? If it is a house, can you eat, sleep, and relax there? If it is an office block, is there a space only for working, or can you relax there too? This is a reasonably common-sense understanding of meaning: if there are chairs in the space, it must mean you can sit. Choices in representational meaning help build a sense of the world around us, what it consists of, and how users might participate in it. And while it may seem self-evident to some extent, such meanings are nevertheless fundamental to all forms of communication, and merit careful analysis. The social-semiotic framework can reveal new understandings of how such meanings are construed in the built environment. In Chapter 2, we examine the foyers of two high-rise apartment complexes in Sydney: the Horizon and Matavai, and how representational choices construct different senses of what it means to ‘live’ in these places.

The second key type of meaning is interactional meaning. This refers to the fact that communicative texts are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Colour Plates
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Foundations
• 2 Construing Living: Apartments, the Representational Metafunction, and the Role of the User
• 3 Enabling Relations: Universities, the Interactional Metafunction, and Social Roles
• 4 Changing Relations: Learning Spaces, the Interactional Metafunction, and the Nature of Knowledge Management
• 5 Framing Society: Shopping, the Organisational Metafunction, and Social Hierarchy
• 6 Individualising Space: Art Museums, the Relational Metafunction, and the Contribution of Users’ Movement
• 7 Finishing (and Beginning….)
• References
• Index