Prefer richness of meaning to clarity of meaning: accept the complex and contradictory demands of program, structure and context, and resolve them in a “difficult whole” rather than excluding them for the sake of simplicity.
Rules · Theory · Ornament · Façades
Double coding
Speak two languages at once: the technical language of modern construction for the profession, and a language of familiar, historical or popular signs for everyone else.
Jencks argued that a building is read like a text and that modern architecture, with its single abstract vocabulary, spoke only to specialists. Post-modern buildings combined steel-framed or concrete construction with quotations from classical, vernacular or commercial architecture, often with irony. The AT&T Building in New York (Johnson and Burgee, 1978–84) is a modern office tower clad in pink granite, with a giant arched entrance and a broken pediment on top, borrowed from eighteenth-century furniture; hence its nickname, the “Chippendale skyscraper”.
Related rules
Let an element do more than one thing and belong to more than one order at once: a wall that is both inside and outside, a column that is both structure and sign.
A building can carry meaning in two ways: as a duck, whose whole form is shaped into a symbol, or as a decorated shed, a plain, efficient shelter with symbols applied to it. Prefer the shed.
Where a building is seen from a moving car across a car park, communication depends on large signs placed at the road, and the building behind them can be a simple shed.
Treat a tall office building as base, shaft and top: an open, accessible ground storey for shops and entrances; an indefinite stack of identical office floors expressed as one; and a distinct attic that closes the composition.
base (1–2 storeys) + shaft (n identical storeys) + attic
Do not design the buildings; write a code. Give each lot a building type, and for each type fix on one sheet where the building stands, how high it rises, where its porch and outbuilding go, whether it may have a tower and where cars are parked; then let any architect design within it.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Double coding”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/double-coding. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.