Words of Desire: Envisaging Architecture

If language shapes reality and architecture gives form to settings for the variety and vicissitudes of life, it may be that architecture and words cohabitate in the mind, the one corresponding to the other in an interdependent manner. This paper explores just such a possibility by considering the work of American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) and the buildings and writing of Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999). Architecture depends on language, texts even, to provide access to the vital desire it can give a form. Consequently, a pre-verbal, or pre-linguistic, architecture is a near impossibility. Radical subjectivity notwithstanding, comprehensibility of the constructed environment remains a real possibility so long as its invention and making occurs within a horizon of shared experience graspable by a language capable of giving form to desire — textually as much as architecturally. Interestingly, this assertion is supported by Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architectural theorist, who encouraged contemplation of architecture as inexorably bound to words, and thus texts. Architecture may provide a stage for an unfolding of human reality but that reality is most graspable when language configures thought by making it knowable. It thus seems conceivable that a thoughtful architecture is an architecture that lends itself to description, not so much in technical or formal terms as in social and emotional ones.