Introduction

The study of language in architecture has been the subject of much debate in architectural discourse for the past thirty years, spurred on by claims and counter-claims that architecture has similar traits to text or written language. This debate became most intense during the 1980s and early 1990s when Post-structuralist and Deconstructivist theories pervaded architectural literature, articulating the notion of a latent or ‘deep’ structure in architecture that possessed manifest sense and therefore was deemed to constitute a linguistic ‘scaffold’.¹