Architecture and the City. The appropriate measuring rod between communication and interpretation

Abstract

The contemporary crisis in city life is seen in the incapacity of urban planning and city design with regard to the landscape, which is basically overwhelmed by the scarcity of ideas in the “architecture as a show business” which now reigns. An empty formalism, as scarce consideration of social relationships and an ignorance of the syntactic rules of urbanistics are transforming architecture into a publicity slogan and urban spaces into a place of changeability and the ephemeral. The lesson which comes from the semiotics of the arts in relation to architecture has been completely forgotten if not altered into a production of “architectonic sculptures” monologuing with themselves, incapable of building continuity in the urban space/time context