The Words Between the Spaces

by Deborah Cameron, Thomas A. Markus

Using language - speaking and understanding it - is a defining ability of human beings, woven into all human activity. It is therefore inevitable that it should be deeply implicated in the design, production and use of buildings. Building legislation, design guides, competition and other briefs, architectural criticism, teaching and scholarly material, and the media all produce their characteristic texts.
The authors use texts about such projects as Berlin's new Reichstag, Scotland's new Parliament, and the Auschwitz concentration camp museum to clarify the interaction between texts, design, critical debate and response.

Genres: Architecture

212 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2001

About the author

Deborah Cameron, is a feminist linguist, who holds the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University. She is mainly interested in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. A large part of her academic research is focused on the relationship of language to gender and sexuality.Cameron wrote the book The Myth of Mars And Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?, published in 2007

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by a linguist and an architect, the book is hinged on the premise that “our experience and understanding of buildings are always and inevitably mediated by language and discourse.” As such, it shows the ways that classifications, values, images and power structures alter the connotative flow of meaning. A picture, they note, is worth a thousand words, but it is those words that shape how and what we think.