2020 – Tehran – Asmaneh Online Journal
It is not far-fetched to imagine that some in the architectural world might regard Adrian Forty as something of a subversive figure. He is not an architect, yet he teaches architecture. He is a historian of architecture, but he rarely speaks about buildings or formal aesthetics in the conventional sense. Most importantly, among the many sites in which architecture emerges, he has chosen to focus on texts and language—as the primary medium through which to understand and explain this multifaceted domain.
The phrase “complex social practice”, which Forty himself uses in interviews and lectures, captures this view: architecture, he argues, is not a purely formal or technical endeavor, but one that is deeply embedded in social, historical, and linguistic contexts. Both architecture and language, in his view, are complex and socially constructed systems, and it is through the historical study of architectural vocabulary that he seeks to gain insight into the discipline’s modern identity.
I encountered Forty’s work during a search for text-centered architectural research—studies that take written discourse not as a supplement to building, but as an intrinsic part of architecture itself. I was looking for approaches that treat text as constitutive of architectural meaning, not merely descriptive of physical structures or biographical of architects. In this search, I came across many works that either leaned too heavily on social or historical processes, dissolving the specificity of architecture into broader narratives, or, on the contrary, treated architecture as a sealed-off discipline, impervious to the influence of other discourses or modes of thought.
Forty, however, as he explains in an interview with Lobby (a publication from The Bartlett School of Architecture), takes a different path. While he acknowledges architecture’s internal principles, he consistently insists that architecture can only be understood within its social and historical contexts. Since architecture is not created by architects alone, language—particularly public, professional, and theoretical language—plays a formative role in shaping architecture in any given era. It is through the study of architectural vocabulary, he believes, that we can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of modern architecture.
Drawing from Roland Barthes, Forty defines language not merely as a transparent vehicle of meaning, but as a system shaped by difference, ideology, and historical contingency. Over the course of four decades of academic work, he has examined how architectural terms acquire meaning, shift in connotation, and participate in broader cultural logics. His key thesis is that words like “space,” “structure,” “form,” “function,” and “nature” are not neutral descriptors—they have histories, and those histories structure how we think about architecture.
This perspective is especially prominent in his celebrated book Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (2004), which functions as both a theoretical study and a critical lexicon of modern architectural discourse. Influenced by semiotics, discourse analysis, and historiography, Forty argues that even the most common architectural terms are saturated with ideological assumptions and deserve critical scrutiny.
The book is divided into two main parts. The first consists of six historical and analytical essays on architectural language. In the opening chapter, The Language of Modernism, Forty traces the philosophical and aesthetic roots of modern architectural language, particularly through Kantian aesthetics and the writings of architect-theorists. Here, he argues that during the consolidation of modernism, language became more important than building itself—and that terms like form, space, design, order, and structure emerged as key signifiers of the modernist project.
In the second chapter, Language and Drawing, Forty explores the dual tools of the modern architect: language and drawing. He asks a pointed question: What can language offer the architect that drawing cannot? This comparative inquiry is rooted in the belief that both tools have distinct cognitive and communicative capacities—and that language, in particular, plays a unique role in articulating architectural theory and ideology.
The third chapter, On Difference: Masculine and Feminine, draws on Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics, especially the idea that language operates through systems of difference. Forty uses this to explore the gendered assumptions embedded in architectural discourse. He provides a wealth of historical examples showing how gender roles and representations shaped the spatial and formal characteristics of past architecture. While the overt gendering of architecture may have diminished in modern times, Forty argues that residual traces of gendered difference remain in various discursive and symbolic forms.
In the fourth essay, Language Metaphors, Forty examines six historical phases of metaphor use in architecture. He demonstrates that architectural language has long relied on metaphor—not merely as decoration, but as a way of legitimizing architecture as an art form, explaining its communicative function, tracing its historical roots, and aligning it with linguistic structures such as grammar. These metaphors have been crucial in shaping how architecture is discussed, understood, and taught.
The fifth essay explores the emergence of scientific concepts in architectural discourse. Forty analyzes how terms borrowed from disciplines like biology, physics, and systems theory entered architectural language and altered the way architecture was conceptualized. The sixth and final essay in the first part examines how social and political concepts entered the architectural field—though Forty concludes with a degree of skepticism, suggesting that architectural discourse has not fully done justice to its social responsibilities.
The second half of Words and Buildings, the part for which the book is perhaps best known, contains eighteen vocabulary entries that Forty refers to as constellations—interrelated nodes in the discourse of modern architecture. Critics have described these as the core terms of modern architectural language. Each entry provides a genealogical and semantic analysis, showing how our present understanding of modern architecture rests on the historical evolution of these terms.
Consider the term transparency, for example—a quintessentially modernist concept that, according to Forty, was largely absent from architectural discourse before the 20th century. He argues that transparency is not simply about glass or visibility. It emerges in three distinct registers: literal (transparency as physical property), perceptual (as described in Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s essays), and semantic transparency—a more abstract, and never fully codified, usage that remains open to interpretation.
Another striking case is nature. The first major challenge to the idea that architectural beauty stems from nature was made in the 17th century by Claude Perrault, a French architect and theorist. Perrault’s radical rejection of nature’s authority paved the way—centuries later—for rethinking the architecture–nature relationship.
The term user also receives close attention. Forty shows that this concept was virtually absent from architectural vocabulary before 1950. It entered architectural discourse in the context of postwar welfare state policies in Western Europe, gained popularity in the 1960s, faded in the 1980s, and re-emerged in the 1990s with new meanings. Its semantic shifts reflect changing political and institutional priorities.
Despite his deep historical analyses, Forty emphasizes a crucial methodological point: there is no single, stable definition of these terms. Over the past two centuries, different intellectual movements and architectural schools have used them in diverging, sometimes contradictory ways. This variability, however, is not a flaw—it is, in fact, central to Forty’s project.
Indeed, one of the most important and perhaps overlooked aspects of Forty’s work is his insistence on the instability of meaning. While he had long maintained that architecture is a social phenomenon, his attention to the historical contingency and social embeddedness of architectural language gives that claim new depth. In Words and Buildings, he not only analyzes “architecture as practice”—shaped by its vocabulary—but also legitimizes “architecture as discourse.” He treats architecture’s discursive dimension as integral to its social function and historical evolution.
Ultimately, Forty’s genealogical account of architectural vocabulary offers readers a critical map of modern architectural discourse. He shows that architectural texts and concepts—while socially and historically grounded—also form a relatively bounded discursive field. For Forty, architecture is a deeply social practice, shaped by the complex relations of society. Yet it is also a textual and conceptual field with its own structures—structures that now require rigorous examination by both architects and scholars.