Aesthetics Of Contemporary Western Architectural Symbols

From the perspective of the second media age, the contemporary architecture has become an abstract metaphorical symbol. And under the new media properties, which included the informatization, communication, narration, critical thought and diversification, an ‘icon turn’ that interprets medium symbols as the aesthetic subject has taken place in the contemporary architectural creation. Thus the study of the emerging trends in architecture, this paper takes the symbolic architectural language as subject matter, to analyse the similarity between architectural art and language, and basing on the development of new technology and aesthetic concepts, to formulate a research system about the contemporary western architectural symbol aesthetics. And this system is based on the ‘semiotics turn’ and ‘aesthetics turn’ as philosophical basis which were caused by the ‘linguistic turn’, the digital tectonic and complexity science theory as technical and theoretical principle. Under this background, this paper also reveals the underlying reasons of the emerging trends that basis of the post-industrial society, digital tectonic and post-modern philosophy, so as to analyze the new aesthetics rules and behaviors.Therefore, drawing on the linguistic analysis methods, this paper adopts the Meta-aesthetics as the technical route to define and formulate an aesthetics system of contemporary western architectural symbol. And according to basic paradigm of aesthetic principles, objects description, artistic skills, psycho–description and aesthetic evaluation, this paper selects the Stylistics, Lexicology, Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics in contemporary linguistics as the research framework. Under this situation, this paper on the one hand uses aesthetic conception of signifier, signified and signification of semiotics to analyze the aesthetic principles of contemporary western architectural symbol aesthetics creation, on the other hand, it also formulates architectural symbol language system, which consists of the vocabulary symbols expressed the building element form, the syntactic symbols expressed the builing constitutive relationship, the semantic symbols expressed the building conceptal content, and the pragmatic symbols expressed the building existential phenomenon, and so as to introduce the main aesthetics behaviors.To appreciate the characteristics that occurs the aesthetics behaviors of these four architectural symbols, this paper introduces the concept of presentation, image, illusion and essentiality, which are supplied from symbolic art theory and phenomenology, to formulate the corresponding relation between the architectural vocabulary symbols and presentational expression of the element formulations, the architectural syntactic symbols and image expression of the configuration order, the semantic symbols and illusional expression of the conceptal content, the architectural pragmatic symbols and essential expression of the existential phenomenon. Based on this situation, this paper still emphasized to analyse the new aesthetics characteristics about the presentational expression of architectural vocabulary symbols, image generation of architectural syntactic symbols, illusional analyzation of architectural semantic symbols, essential expression of architectural pragmatic symbols, so as to systemic and rational analysis the aesthetics system of contemporary western architectural symbol and their art expression.