Interpretation Of Aldo Rossi’s Architecture Design From The Perspective Of Semiotics

As a comprehensive discipline featuring the symbolic research of social life, semiotics, mainly concerns about the emerging, significance as well as utilizing of symbol, being taken as an effective way and methodology for people to apprehend the world and all cultural phenomena including architecture. Accordingly, the theory of semiotics can be applied in architecture as a significant analysis tool. The essence of architectural design is not only to satisfy its functional need, but also to accomplish the underlying need of society, economy, technology, region, culture, social convention and so forth. From this viewpoint, architectural design involves the construction of architectural symbol and its implied meaning. With the guidance of semiotics theory, architectural design is expected to help people to perceive the organization of architectural language more clearly, express deeper meaning as well as interpret the architectural symbol more accurately, and thus to fulfill various requirements.On the basis of the semiotics theory, the thesis aims at analyzing the architectural work of Aldo Rossi in three aspects:syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. The structure of the thesis is as follows. At the beginning, the surface structure and deep structure of Rossi’s architecture will be discussed from perspective of syntactics, and a summarizing of point, line, surface, body, space embodied in Rossi’s architecture will be given in this section. In the next section, this thesis will explore the symbol types of Rossi’s architecture in semantics, according to different signification of signifier and signified, and then analyze communication of architectural symbol through colouration, material, light and shadow in Rossi’s architecture. At the final section, in pragmatics, the communication process of Rossi’s architectural symbol and factors that affect communication of symbol will be discussed. By analyzing the semiotics systematically, this thesis concludes the semiotic characteristics and gives an insight into Rossi’s architecture connotation. To analysis Rossi’s architecture design methods, the thesis classifies and analyses transformation of Rossi’s architectural deep structure, establishment of semantic and the system of symbol design.At last, based upon the analytical results, this thesis proposes some limitations and weakness of Aldo Rossi’s architectural design from three respects, namely, syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. While absorbing the essence of Aldo Rossi’s architectural design suggestions on the principle of symbol extraction and application in the field of architecture is put forward. Hope the result of this study may have some implications for domestics architectural design.