The Language of Space & The Words Between the Spaces: Buildings and Language. (Enriching Discussions?).

By Bryan Lawson, Oxford: Architectural Press. 2001. [pounds sterling]22.99

THE WORDS BETWEEN THE SPACES: BUILDINGS AND LANGUAGE

By Thomas A. Markus and Deborah Cameron. London: Routledge. 2001. [pounds sterling]19.99

Lawson, Dean of the Faculty of Architectural Studies at Sheffield University, is an architect with a doctorate in psychology. When describing the things he knows well, he has much to say that is useful and occasionally fascinating: where people choose to sit when entering a reception area or office, for example. It is certainly one of the great mysteries of current teaching that so much studio design work is entirely form-based. As Lawson suggests, the process could become a great deal richer if methodical discussions were carried out evaluating the practical and indeed emotional effect of experiencing certain spaces. He lets himself down by increasingly giving his views on the world in general, rather as if he had space to fill. Adopting a vigorous use of the first person singular and including at least one exclamation mark in almost every paragraph, he projects an image of a jolly uncle perfectly bearable in small doses.

Markus and Cameron too have adopted a fairly irritating editorial style, albeit a completely different one. Markus is familiar to a wide readership through his Buildings and Power of 1994; Cameron is a linguist who apparently made her mark with an article entitled 'Naming of Parts: Gender, Culture and Terms for the Penis amongst American College Students'. Together they have adopted the politically correct Routledge-speak where everything is a 'discourse'. I was not convinced that the authors achieved their aim of explaining how 'language matters', by which they mean influences architecture by its register and vocabulary. Characteristic of the self-deluding feminist claptrap the authors have got themselves mixed up with is a kitchenless ideal housing scheme of 1916 by someone called Alice Constance Austin. A much more valid example of this type of thing was something that was actually built - the early history of the Israeli kibbutz, where the whole notion of food preparation and eating was successfully de-g endered and de-located from the home; and, furthermore (bearing in mind the subject of the book), this was achieved through the deployment of a language that was only then being revived and consequently re-vocabularized with a distinctly deterministic aim. However I dare say that any mention of Israel is out of favour nowadays with the sort of Guardian/Independent reading people one imagines run Routledge.

The very short case studies are occasionally glib and offer little. Paradoxically, reading between the lines of the superb Buildings and Power is likely to be more rewarding on the subject than this rather camp piece of largely redundant verbal introspection.