A Bakhtinian Proposal for a Transdisciplinary Study between Linguistics and Architecture

Abstract

This research focuses on the conceptual contribution of Bakhtin and his Circle to the field of Architecture. From a Bakhtinian perspective, the research expands the analytical corpus to include visual signs — specifically, architectural works—while offering Architecture new conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing and critiquing the architectural object as a human product that fulfills a social function within a given time and space. Architectural objects, in addition to delimiting an organized space for the exercise of a function, also carry meaning. It is within this realm of the sign that architecture and language connect. As a central objective, we aim to demonstrate that concepts developed by the Russian thinkers can be used as an instrument for the conceptual analysis of architectural space, which, like a spatial concrete utterance, reflects and refracts a social reality. This theoretical and bibliographic study draws from Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Medvedev, as well as from key theorists and critics of architecture. The results indicate that the concepts of Bakhtinian architectonics enable analyses of architectural works in ways similar to the analyses of concrete utterances, as they are signic materializations exhibiting a finalization shaped by ideological perspectives present in the form and function of built space.