Semiotics and postmodern architecture were mutually justified by their shared populist, sign-emitting character

Evidence

The originality of Charles Jencks pathbreaking Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) lay in its well-nigh dialectical combination of postmodern architecture and a certain kind of semiotics, each being appealed to to justify the existence of the other. Semiotics becomes appropriate as a mode of analysis of the newer architecture by virtue of the latter’s populism, which does emit signs and messages to a spatial “reading public:” unlike the monumentality of the high modern. Meanwhile, the newer architecture is itself thereby validated, insofar as it is accessible to semiotic analysis and thus proves to be an essentially aesthetic object (rather than the transaesthetic constructions of the high modern). Here, then, aesthetics reinforces an ideology of communication (about which more will be observed in the concluding chapter), and vice versa. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 906

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what distinguishes postmodern (sign-emitting, populist, readable) from high modern (monumental, transaesthetic) architecture — useful for the parody vs pastiche definitional task.
• XREF: connects to: Architecture’s postmodern turn began with celebrating Las Vegas’s commercial signs — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 58