Structuralism is a broad twentieth century intellectual movement which seeks to discover structures in everyday life and in language. It developed from semiotics, which is the study of signs. Signs comprise a signifier and a signified. The signifier is an indicator; the signified is the meaning. An arrow (the signifier) tells you which way to go (the signified). An oversized door signifies 'main entrance'. Social customs can also be signifiers. For example, the custom of cooking food signifies that 'Man is different from nature'. The sign is a human construct which signifies how we understand the world and expect people to behave. Binary pairs like cooked:uncooked, mown:unmown, and married: unmarried are surface structures which tell of deep structures in human society.
Deconstruction is a development of structuralism. Followers of Jacques Derrida have argued that in each binary opposition one term is hierarchically privileged. Culture is better than nature, cooked is better than uncooked, mown is better than unmown, male is better than female, speech is better than writing, a novelist is better than a critic, a moral poem is better than a naive poem, reason is better than emotion. Deconstruction began as a way of reading philosophical texts to uncover hidden structures and contradictions. Use of the technique was extended from philosophy to literature and then to the visual arts. It is a sceptical procedure which questions hierarchical relationships. The words Master and Chairman, for example, are said to contain the meaning that men have a hierarchical dominance over women. Noting that architectural function is privileged over architectural form, Jacques Derrida recommended deconstructing the relationship. At Parc de la Villette, Bernard Tschumi designed the form of the park buildings before planning their functions. He also deconstructed the very idea of a 'park' and proclaimed that la Villette would be 'the largest discontinuous building in the world'. His clients wittily re-deconstructed his proclamation and the place is known as Parc de la Villette (Turner 1996:208).
A deconstructive procedure can also be used to challenge relationships between development projects and their contexts. The man-made environment has been profoundly affected by hierarchical relationships, not unlike those discussed in structuralist and deconstructionist texts. It has many examples of relationships which have been brought to the surface, as a crude artificial language and landscape. Relph describes the effects of zoning policies on the North American townscape:
The result on the ground is segregated landscapes - here a zone of high-rise apartments, there a zone of detached houses, beyond a zone of retailing revealed as a plaza. And the boundaries between zones on the maps appear no less clearly as boundaries in urban landscapes - a six-foot-high fence marks the line between a residential zone and a retail zone, an arterial road separates industrial and residential uses... in those parts of cities where everything old has been carefully eradicated, zoning has directly contributed to the creation of a tight visual order in which landscapes correspond almost exactly to the land use zones set out in plans. (Relph 1987: 69)
