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How to Build a House from Reading a Drawing: Professional and Popular Mediations of Construction

Department of Scandinavian Languages, Stockholm University, anna-malin.karlsson{at}nordiska.su.se

This article explores construction discourses as they appear in the professional fields of architecture and design engineering, as well as in hobby magazines; its focus is the semiotic and mediated realization of knowledge. How does the semiotic specialization found in industrial construction drawings relate to the way knowledge is constructed within the professional and academic construction field? In what ways is the popular discourse about construction related to the professional one? In an attempt to answer these questions, the written and visual modes in two industrial drawings and three magazines are analysed using social semiotic methods. In the industrial drawings, the visual is shown in a very conventional way, expressing meaning exactly and systematically; these texts are usually monomodal, with the written text playing a very restricted role. In the magazine drawings, the visual resource is used in a much less conventional way, with the coding orientation varying between a more abstract, scientific orientation and a naturalistic, life-world oriented one. These unstable visual conventions require written language for clarification, which gives the writing a dominant role. The article argues that professional construction discourse is less text-mediated and more action-mediated than popular discourse that heavily relies upon written language.

Key Words: architecture • construction • discourse • drawing • magazines • modes

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