Core idea: Buildings have no inherent meaning until they become part of a ‘use-game,’ where their physical design imposes rules that shape an inhabitant’s life.

“To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit the more efficient in favor of the less efficient, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.”  – Bernard Suits

Language-games

In Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, he famously asserted that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”  Wittgenstein later did a full one-eighty on this issue, and argued instead that language has no ability to reflect reality.

In this later thinking, Wittgenstein concluded that sentences do not contain any inherent meaning; meaning is determined by context alone within a specific activity.  Consider the following one-word sentence.  “Water!”  It can be an order, a request, an answer to a question, or even a warning to someone that the water has been poisoned.  Taken out of context, a word or a sentence is inherently meaningless.

To describe this phenomenon, Wittgenstein came up with the term “language-games”, which refers to the contextual rules that shape the various ways we use language.  Each language-game has its own rules, and its meaning is limited to the context within each specific language-game.

Wittgenstein believed that many problems in philosophy arise when terms from one language-game are pulled out of context and used in a different language-game.  For example, the word “truth” has different meanings depending upon which language-game it is used in, and since its meaning in one context differs from its meaning in another, confusion proliferates within philosophies that discuss truth.

Making meaning

Let us imbue some existentialist thinking at this point.  The French philosopher Sartre believed that we live in an absurd world and that life has no inherent meaning; it is up to us to give meaning to our lives.  Combining this with the prior idea, it may be wise to treat life as a game, and therefore to impose our own rules upon it.  The rules we choose for our own life brings about the sort of meaning which we desire for ourselves.  Life is a game, and we must make our own rules, and these rules self-determine our meanings of life.

Use-games

Let us go a step further and relate these ideas to architecture.  We can create the term “use-game” which refers to the activities that take place within buildings.  Just as Wittgenstein found meaning in the contextual rules of language, we can find meaning in the contextual rules of a building’s uses. Buildings and spaces have no meaning beyond their context, and they have no meaning until they become part of an inhabitant’s use-game.  That is, meaning in architecture is brought about for an inhabitant only when they use a space.  The physical design of a building sets the rules, and the people who inhabit it “play the game” by using the space in a way that gives it meaning.

A good building imposes rules upon its inhabitants.  Excessive rules are problematic, but a building by its nature sets forth rules that shape behavior and guides inhabitants towards specific states of affairs, and ultimately, towards specific categories of meaning.  Without an imposition of rules, buildings are meaningless.  What use-games might a building encourage inhabitants to engage with?

In a built space, there are games of human connection and community, of solitude and self-discovery, and of organization and order.  There are games of awareness, of movement, of transition, and of creativity; games of routine, of ritual, and of perception; games of sensation, risk, adventure, memory, and narrative.

As an example in one’s own home, the kitchen shapes the rules of the dinner game, and it affords us the potential actions that we can take and the ways that our meal-making is choreographed.  When we perform an activity, we not only use space towards our own intentional ends, but the space shapes what is possible by making some things easier and other things harder, by encouraging some actions and discouraging others.

The rules of a use-game are physical and psychological.  Walls, doors, shelves, and rooms provide real constraints on our actions, while daylight, color, quality, and sound shape our mental states.  Both the physical and the psychological parameters of a space can be used to set the rules for a use-game and to induce a certain state of affairs or state of mind.

A building’s design can force us to be less efficient in ways that create meaning.  For example, a long, winding staircase is less efficient than an elevator, but it creates the game of a slow ascent, which can create moments of meaning.  Modern design is often overly focused on efficiency of use and may miss out on the playfulness inherent in human nature; people want to play games.  Thinking in this way, a building can become a large game board, offering us the opportunity to play games of connection, solitude, creativity, and order.  A good building doesn’t just house us – it gives us a stage on which to create meaning in an absurd world.