Contemporary architecture: symbol or role?

In the world of marketing and advertising, the concept of symbol and role are the basis of every communication choice. They often coexist within a single message, but specifically a symbol is something that stands for something else (the color black for mourning, the cross for Christianity or a lion as a symbol of strength); the role is something that means because it occupies a certain position within a system (Falcinelli, 2017). In philosophy, the intrinsic meaning of “symbol” and the differences it has, for example, with ‘sign’ and ‘signal’, have often been debated; while on the one hand Morris states that a symbol is a sign with an intrinsic evocative value with respect to the signal, which instead has an informative character, Hegel instead distinguishes symbol and sign in that it “represents a content completely different from what it has for itself” (Encyclopedia, par.458). The role derives from the French ‘rôle’ and in turn from the Latin ‘ròtulus’ o ‘rùtula’ which means wheel or disc; the role was in fact a roll of paper, then a list or register, in which names, functional compositions and structures of certain bodies or sectors of activity are noted down. The role is therefore the part, the function, the weight of someone or something in the realization of a fact or a situation (Treccani). It is therefore interesting to think about how architecture has often, voluntarily or not, found itself to be sometimes a symbol and sometimes a role. There is no doubt that some architectures immediately remind us of a specific place or historical period: The Colosseum for Rome, the pyramids for Egypt, the Eiffel Tower for Paris or the great cathedrals for the Gothic period; each of them now represents the image of something else. If, however, they are these symbols, one can think of the modern movement as the fundamental role it has assumed in that particular historical context. This work seeks to answer the question of how and whether contemporary architecture today can once again embrace its role in the construction and iconography of the city of the future, and not just be a symbol – economic, social and representative – as has happened in the last sixty years.