“Bricks as Arguments: Representing Polysemy in Amsterdam School Architectural Design” by Sarah Constant

Sarah Constant, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication has had her article titled “Bricks as Arguments: Representing Polysemy in Amsterdam School Architectural Design” accepted for publication in the Journal of Argumentation in Context.

The forthcoming study applies Leo Groarke’s ART approach and Key Component table method to buildings designed by a significant Dutch architectural movement during the early twentieth century--the so-called Amsterdam School. Unlike members of other contemporary architectural movements, architects of the Amsterdam School seldom wrote about their theories or beliefs leaving very little evidence about their feelings and attitudes apart from the architectural forms they constructed.  The expressive designs of ‘workers’ palaces’ De Dageraad and Het Schip are therefore presented as examples of embodied visual and multimodal argumentation.