The buildings on Bombay's Backbay Reclamations that came up in the 1930s and 1940s are now considered icons of the city and are collectively referred to as 'Art Deco'. Two sets of buildings – the ones facing the Oval Maidan and the Marine Drive in South Bombay best represent this appellation. While their exuberant facades and their (sometimes idiosyncratic) applied ornament invite appreciation and delight in contemporary viewers, they also form connotative repositories of a time of change and modernisation, and of an international and universal outlook developing in its citizens. In the current literature, these buildings have been largely studied from a historical/ stylistic perspective, placing them synchronously in the development of Bombay's/India's architecture in the early 20th century.
We assert that an ahistoric re-examination, by reading these buildings semiotically as a system of signs, would elicit more useful meanings leading to a better understanding of the architecture of the period. With this in mind, we examine the facades of the Oval Maidan and Marine Drive buildings as agglomerations of semes (basic meaning trait or distinguishing quality) that connote references and concepts that express their age. Using analytical models from visual semiotics (described variously by Saussure, Greimas and Matozzi), we examine the facades as texts, breaking them down for syntax (the order of the elements) and collating the semes to form isotopies (repetitions of traits).
In order to articulate isotopy usefully, two terms are also coined- 'enhancers' or semes that synchronically work with architectural elements and 'nuancers', the diachronous, often iconic ornament-semes on the building. Semiotic isotopies formed by enhancers and nuancers are then analysed for connotative meaning to chart a narrative of the architecture. Through the uniform readings so found, we position the Backbay buildings as speakers for the city's emerging modernity.
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