Re: On synchronic and diachronic structure.

Dear Santosh ji,

Even I share your excitement in looking at buildings through structuralist framework, though analogy between architecture and language has raised severel issues since the late '80 and has only helped in underlining various specific facets/aspects of architecture that make it different from language. You have Prem's beautiful overview here on that in any case. The challenges and frustrations of 'seeking meaning in' or 'ascribing meaning to' Architecture are well registered. And Structalism itself have been vehemently questioned. 

Yet, 

When architecture presents to us a physical construct/event with identifiably different parts, their coming together/apart is often a treat to watch and feel or at least worth recording for academic purpose, albeit often they are mundane and unregistered as Prem Chandravarkar rightly reminds us. But, we may not necesarily call it 'Reading', and thus, we may avoid the complexities of 'Language', and thereby the culture of Poetry and Prose et all. Architecture may be taken to be more simple for a while....... ,   

In your text, Santoshji, if one  replaces words as now placed within (--- ) with words within {--- }next to them, in an attempt as if to reach architecture's innards with our language as a nutral tool rather than seeking any parallel (we know the difficulty/imposibility of discarding metaphors, but still ) 

>We will find
> that each plan has its own (violence){internal difference} of events, its own
> (rhythm of language) {consistent system/s of repition and difference/ tendencies} with some (spill out dialects) {other/ distinct >sub-systems or consistencies}, its
> own (institutional){canonical?} value, its own (class of
> corruptions....) {range/pattern of deviations} and all these facts are happening
> simultaneously, Here it becomes necessary for us to
> subsist in the constantly (bombarded) {interactive} simultaneous
> forces. 

And those 'forces' may not be necessarily, jump- read as metaphors/metonyms of gross cultural histories, unless one is really interested in that itself, (usually the bane of cultural analysts of architecture) instead one may focus on the immediacy of the causalities and/or accidents as close as possible to the making/happenning of the architecture. ( -For those who are already enthused by the richness/frequency of occurance of 'events' of 'Language' a close look/feel at architecture may be frustrating because of the usual comparative scarcity of 'events'. But alas that is a reality of architecture. And a convenient and satisfactory long distance view is only an abstract reduction of that reality.-). Postpone the issue of the 'Meaning' and forget some of the frustrations and may still work with the pure working tools of structural anlysis, ( may be in a shallow sense ! ) to get if not anything else but 'statements' or enunciations of architecture proper. Surely exploration in
 the sychronic plain is interesting but even in the diachronic plane it can be rewarding in a different way if the scale of operation is brought closer to architectural event reality ( a much finer grain of exploration). Again, Prem nicely covers the issue of memory and use. If I may take a risk and say that contribution of architecture to memory too has scope for closer inspection; it may often be over (read wrongly ) read in a process of reductive abstraction. At a certain diachronic (temporal) scale '-- building's ability to express meaning or from its ability to absorb and sustain meaning--' (see Prem's Text)  may not have much difference.  (Incidentally "Human Being" may be already indicating to us that contemporary condition might have rendered such old fashioned exploration meaning less or use less or rather impossible except perhaps in Nature proper. Pardon me if I am completely off here.) 

However, in this kind of a sprit too, one may take the questions below rather than as only as gross cultural issues.  

>How and why does this plan, of whose reality
> we are a part of; take a leap for the next plan? This
> is one question which always bothers me.

I dare write this things as a teacher of history of architectural 'form' and substance at an undergraduate level. 

Regards, 

Rajat Ray