The  Tower-Gate': A New Type or an Empty Sign

Although none of the concepts of form as following function or form as a purely semiological order or the necessity or otherwise of taking the context into account in design are new in architecture today, it is still hard to create any remarkably thoughtful architecture without having answers to such questions. The present text is an exploration of the high-rise, gate-like twin tower type: a type without a significant historic precedent, and as such, relatively free from post-design semiological loads despite the limited numbers of its examples. Having Jim Collins’s idea of the replacement of ‘form follows function’ with ‘value follows location’, the text attempts to demonstrate that even in the case of this type in which close associations between design ideas and semiological references are not far away, one can still witness a fluidity in the relationship between form and function on one hand, and form and socio-political and cultural context on the other. In other words, it is not just the classic views on typology whose historicist and rationalist traditions seem inadequate to explain this type, but also that neither the earlier idea of form following function nor the latter one of the building as a meaning-producer and a conveyor of semiological references can provide a firm ground in this regard.