This article explores transformations in Peter Wilson’s work by reading his Japanese projects of the late 1980s in relation to Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs. The specific account it develops is constructed around the entries Wilson produced for the 1978 and 1988 Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competitions. What makes this a comparison of particular interest is that the competitions, a decade apart, were run under nearly — but not quite — the same brief. The first was set by Peter Cook, who called for projects for a ‘Comfortable House in the Metropolis’. This idea was then taken up for the second by Toyo Ito, although he inflected it with an emphasis on the ephemerality of the physical under the effects of new electronic communication technologies. Drawing on Barthes’s observations, the article argues that — across these years — Wilson’s work moves from an approach grounded in metaphor to a mode that is increasingly ideogrammic, and that this is supported by, and reflected in, the way that his drawings change. Here, I claim, the submarine — allusions to which become prominent in Wilson’s work in the period — comes into focus as the key transitional device. Importantly, Wilson’s submarine is not a tool for plumbing depth conditions; rather, it is quite the opposite, insofar as it acts as a figurative cipher, an ideogram in its own right, for the act of screening out relations and drying up metaphoric fluidity. In its conclusion, the article brings the 1988 project into contact with earlier ideogrammic experiments within modernity, including the drawings of Henri Michaux and the reflections of Sergei Eisenstein on cinematic montage and compound ideograms.

中文翻译：

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符号帝国中的彼得·威尔逊

本文通过阅读他在 1980 年代后期与罗兰巴特的符号帝国相关的日本项目，探讨彼得威尔逊作品中的转变。它开发的特定帐户是围绕威尔逊为 1978 年和 1988 年新健竹住宅设计比赛制作的参赛作品而构建的。让这个比较特别有趣的是，相隔十年的比赛几乎是——但不完全是——同样的简报。第一个是由彼得库克设定的，他呼吁建造“大都会舒适之家”的项目。这个想法随后被 Toyo Ito 采纳为第二个想法，尽管他强调了在新电子通信技术的影响下物理的短暂性。根据巴特的观察，这篇文章认为，这些年来，威尔逊的作品从一种以隐喻为基础的方法转变为一种越来越表意文字的模式，这得到了他的绘画变化方式的支持和反映。在这里，我声称，潜艇——在威尔逊的这一时期的作品中变得突出的典故——作为关键的过渡装置成为焦点。重要的是，威尔逊的潜艇不是用于测量管道深度条件的工具。相反，它是完全相反的，因为它作为一种象征性的密码，本身就是一个表意文字，用于筛选关系和干涸隐喻流动性的行为。在其结论中，这篇文章将 1988 年的项目与现代性中早期的表意文字实验联系起来，