A Social Semiotic Analysis of Qatar FIFA World Cup 2022 Stadiums’ Architecture.

Abstract

Semiotics and social semiotics are major fields of study that treat sign systems within the socio-cultural context. Architecture, as a sign system, is a representation of the cultural beliefs and attitudes of a giving society due to its semantic loading created by the innovative designability of architects. Due to the cultural significance of the topic, it requires also the adoption of Barthes’s semiotic model of orders of signification known as Denotation and Connotation in order to explore the cultural meanings of the represented Qatari cultural aspects in the stadiums. From a social semiotics angle, the study explores the used semiotic resources in the creation of the FIFA World Cup stadiums (five are selected) that are basically a representation of selected cultural aspects from the Qatari culture. This representation is analyzed and interpreted within Kress’s (1997) Representation theory. The findings, from a semiotic perspective, managed to find the denotative and connotative meanings based on the represented cultural aspects that elaborate the investigation to have a semiotic access to the cultural meanings of Qatari culture. As for social semiotics perspective, the findings show that a multiple semiotic resources are used by the architects in order to materialize and represent the cultural aspect in the stadiums. As a recommendation, the study paves the way to future studies to approach more architectural works and explore the loaded meanings represented within its socio-cultural context.