Solidification and the Power of Place: A Semiotic-Geospatial Study of Rewaq al-Karama (Galleria De Bono), 1931

Abstract

This study examines the mechanism by which the geospatial organization of urban and architectural form contributes to perpetuating ideological discourse and embodying spatial power across successive eras and political regimes. To test this, "Galleria De Bono" (Rewaq al-Karama) in Tripoli was selected as a case study, given its fulfillment of three integrated analytical criteria: its stability within its original urban fabric in a manner enabling direct quantitative measurement, the persistence of a lively cultural controversy over its meaning, and its preservation of its most significant original semantic elements despite successive political eras. Accordingly, the study employs a dual methodology combining structural semiotics, following Barthes and Eco, with space syntax, applied in parallel across five successive stages, analytically distinguishing between a semantic "Code" latent in the form of the element itself and a geospatial "Channel" determining the intensity of its exposure. This synthetic framework, bridging the two layers, maybe situated under the designation "Geospatial Semiotics", a synthesis between the existing traditions of "spatial semiotics" and "geosemiotics," to which this study adds quantifiable operationalization through space syntax tools. The convergence of these two levels yields, as an analytical outcome of their intersection, the concept of "Solidification" (al-Tasleed), which positions the study in direct critical dialogue with Aldo Rossi's foundational concept of "permanence" in urban morphology literature, complementing it by specifying the precise geospatial mechanism involved. The results of the application reveal that the ideological charge of the building's elements concentrates at the highest points of visual and movement integration within the surrounding urban network, a convergence quantifiably diagnosable through three independent syntactic measures, and manifests architecturally in a three-tiered hierarchical structure organizing the building's components. An internal comparison with neighboring Italian landmarks that underwent both functional and nominal transformation, a change the studied case did not undergo, further reveals that the persistence of controversy over the landmark's naming constitutes an additional empirical indicator of the efficacy of the "Solidification" mechanism. The study establishes the geospatial and semiotic properties of this mechanism as a methodological model generalizable to other cases, laying groundwork for reading the solidification of any ideological discourse.