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AT THE INTERSTICES OF SPACE AND LANGUAGE: ARCHITECTURE AND
GRAFFITI
Our cities are still repositories of writing, elicited
and illicit, reminiscent of the littered landscape of drawings and engravings
in Rome between the first and third century.While graffiti is considered
a unique phenomenon, it is only one combination of text and image that saturates
the surfaces of our cities. Graffiti contrasts with the predominant form
of writing, which has become a ubiquitous part of our urban visual landscape
today, the advertisement. We are bombarded daily by a variety of commercial images: poster advertisements are pasted onto all available exterior surfaces, billboards float in the sky next to expressways, and corporate logo's beckon to us from afar. Surviving as sub-texts to the predominant display of our city's writing are the graffiti tags, pieces, and murals that have become synonymous with urbanity. While all of these visual signs are valid forms of writing, legitimacy is granted to the messengers of commercial language exclusively, while graffiti is usually singled out as an illicit form of written expression. I am primarily concerned here with how two kinds of graffiti- gang graffiti and graffiti Writing- function as sign-systems, and how the latter makes an architectural contribution by enhancing a neighborhood's uniqueness, thereby contributing positively, like the best architecture,towards its sense of place.  
History In the midst of a thriving commercial visual culture in which advertisement billboards and neon signs proliferated, a particular form of graffiti arose in New York City in the late 1960's. Understanding the history of writing in American cities, both commercial and personal, illuminates both the uniqueness of the graffiti Writing phenomenon that began in New York, and weaves the threads which bind the youth writing any type of graffiti today with earlier traditions of public writing. Graffiti Writing did not consist of political statements or slogans as had the graffiti that developed in Philadelphia, NewYork City, Chicago and Los Angeles in the 1950's-a tool used by ethnic groups to communicate identity and pride, and also adopted by gangs to mark their territory. This graffiti's evolution into a youth culture in the 1970's differed from gang graffiti in that graffiti Writing crossed neighborhood boundaries, did not mark a writer's turf, and did not involve violent activity. Nor was graffiti Writing commercial in nature, instead, Writing focused upon fame and recognition earned through the writer's visual presence in the city, by the proliferation of his or her tags and pieces on walls, subway trains and tunnels, etc. Until the nascence of graffiti Writing in New York, no previous form of "private and occasional... writing...[had] developed its own autonomous or homogenous formal stylization..." (Armando Petrucci, Public Lettering, 118). When I use the term graffiti Writing, I am referring specifically to the form of public writing that developed into a distinguishable youth culture in New York City, and was soon adopted and transformed by a variety of cities across America, including the city of our interest, Chicago. 
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