Architecture, as a coherent, integrated, and autonomous domain of study, is an ironic and academic fiction, and its appropriation as a field of semiotic inquiry is a compounded fiction. I want to talk here about the hazards of this fiction. Speaking of architecture today necessarily evoikes the problematics of recent writing on the semiotics of nonverbal aspects of culture and experience. On this front, as has been noted periodically for over a decade,¹ we encounter a mutually–reinforcing chain of linguistic metaphors for what architecture is, what it does, and for what architectural semioticians should do with it.