'To study the rhetoric of meaning we must engage with the way that architecture comes to express ideas, comes to be part of the cultural life of its time. To do this we have first to see how society is given shape and continuity through its beliefs expressed in words, and how language sustains and creates culture'. Bob Maxwell gives his last lecture at the AA, relating his 'love affair with semiology' to an exploration of meaning in architecture. Through an analysis of rhetoric he examines the complexities (and complicities) of language and ideology in order to focus ultimately on the 'questions that remain'. Robert Maxwell began practising as an architect in 1950 and joined the staff of the AA in 1958. Between 1962 and 1982 he taught at the Bartlett, before being appointed Dean of Architecture at Princeton University where he is Emeritus Professor of Architecture.