Usually, in the “Briefing,” arcCA DIGEST asks experts in the season’s theme to identify emerging issues, problems, opportunities, circumstances, etc., to which they believe architects should be alert. Here, we depart from this custom to suggest, instead, why we have chosen the theme.
Why are we interested in typology?
A bit of product design pedagogy throws light on the notion. In it, students are asked to design something – let’s say a toaster – twice.
The first time, they’re given an existing toaster, which they’re instructed to dismantle, to discover how it works. They critique its flaws and limitations and set about correcting them. They try to design a better toaster.
The second time around, they’re asked to put aside the toaster they were given, to put aside the improved toaster they had designed, to put aside the word “toaster” and even the word “toast.” In place of these things, they’re given a brief, which might run something like this:
“You have a slice of bread. Figure out a way to make the faces of it brown and crispy.”
That is, they’re given a program, stripped of formal expectations. It’s a “blue sky” exercise, in the giddy, entrepreneurial lingo of product design; in the more sober language of architectural modernism: a blank slate.
For architecture’s modernists, to take program as the sole given was to break free of encumbering, historical patterns. In place of such patterns, the modern designer would assemble the functional parameters of a problem, and from them a form would emerge.
In a seminal essay of 1969, “Typology and Design Method,” Alan Colquhoun questions this approach, arguing that such parameters are never sufficient to determine a form. As he puts it, “Truly quantifiable criteria always leave a choice for the designer to make.” He observes that, “In modern architectural theory this choice has been generally conceived of as based on intuition working in a cultural vacuum,” but, he argues to the contrary, “intuition must be based on a knowledge of past solutions to related problems.”
“Creation,” Colquhoun suggests, “is a process of adapting forms derived either from past needs or on past aesthetic ideologies to the need of the present.” He continues:
The process of change must involve a dialectical relationship between those parts of the system that are resistant to change (because they are conventional) but changeable (because they are arbitrary); and those parts of the system which depend on natural laws which progressively come to light under the pressure of technological evolution.
It is this dialectical relationship that the two-part product design exercise is meant to reveal.
Typology is the understanding of changeable conventions. Paired with a grasp of evolving conditions, it constitutes a design method. It is a method we neglect at some risk, because building types are bearers of intelligence, records of forgotten reasoning. A return to their study is a useful foil to whatever the day’s functionalist conceits may be (ours are captured in the algorithms of Grasshopper); and it offers a framework for weighing the relationship between continuity and change.
It has yet another virtue, as well. As John Leighton Chase writes in “The Typology of Building Production,”
Architectural culture tends to overvalue the importance of the individual architect in determining the nature and design of buildings and to underplay all other factors. The notion of type has the virtue of emphasizing the forces of creation that buildings have in common, of finding links across time and space. In addition, the notion of type allows buildings to be seen as a hybrid of style, program, economics and construction practices. It takes into consideration the economic incentives for the building’s construction, the method of its construction and use for which it is intended. Only then is the role of the architect considered.
