On the ‘Three Typologies’
The exercise of typology in architecture — the identification of essential types of building or element — can seem primarily an enterprise of systematisation and ordering. Tables of plan forms, column capitals, material details, houses, apartments, civic functions of different kinds, styles, structural systems — abound in architectural textbooks from the 19th century onwards. Much of the pleasure of reading these now is the way in which they define a recognisable but foreign lexicon of possible action. This — is what a cottage in the ‘Egyptian style’ would look like. Here — is the plan form of a masonry building designed around a triangle, a square, and a pentagon. And there — are the plans and elevations of every significant variation of the vestibule…
Typology is a term you still hear today, and the identification of architectural type is — if not all that common as a heuristic in the contemporary design process — then certainly at least still a major frame of reference for interpretation. It isn’t, as far as I can see, bound to a particular subculture or style — and is as likely to crop up on the fringes of parametricist urbanism as in the rhetoric of new generation of PoMo nostalgics. However, the use and meaning of type is broadly ambiguous and inconsistent. The typologist as a figure — the identifier and categoriser of types — seems like a butterfly collector; roaming cities and towns in search of examples and pinning them in neat rows. In this sense, typology seems to be empirical, and the type to be a product of its environment and historical and cultural circumstance. But at other times, the identity of a given type seems to be a deeper and weightier matter. I recall a denunciation of Peter and Alison Smithson for their temerity in ‘thinking they had invented a type’ (the ‘street in the sky’ in this case) — as if this were an error of the self-evident sort.
If inventing a type is wrong, then it may be as sacrilege, or simple vulgarity. If we adopt a mythic, eternal reading of type, then the idea connects to some primal essence of dwelling, sociability, human nature, beyond the vagaries of technology and the development of production – a law of nature, as it were. Alternatively, type might just be a secure and deeply embedded convention which, like language, requires a level observance in order for people to participate in it together.
In The Third Typology (1977) Anthony Vidler argues that the invention of the enterprise of typology was as much about seeking validation for architectural form-making as it was about the systematisation of evidence. In a broad survey of the history of the idea since the mid 18th century, he identifies three currents, corresponding to nature (c 1750-1860), production (1860-1950) and the city (1960–).
From the middle of the eighteenth century, two distinct typologies have informed the production of architecture.The first, developed out of the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, and initially formulated by the Abbé Laugier, proposed that a natural basis for design was to be found in the model of the primitive hut. The second, growing out of the need to confront the question of mass production at the end of the nineteenth century, and most clearly stated by Le Corbusier, proposed that the model of architectural design should be founded in the production process itself. Both typologies were firm in their belief that rational science, and later technological production, embodied the most progressive “forms" of the age, and that the mission of architecture was to conform to, and perhaps even master these forms as the agent of progress.
Laugier’s Primitive Hut sets up an analogy; so, just as complex natural phenomena emerge out of the simple geometrical laws of Newtonian physics, so the orders and principles of architecture emerge from similarly natural point of origin. The process of legitimation applies analogy extends to the process of development and invention, in which a metaphor of quasi-biological speciation can beapplied to the different kinds and functions of building; the hierarchical order of the plan likened to vertebrae and other signifiers of natural order or genus. Bannister Fletcher’s genealogy of architecture (above) places contemporary styles and forms at the leading edge of a long evolutionary process, in which the native styles of the East and the Americas significantly appear as dead ends. Architecture as a discipline plays a double role in this narrative as both the protagonist of the evolutionary drama and the principle recorder and observer.
The second typology is a response to the new technologies of the Second Machine Age, and gradually moves into alignment with the ideology of functionalist modernism. New kinds of buildings, elements based on new inventions and technologies, the phenomenon of mass production, and the relentless drive to maximise efficiency, together shape a new set of types. A typological ethic was already apparent within industry —factories competed to produce categories of consumer good for sale; the scale of assembly-line mass production creates a necessity for standardisation, later becoming a national and international drive for compatibility which continues to this day. As an example, the first British Standard (1901) is technically a typology (I suppose) of steel sections, setting out a range of sizes, profiles, etc.
Functionalism extends this analogy to the subject of the architectural brief — identifying types of discrete human use and activity — living, shopping, industry, transport, education etc. The mission of architecture in the ideology of functionalism becomes the organisation of these, while maximising the efficient use of resources, access to greenery, fresh air and efficient networks of transport, and commodious and attractively proportioned spaces.
Conventionally, functionalists have tended to resist a reading of their process as typological at all. In Typology and Design Method (1969) Alan Colquhoun recalls a lecture by Tomás Maldonado in which the critic admitted that typological solutions would have sometimes necessary enter into a given solution, but argues that if incorporated will remain ‘a cancer’ at the heart of the design as realised. A truly functionalist design process lays claim to a certain purity of operation, unencumbered by such ‘vestiges’ of a previous, less scientific age. A thorough and rigorous investigation of the site and functional requirements, mediated by a consideration of the prevalence and availability of industrial and constructional processes and materials, should, on their own, yield solution without ‘the conscious [aestheticising] interference of the designer.’
The path by which the artefact affected the observer aesthetically was seen as short-circuiting the process of formalisation. Form was merely the result of a logical process by which the operational needs and the operational techniques were brought together. Ultimately these would fuse in a kind of biological extension of life, and function and technology would become totally transparent.
As Colquhoun points out, while the essence of form follows function is a claim never to resolve prematurely on an aesthetic or formal resolution, this principle is consistently flouted within, for example, the International Style, by the pervasive deployment of heroic technological symbols — steam-ship, Bugatti, aeroplane — in a manner tenuously (if at all) justified by actual need or ‘efficiency.’ The valorisation of technology in modernism — as a liberating and revolutionary force — is really inseparable from the fetishisation of a typology of resonant, futuristic and desirable objects –
Those in the field of design who were — and are — preaching pure technology and so-called objective design method as a sufficient and necessary means… persistently attribute iconic power to the creations of technology, which they worship to a degree inconceivable to a scientist
Visual symbols are necessary because the functionalist design process is insufficient to generate a complete solution — it ‘leaves a vacuum.’ The designer always has an image of where they are heading, however provisional or subject to emendation it might be. There is no purely functional design — a decision is always made about what it will look like.
The First and Second Typologies, in Vidler’s schema, are united in their deployment of an external natural order to serve as a means of justification for architectural form. Whether the idealised nature of the first, or the quasi-Darwinian evolution of industrial processes in the second; the function of the external object is to furnish a broad conceptual metaphor, within which a belief in future progress is implicitly justified. Just as the tree of life continues to grow and enrich itself; the machine age never stops rolling forward.
In the Third Typology, the typological model and object are no longer external to architecture, but rather are directed at the evidence of its own disciplinary and material history. Typology becomes an ontology of the city in which the operation of validation no longer figures. The Third Typology has no grand supporting analogy; and deploys identifications as part of a critical engagement with the contemporary reality of the city. As we will see, it is this insistence — that the Third Typology has only a critical, and never a merely affirmative, function, which most severely limits its scope.
Columns, houses, and urban spaces, while linked in an unbreakable chain of continuity, refer only to their own nature as architectural elements, and their geometries are neither naturalistic nor technical but essentially architectural. It is clear that the nature referred to in these recent designs is no more nor less than the nature of the city itself, emptied of specific social content from any particular time and allowed to speak simply of its own formal condition.
It is important to be clear on exactly what is (and is not) being emptied out here. At first appearance, this might seem to describe a purely formalistic decomposition of the city-as-found into fragments for reassembly according to pictorial principles, but in fact I think refers only to the actual original function and program. The political and social connotation of the fragment — the carried meaning of archetypes like column, capital, temple, tomb, prison — remains integral to the critical nature of the compositional exercise. Elements, symbols, plan forms, apparent functions, are collaged with a certain permissiveness — ‘disinfected’ of neither their received, or current associations. Vidler describes –
…three levels of meaning — the first, inherited from the ascribed means of the past existence of the forms; the second, derived from the specific fragment and its boundaries, and often crossing between previous types; the third, proposed by a recomposition of these fragments in a new context…
In an interpretation of Rossi’s Cemetery at San Cataldo, these levels might correspond respectively to — first, the archetypes — Columbarium, Colonnade, etc; second, the existing 19th century cemetery by Cesare Costa including the pattern of its subsequent development in use (e.g the larger independent monuments and the infrastructure for watering flowers); and third, the fusion of these with the abstract, dream-image of the house.
In the text, Vidler analyses this manipulation of significance and legibility of fragments (which include the type-form of the 18th century prison among other things) in Rossi’s unbuilt design for a City Hall in Trieste:
Rossi, in ascribing to the city hall (itself a recognisable type in the nineteenth century) the affect of prison, attains a new level of signification, which evidently is a reference to the ambiguous condition of civic government. In the formulation, the two types are not merged: indeed, city hall has been replaced by open arcade standing in contradiction on prison. The dialectic is as clear as a fable: the society that understands the reference to prison will still have need of the reminder, while at the very point the the image finally loses all meaning, society will either have become entirely prison, or, perhaps, its opposite.
As we previously noted, the essential quality of the Third Typology is its criticality. Where the first two typologies are deployed to reify architecture — reassuringly endowing it within momentum on the road towards a golden-hued future; justifying its process, methods and orders — the third is a strategy to bring the discipline into confrontation with the contemporary city of production and consumption. It becomes clear as the essay progresses that Vidler is drawing the circle quite tightly around a very specific strand of practice. The new Rationalism –
… refuses any “nostalgia” in its evocations of history; except to give its restorations sharper focus; it refuses all unitary descriptions of the social meaning of form, recognising the specious quality of any single ascription of social order to an architectural order; it finally refuses all eclecticism, resolutely filtering its “quotations” through the lens of a modernist aesthetic. In this sense, it is an entirely modern movement, and one that places its faith in the essentially public nature of all architecture, as against the increasingly private and narcissistic visions of the last decade. In this it is distinguished from those latter-day romanticisms that have also pretended to the throne of post-modernism — “town-scape,” “strip-city” and “collage-city” — the in reality proposed no more that an endless reduplication of the flowers of bourgeois high culture under the guise of the painterly and the populist.
The element within postmodern historicism excluded by this definition is much larger that what is left. Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown are disinvited personally. The lamely affected populism of Learning from Las Vegas is always good for a kicking — and the assassination of Rowe, his thesis supervisor, has an enjoyably oedipal flavour. I think we may take it as read that such works as Roche and Dinkeloo’s remodelling of Andrea Palladio’s Villa Barbaro into the headquarters of General Foods in Rye, New York are also shut out of paradise. But so too may be much of Rossi’s own later work — the parodic fusion of roman ruins and Floridian mirror glass in the Disney HQ, seems equally hard to place within the framework as defined.
The wasting of post-modernism’s critical potential and its rise to prominence in the USA have seemed, to some, to coincide significantly. Terrance Goode’s Typological Theory in the United States (1992) identifies the failure to adopt a parallel ‘ontology’ of the American city (outside of a few eccentricities like Steven Holl’s Pamphlet 9 — North American House Types) as a factor in the concept’s degradation from critical tool to facile theatrical device. Instead of looking to their own urban history, American architectures postmodernists adopted already distant and mythologised European typolgical images, and then abstracted and cynically sprinkled these to add a flavour of High Culture to the precincts of latter day Capital. In reality, both the promise and the disappointment occurred in parallel on both sides of the Atlantic, with what seem initially to be methods of critical engagement becoming tools of affirmation of the excesses and exuberance of the Thatcher-Reagan-era (and for what it’s worth — Holl’s typological references are, if included at all, then certainly submerged pretty deep beneath the artiste affect of his actual built work).
The critical function of the architectural work in Third Typology mandates a certain legibility at the level of the fragment. The composition Vidler identifies in the design of Trieste City Hall only works if references or quotations — prison, arcade — are discernible. The ‘private and narcissistic’ strain in the individualistic modernism of the previous decade (presumably Kahn, Scarpa etc) would become a feature of Rossi’s own work in the following decade; a drift from literate and erudite ‘quotation’ into poetic-affecting and hermetic symbology. His typology may have begun in direct engagement with the city, but like an isolated island population of birds, its elements gradually inbred, softening into a set of detached emotional mnemonics expressed as enigmatic hieroglyphs. As he himself admitted in his Scientific Autobiography (1980) —
… I seem to see all the things I have observed arranged like tools in a neat row; they are aligned as in a botanical chart, or a catalogue, or a dictionary. But this catalogue, lying somewhere between imagination and memory, is not neutral; it always reappears in several objects and constitutes their deformation and, in some way, their evolution.
That Rossi’s work still retains a fascination even in these hermetic moments has partly, I think, to do with the negativity, ineffability and individuality of these markings, and the consequent difficulty in co-opting them as symbols of corporate power (or anything else for that matter).
The withholding (or not) of meaning is the central ground on which the theoretical battles of the 1980s would be fought. To the extent that the postmodern historicists excluded by Vidler also lay claim to ‘typology’ it is often deployed as a form of architectural language. The ‘type’ becomes one of a series of signs, part of a framing of the architectural work as primarily an exercise in communication. The conflation of typology and the metaphor of architecture as language has been pervasive for a long time, and probably seems natural: types are the elements or structure or lexicon or vocabulary of architectural expression — I have already used some of these terms and so does Vidler. But the problems of approaching architect as an exercise in language are numerous; people don’t agree on the meanings of architectural signs; aren’t listening consistently; meanings in any case are subject to major change; and the whole message is extremely ambiguous. A type certainly can be deployed as a sign — making something look like a house sets up many possible readings — but its formal, structural, urban, material proposition are passed over in the process.
One reason to read the Third Typology now might be in the context of the ongoing reappraisal of Postmodernism, whose second incarnation now is one of the major flavours of small-practice and architecture school design. There is a whole other essay, I think, to be written about the re-emergence of a rhetoric of communication in architecture, allied to a broadly liberal ideology of mitigation in the face of large scale development — community engagement, localism, dialogue — and taking place in the temporarily available ‘meanwhile’ sites released by clearance of previous activities. One observation is that the new postmodernism seems to express nostalgia as much for the fun, uninhibited esprit of Moore, Graves, Venturi etc as for the originally-invoked historical image.
A conclusion we might draw from the failure of the Third Typology is that within such a project the processes of communication and ontology pull in opposite ways. The former will always tend to simplify, the latter to return to material and irreducible specificity. The process of constructing a critical work abstracts and essentialises the originally observed fragments that are composited within it. The language becomes conventionalised, and gradually walls itself off from the real conditions it once alluded to. Gradually ontology dies, leaving a vapid recital of empty symbols. If the Fourth typology is going to be more than a bleak restaging of the disgrace of the Third, it will be through re-founding its ontology.
If you’re interested, we discussed Rossi’s writing and buildings in a series of episodes of About Buildings and Cities, links to which are on the website.
This essay is a bit of an experiment — thoughts and feedback welcome here or on Twitter
