III-3. Organization principle of typology

Type

    The word “type” originally began from the Greek word “tupos”, which was originally used as a word related to strike a stamp. This eventually came to be used more figuratively, and changed into the concept of “type” as classifying some kind of morphological characteristics. The actual definition and widespread use of “types” of buildings occurred at the transition from the 18th century to the 19th century, during which the art theorist Quatremere de Quincy and professor of architecture at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, played pivotal roles. The former wrote the architectural entries for the “Encyclopedie Methodique” (1825), etc., and attached a more philosophical meaning in particular, while the latter presented a classification of types for concrete buildings through his works “Precis des Lecons d'Architecture données à l'Ecole Polythechnique” (Precis of the Lectures on Architecture) and “Receuil et Parallele des Édifices en tout Genre, Anciens et Modernes” (Compendium and Parallel of Ancient and Modern Buildings) which contained many plates*.   

    These works that followed on from the age of Enlightenment in France had the effect of increasing the intellectual quality of constructing buildings. Anthony Vidler asserts that the concept of “type” and the system of thinking that uses this (typology) changed through two stages, with the first stage being the “Essai sur l'Architecture”(Essay on Architecture, 1753) by Marc-Antoine Laugier in the middle of the 18th century and the second stage being the modernism movement from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century**. The former came against the background of the 18th century idea of naturalism (in other words, Newtonism) of restoring natural order, as can be found in the theory advocated by Laugier that viewed architecture as returning to the “primitive hut” created by the trees within a forest (Fig. 55). On the other hand, the latter had a background of technicism (in other words, the mechanistic world view) that considered buildings as mechanical or technological creations, as advocated by Le Corbusier and Gropius. On such thought, Quatremere de Quincy and Durand were under the effect of the first stage.

    Vidler then pronounced the “third typology” which found acceptance amongst the rationalists of the 1970s. They elucidated architectural elements like columns, traditional units of house, and urban spaces like squares and streets from historical cities, and constructed an architectural theory by classifying them into types, while at the same time grasping the city as an organic entity. This anticipated a new third idea that was critical of both the first typology of naturalism and the second typology of technicism. This resembles to the attitude that Fritjof Capra criticize the Newtonian physics world view and the mechanistic world view, looking for a new physics and the world view, and all of which gave the feeling of a large theoretical background.

    One characteristic of the typological architectural theory of the 1970s is that it sought architectural types within the memories of people, or the entire humankind. This was prompted and invigorated by the theory of the primitive hut advocated by Laugier more than 200 years earlier. In truth, however, it should be called a critical reevaluation of the theory of Laugier. Laugier traced history back to the extremes, surpassing the history of humankind and could be said to have been attempting to establish a theory of architecture in the age of the gods. Of course, even if we mention gods, it was the 18th century that was attempting to realize an enlightened world that cast off superstitions, and the goddess of architecture and a cherub that appear in the frontispiece in the works of Laugier were nothing more than allegoric representations. The fact was that the theory of architecture as a natural ordering on a universal and irresistible earth was proposed. As the Enlightenment is said that it created a new mythos of reason while rejecting the traditional idea of gods, the theory of Laugier created what should be called a new mythos of architecture. It should not be overlooked that today’s theory of typology has indeed learned much from Laugier but throws away such mythos of architecture that surpassed human society.

    Twentieth century modernism could also be said to have created something that should be called the mythos of technology. Of course, modernism fell far short of the concept of gods. The mythos mentioned here is nothing more than a metaphor. The fact is that there was established a strong and undefeatable system of thought comparable to a mythos. Speaking of typology, it is epitomized by the theory of apartment houses that takes the most primitive unit of living called “Existenz Minimum” as the fundamental theory. This theory, which was discussed by a huddle of the leading architects of those days at the CIAM 2 (Frankfurt a.M., 1929) is well represented, for example, in the matrix of housing typology proposed by Alexander Klein. This took the horizontal width dimension of a single dwelling as the vertical axis and the vertical width dimension as the horizontal axis. And this showed what kinds of variations were possible from small scale residential units to large scale residential units in response to a variety of dimensions. The clearness and rationalism of this dwelling planning theory suggested on the other side the dwellers’ poverty of freedom that they had no path but to discover their own existence within the technological theory.

    In the 1950s, Aldo van Eyck focused on uncivilized people such as the Pueblo and began theorizing architecture through the eyes of cultural anthropology following its boom. The Amsterdam Orphanage (1957–1960, Fig. 56) that he designed was structured by combining together geometrical spatial units, and completed as a institution matching a small community. It is estimated as an example of the architectural structuralism as there could be found a structuring principle equal to the way of thinking of French structuralist cultural anthropology as epitomized by Levi Strauss (Arnulf Lüchinger*).

    The idea of searching for archetypes of buildings among uncivilized peoples had already been raised by the mid-19th century architect G. Semper. Compared with that Semper raised the question of building technology, Aldo van Eyck focused on the techniques of social spatial composition concerning the spatial units and the composition of groups of these. This idea was eventually developed by many architectural theorists and designers as the theory of “urban structure” in the 1960s. However, the typologists of the 1970s criticized its way of thinking based on the industrial society, returned to the starting point of Aldo van Eyck’s thinking, and turned their eyes away from uncivilized peoples and onto familiar historical cities. They did not deduce spatial construction methods from settlements of uncivilized peoples like a fairy tale, but deduced the types and typologies of buildings and urban spaces from the real cities beneath their feet which continue to thrive and survive through the history with the ordinary reality.

    A standpoint will be presented, which does not extract the architectural archetypes from an objectively viewed history of architecture but rediscover the architectural archetypes from among a subjective memory of community. For example, Aldo Rossi, as described calm in his “Autobiografia scientifica*” (A Scientific Autobiography), reflected on his memories of several tens of years of his own life and elucidated the fundamental forms of buildings while imagining the traces of buildings appearing and disappearing like a revolving lantern. This can certainly be called a historical methodology because of taking models from the buildings of the past, but it did not simply place importance on objective history or official history. Yet it was a history that traced personal memories, as it were topologically. At the same time, this was not something like a completely private reminiscence, but was, so to speak, an accumulation of monuments in memory, which a single person as a representative of the public had left behind, running against the past society that had experienced a variety of twists and turns. The things that float up as monuments in this are statues of saints, the mysterious spaces of church buildings, large apartment blocks like structures of civil engineering lining a canal, the a single blunt large wall, a lighthouse, and arcades that stretch on in silence, etc.

    It seems that inside Rossi’s head, various formal motifs are scattered about as this kind of memory fragment. When his design begins, they are dropped into a sketchbook through the filter of formal typology which his own hand equips, and a single consistent form of a building emerges. Although the finished form is extremely abstract, at the same time, it has not lost the minimum voice of expression to evoke some kind of motif like a temple, or arcade in a town, or a lighthouse, etc. For example, the “Teatro del Mondo (Theatre of the World)” (1979, Fig. 57) fastened to the coastline of Venice can be thought to appear as an extremely simple and cheap building as a consequence of the abstract form. By the same token, it gives an intense visual impression like a lighthouse protruding from the surface of the sea and stimulates the memories and senses of people with its half-nostalgic sentimentality and half heroic youthfulness.

    This modern notion of type that has been completely changed in this way does not determine architectural archetypes from external factors such as natural order and technical theory, but assumes a procedure of elucidating archetypes from within the shared memories of people. This is neither a completely objective nor completely subjective, and rather inter-subjective. There exist several layers of a communities that share memories, i.e. types and typologies, which handle these. There is a typology that is shared only by the residents of one city, and it could be one village, one region or one country, or again a gathering of such units or the entire global society. It means that there could be a part of the typology of Rossi that Japanese can understand, and possibly a part that is beyond their understanding.

City as fabric

    In Italy, the method of “tipologia (typology)” for architecturally surveying and researching historical cities was established by the school of Muratori, and in Japan this was employed by Hidenobu Jinnai and others*. This was basically formed from the architectural types developed from house, namely the townhouse (palazzo) type and freestanding house (villa) type, and the special architectural types such as churches, public institutions and so on. In tipologia, a detailed analysis was carried out of townhouse types in particular, and the way in which the various rooms within a single house are pulled together via the courtyard, etc. is modeled theoretically. This has clarified how the townhouse changes its typologic form, conditioned by the oblong shape of the lot, from the minimum scale basic type while the width and depth become larger. When this analytical method was applied to historical cities, not only the situation of building in its present condition but the past situation of building were clarified through following the traces of extension and renewal, and then even the architectural and urban history of the cites was uncovered.

    The tipologia research method used here has a quite different standpoint from the way of thinking of typology from the point of view of the design theory described earlier, with the focus settling on vernacular buildings untouched by architects. Thus, the buildings that had been contributed by famous architects, such as churches, public institutions, and monuments, were treated as a special architectural type that is difficult to categorize in type because of the strong individuality. How much aesthetic treatment has been carried out in individual buildings was not taken as a problem here, and instead the theory of formation of more universal urban spaces left after smoothing out the individual and special processes was taken as the main problem.

    If we actually create a plan diagram of some historical city, we recognize that so many similar plans are repeated that it evokes optical illusion as if viewing a plan of an apartment block. Although townhouse type buildings have been individually designed and built, they have a common theory like snuggling together to create a single large apartment block. Thanks to this kind of logical background that had been conveyed through tradition, the research method of tipologia became possible and tipologia was established as the logic that formed urban spaces. Although cities were viewed in which people had constructed buildings completely freely, in fact, the building units of townhouse types and freestanding house types were arranged as neatly as possible according to some fixed typological logic, with special architectural types inserted to give accents to necessary locations.

    Tipologia was eventually developed as an urban planning and architectural design theory beyond the realm of a method of academic art research. As for urban planning, it was applied for the first time in the town of Bologna. In order to redevelop the dilapidated city streets, the historical process of formation of the entire town and the current state were clarified with tipologia. An urban planning strategy was created based on this, and the residential area was planned following tipologia and constructed in this redeveloping areas. This rejected the “modern” design of building high-rise residences with wide open air, and the sloped roofs, small windows, and traditional materials were used the same as those that can be seen in the surrounding areas, and also preserved the traditional semi-private, semi-communal spaces of the continuous arcades.

    The focus here was on historical continuity. The city residents were able to live in the new residential area without a feeling of disharmony by emulating the traditional urban space forms and building forms that the city residents were familiar with, i.e., by inheriting the tipologia that had become traditional. It was not regarded important how to construct an individual building independently, but how to integrate it within the city as a whole. It should be given a certain type and woven into the “fabric (tessuto)” as a city which is formed by the various types of buildings.

If an urban space is newly designed as a new city, the overall form is normally created by assembling the distinct building units and various groups of buildings along the infrastructure of roads, etc.  In order for the city to have excellent capabilities as a city, a rational plan is formed and the functional urban structures and various groups of buildings effectively connected to these are designed. The architectural theory of structuralism of the 1960s as described earlier expended an effort to promote this kind of integrated urban structure in particular. This also created a theory based on types, but this created conditions that should be called a tyranny of structure or infrastructure, and the theory of building type did not have a its own consistent system of logic. It was important there, for example, on how much abundance of variation was possible for each dwelling.

    In urban planning using tipologia, a fine balance was preserved between structure and unit. It was thought that, in urban planning, the city should no longer show a clear system externally, but was expected as a kind of intricate yet indistinct fabric. A clear urban structure could be indeed created by newly establishing a broad avenue passing through the entire city, but this would dismantle and destroy the existing fabric of the urban space that preserves the historical stability. In terms of resolving the problem of transportation, flexible solutions that maintain the existing self-organic fabric of the city were taken to be better than this kind of major operation. The difference between viewing the city as a clear structure and viewing it as a complexly and intricately woven fabric is immense. This is because one treats the city as an inorganic organization, while the other treats it as an organic organization.

    The thinking that the inorganic structure comes first is evoked by the geometrical urban planning techniques which can be seen in ancient Greek and Roman cities. This also brings to mind the capital cities in China, and Heijo-kyo and Heian-kyo in Japan that emulated them. Cities that should be considered organic organizations are the medieval cities of Europe and rural cities of Japan, where the roads are arranged in complex curves and the buildings are arranged in a fairly unordered way. The buildings and urban structures are formed simultaneously in this case, and such city is generally called the spontaneously developed city.

    In recent theoretical physics, there is a theory called “bootstrap theory” (Geoffrey Chew) in opposition to the hypothesis of quarks as the even smaller particles that make up the elementary particles. In this theory, this kind of solid particle does not exist at the most microscopic world. The various phenomena and physical properties are formed purely by the relationship between intricately interacting formless entities. This was a theory that supported the view of Fritjof Capra that a new organic world view replaces mechanistic world view. If this kind of view is employed here, the idea of city as fabric formed by tipologia can be thought of as one kind of bootstrap theory.

    Modern architectural theory considers building units and city structure exactly as the part and the whole, and view buildings as particles with same shape, however, real cities cannot actually be broken down into independent particles with same shape. The types as architectural units are typically found in townhouse type buildings, in which a single one cannot be separated out and placed as a freestanding rural house. This must be able to function and exist from the start as the intertwining of other synonymous types and different types, and the type determines from the start the form within the organic system of the city. This is not having types as something that starts from the word.

    It is natural to think of the flow as a standalone building being constructed first, with an urban group eventually forming as more collect together. However, once a city has been established, the individual building types are conversely formed within the correspondence relationship in the existence of the city as a whole. When this happens, each of the subsequent types has intrinsic urban elements. Furthermore, since the overall form of the city is first formed by taking each of the types as prerequisites and following a format of modifying the groups of buildings, an amorphous spontaneous city can be said to work more effectively than an “ideal city” that shows perfect geometrical forms. The ideal cities of the Renaissance such as Palmanova evoked geometrical forms such as squares and octagons, but this was due to the action of a powerful formation will in a separate dimension from tipologia at the building level.

    In modern cities where the boundary line between rural and urban clearly delineated by the town wall has disappeared, and it has become impossible to draw the outline of the city, the street corner spaces created by the individual townhouses and building groups (ensembles) continually give people the feeling of a city. In other words, the reality is the state of inconsistency in which the whole is felt only in a small part. People understand the urban space through understanding individual types. Even if the fundamental types are transformed or a unique urban space is produced through complex groupings, the system of ideas of tipologia gives a relatively simple understanding of the urban space formed from various buildings. As is well known, although the streets in Islamic cultural cities wind like a labyrinth, the city residents do not find obstacles because of this. This is because the structural principles of Islamic cities take the type of residential units surrounding a courtyard as the fundamental type and create an overall form, where these are spread out over the plan squashed together like an evolving amoeba. It is thought that such is formed against a background of a way of thinking that gives priority to the part over the whole. Thus, in such a case, the urbanity can be found more in the parts than in the whole.

    This kind of typologic logic supports the creation of a well-functioning organic whole that does not permit the existence of an overriding whole. The idea of city as fabric coupled with the logic of typology gives a unique cultural life force to urban physical and spatial organization. If we try viewing this kind of thinking as the background, it is a rejection of both the theories of functionalism and structuralism of modern urban planning.

Typological design method

    An example of architectural design in which typology was applied is the housing estate of Gallaratese Quarter (Milan, 1967–1973, Figs. 59 and 60) planned and designed by Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi. Aymonino employed a constructivistic layout plan using angles of 60 degrees to design wings of   apartment complexes composed of dwellings following typology, and let Rossi design one of the wings. Rossi also used the method of typology, but in his case he gave embodiment to his own rationalist idea and used an abstraction of the historical architectual elements and spatial motifs of arcades and columns in addition to pure geometry based on the square.

    Apart from whether it succeeded as a living space in an apartment complex or not, the two typologies described earlier have been merged. In other words, one is using the typological arrangement of a dwelling plan, while the other is giving the image as primitive types to the architectural elements. The formal design method of Aymonino used large geometrical shapes of cylinders and parallelepipeds, the same as Rossi, whereas this inherited the design sensibilities of constructivism, i.e. modernism. But the cylinders of Rossi evoked classical columns and the pilotis adapted the unique tradition of this region of continuous arcades, and therefore his abstract forms embodied historical and local meaning. Yet these were significantly enlarged and abstracted, and followed a monumentality wrapped in metaphysical atmosphere.

    Whereas the typological urban design in Bologna emulated the vernacular buildings and also the vernacular design techniques, the architectural designers were incorporated through handling vernacular architectural elements with designer’s sense. Here, the role of the architects was merely in the design of buildings with monumentality. They schemed to draw the dimensions of vernacular into the dimension of fine art. The town planning theme in Bolgna of preserving and inheriting a historical city immersed in politics was moved to the stage of a new building design, although it is difficult to say both were merged as one methodology.

    The attitude towards merging these two, i.e. the problem of urban planning and  the problem of architectural design was shown by Leon Krier, and he expressed this image splendidly through Echternach redevelopment project (1969–1970, Fig. 61). Here, he used a geometrical monumental typology of the Rossi type by using disused railways, arranging groups of streets with long stretching arcades, and introducing large geometrical squares. However, all the wing-shaped buildings lining the roads and squares had slanted roofs. Here it is clear that the overarching aim was to restore the historical city more than autonomous pure geometrical solids.

    The point to note when viewing this bird’s eye view is that the complex historical city and the surrounding scenery of hills, rivers, plains along the rivers, and roads meandering through the plains apart from the newly developed area continued to be drawn out as is. This diagram presented an idea that answered the urban planning problem of what degree to merge the historical streets and redeveloped area and the surrounding landscape was no longer simply landscape for emphasizing the newly developed area. This proposed inheriting the typology inherent in the existing individual buildings and the city as a fabric, and also proposed a typological method for designing new buildings.

    When Rossi designed the Monument to the Partisans in Segrate, he drew a perspective drawing contrasting the abstract geometrical sacred monument against the representational trees, as was mentioned before (Fig. 27, 28). This contrast between abstract and representational was expressed by Leon Krier as the contrast between the newly developed area and the existing historical street area. In order to make this contrasting theme clear, in the bird’s eye view of Echternach, there is a contrast between the spherical balloon which is the most geometrical solids and rises up towards the left – which borrow from the spherical monument proposed by the Russian Constructivist Leonidov in his design for the Lenin Institute – and the organic street space towards the right.

    Leon Krier’s brother, Robert Krier, proposed various geometrical squares and street spaces within his book “Urban Space”, and advocated the typology of urban spaces. He proposed passionate monumental square spaces through cool geometrical spaces including horse-shoe shapes, etc. and exhibited a unique Baroque design sensibility. His ideas that considered typological means of regenerating life into cities, using giant geometrical buildings and urban spaces, were also incorporated into projects of his younger brother Leon Krier. The large rectangular and circular squares in the Echternach proposal and the series of streets joining them were certainly examples of this.

    However, the squares and street spaces of Robert Krier showed strong self-assertion. For example, in the redevelopment project set in Stuttgart, he proposed to insert various different spaces as if cutting through the existing built environment. His urban space typology has an aspect that cannot easily be said to be consistent with the typology created by the city as a fabric (Fig. 62). Leon Krier , in contrast, could be said to have adopted a design method that surpassed such inconsistency. And the urban spaces that he proposed treated external appearances exceptionally subtly in an awareness of the sloping roofs, etc.

    Typology is obviously an artificially created logic that differs from the mechanism of the preestablished harmony inherent in nature. This was the creation of a gradually more stable logic through various trials and errors through contact with nature and along the flow of history. Therefore, this had a duplicity of, on one hand, being viewed as a given that existed from the past and, on the other hand, being viewed as something completely artificial. Thus typology was viewed as stable, while at the same time preparations were already being made to modify it. In other words, it was intrinsic logic that was consistent from beginning to end, but that also maintained a relationship open to the external world. Between the typological design methods of the Krier brothers, there existed a vague difference in terms of this.

    When the point of view of the bird’s eye view of Leon Krier is taken even further away to bring even more of the earth’s scenery into the field of view, as if viewed from a spacecraft, then the only things visible are the non-geometric amorphous forms of the intertwined complexity of nature, i.e. the boundaries between land and sea and the motion of the clouds. The artificial and geometrical formal elements of typology are soon too small to be identifiable. In other words, typology at the building level becomes a microscopic formal logic internalized and hidden in the depths of the organic mechanisms of an enormous nature. When several cities are viewed from the air, the curving line directions of the road networks lose any pattern, becoming dispersed all over the place according to the regional and historic character of each city and bearing their own roles.

    The artificial logic of typology exhibits a unique appearance according to time and space. The way to form a city appears as same in every region of the world, but has slight differences. For example, although Italian townhouses and Japanese townhouses appear startlingly similar if the floor plans are examined, the external appearance is completely different. The formation of individual typologies unique to each region indeed means that there are numbers of typologies. Typology is universal to all humankind in principle, but it appears in a variety of different forms and is itself an invisible organizational principle.

  While it was modernism that proposed and disseminated an international architectural form based on the global theme of functionalism in the meaning of natural scientific or mechanistic theory, the typological design of today means the antithesis of this and attempts to establish a design system to replace it. Whereas the globally universal language of modernism discards uniqueness and only restores commonality, the typology proposes a system that absorbs uniqueness and permits diversity. This has the meaning of dismantling the fixed one-dimensional system and of changing it into a distributed flexible system, in which both moments of dismantling the existing system and regenerating a new system are overlapping each other. Although a consistent system may not be found in the works of typological design from an external view, there could be found what it  could be said an organic system.

    If we attempt to put this in order one more time, these in principle individually start as parallelepiped space units (space types), with several joined together to form a dwelling unit, or a single wing of a building (building types). Then, several number of wings are combined to a block, several number of blocks are woven to a city as a fabric, and then, such artificial spatial systems are blended into the surrounding environment and scenery. There emerges not a geometrical urban form proposed by Le Corbusier but a picturesque townscape like a medieval city with complicated incorporation. The preference of such logic of typology for romantic landscape filled with variations over the disciplined spatial ordering was also clear in the bird’s eye views of Leon Krier.