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　　Urban Typologies: The City as History

　　Marina Lathouri

　　Programme Director / MA History and Critical Thinking Architectural Association London

　　The conceptual and visual engagement of the different scales in the above account of the typical and type paradoxically exposes a desire for ultimate synthesis and visual coherence to be achieved in the New City. The question raised in the rethinking of the modern city in the 1950s and 1960s is what happens to the immediate conformity between the sequence of unitary elements and the synthetic instant, when we confront the complex and rather ambiguous figure of the ‘existing city’.

　　But to define the ‘existing city’, how its identity is to be understood and engaged with, proved a rather complex task. Nothing illustrates more clearly this difficulty than the historic research done in Italy by Saverio Muratori and Ernesto Rogers in the 1950s, and later, Aldo Rossi and Giulio Carlo Argan. Despite the often conflicting attitudes involved in these explorations, the aim was to stress by means of a typological permanence the cultural continuity of what Rogers would describe as the ‘pre-existing conditions’ (preesistenze ambientali). In these studies, undoubtedly displaying aspects of the contemporaneous critique of the Functionalist city, any construction was thought as ‘a completed cultural history’. The architectural work was analyzed and conceived as a singular entity (not a unitary element), and at the same time an expression of the development of the urban aggregate within a given place, which was the region, and within a precise historical space, the city.

　　On the one hand, the city was read as a structure that constantly evolves and changes, yet certain features were constant in time, and therefore typical; that is, constituent factors of that structure. On the other, this was an attempt to develop a working method; a method which invoked history in a series of transformations rather than a sequential unfolding of time. This method brought together ideas on history and principles of morphology already formulated in the 1930s by thinkers such as Henri Focillon. In particular, Focillon’s idea of art as a system in perpetual development of coherent forms and of history as a superimposition of geological strata that permits us to read each fraction of time as if it was at once past, present and future is interestingly relevant.

　　A work of art, according to Focillon, was ‘an attempt to express something that is unique’, but it was likewise ‘an integral part of a system of highly complex relationships’. Forms thus acquire in their stratified evolution a life that follows its own trajectory and can be generalised only on the level of method. It was in very similar terms that Ernesto Rogers, editor of Casabella – Continuità during the 1950s, understood the architectural work and project. For Rogers, the individual artefact was a sensible form, a singular and specific outcome, here and now, but also part of a broader structure, and as such a process in search of laws by means of which this structure might receive a greater degree of clarity. Thus the architectural project consisted primarily in a ‘methodological process’ (processo metodologico) seeking to identify the ‘most salient qualities’ (emergenza più saliente) of the existing structure (material, urban, civil, cultural) and capture its ‘specific essence’ (essenza specifi ca).

　　Moreover, if the ‘ideal of an individual architecture’ was ‘an element distinct in the time and space of experience’, it was only ‘the successive experiences’ of these distinct moments in the life of the individual artefact that ultimately ‘achieve a synthesis’. History here shifts into the realm of memory, and the singular form was not only to signify its own distinct individuality; it became a sign of forms and events that were part of a collective – that is, urban – memory. In these terms, any architectural form, existing or new, was the expression of its particular character at a specific time and place, but also embodied the memory of previous forms and functions.

　　If the work was to be read, by means of associations, within the construct of this collective memory, type was the ‘apparatus’ (using Aldo Rossi’s term) which, fusing history and memory, could produce a dialectics between the individual object and the collective subject, between the idea of the object and the memory of its multiple actualities. It is precisely this dialectics which, for Rossi, was to ultimately constitute the structure of the city, a ‘collective possession that’, in its turn, ‘must be presupposed before any significance can be attributed’ to the individual work.

　　As he wrote in the early 1960s, ‘the city is in itself a repository of history’. This could be understood from two different points of view. In the first, the city is above all ‘a material artefact, a man-made object built over time and retaining the traces of time, even if in a discontinuous way’. Studied from this point of view, ‘cities become historical texts’ and type is but an instrument of analysis, to enter into and decipher this text, a function similar to the archaeological section. The second point of view acknowledges history as the awareness of the historical process, the ‘collective imagination’. This leads to one of Rossi’s prominent ideas that the city is the locus of the ‘relationship of the collective to its place’. And it is type, this time as an element of design, which enables the formal articulations of this relationship.

　　In this notion of type, we see an attempt to reinvest the work of architecture with a dimension of meaning, something that is not dissimilar to de Quincy’s understanding of type within a system analogous to language. Only, in this case, the meaning depends on a kind of collective memory. Nonetheless, the suggestion of type as a formal register of the collective but also an instrument of analysis as well as an element of design that can transform theoretical speculations into operative means for making architecture in the present was mostly evident in these studies, yet always recurrent in the critical discourse of architecture.

　　Figure 1. JNL Durand, Fa?ade Combinations, 1809

　　（文章来源：THE CITY AS A PROJECT excerpts）