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Typological Urbanism And The Idea Of The City

Christopher C.M. Lee

Associate Professor in Practice of Urban Design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, co-founder and principal of Serie Architects

Type and Typology

In common usage the words ‘type’ and ‘typology’ have become interchangeable and understood as buildings grouped by their use: schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on. ‘Type’, however, should not be confused with ‘typology’. The suffix ‘-ology’ comes from the Greek logia, which means ‘a discourse, treatise, theory or science’. Thus, typology is the discourse, theory, treatise (method) or science of type. Its reduction to categories of use is limiting, as buildings are independent from their function and evolve over time, as Aldo Rossi and Neo-Rationalism have already argued. A warehouse can be turned into apartments, and a Georgian terrace into a school. What this means is that a functional reduction prevents other knowledge that can be obtained from type by considering it as belonging to a group of formal, historical and sociocultural aspects. The essential quality of change and transformation rather than its strict classification or obedience to historical continuity endows type with the possibility to transgress its functional and formal limitations.

For the definition of the word ‘type’ in architectural theory we can turn to Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy’s masterful explanation in the Dictionnaire d’architecture (1825) that formally introduced the notion into the architectural discourse. For Quatremère:‘The word type presents less the image of a thing to copy or imitate completely than the idea of an element which ought itself to serve as a rule for the model.’ Type consequently is an element, an object, a thing that embodies the idea. Type is abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and literal. Its idea guides or governs over the rules of the model. This idea, following a Neoplatonic and metaphysical tradition, is by Quatremère understood as the ideal that an architect should strive for but which never fully materializes in the process of creative production. The idea of the ‘model’, on the other hand, is developed by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand in his typological design method of the Précis des le?ons d’architecture données à l’?cole royale Polytechnique (1802–05). In the Précis, developed almost at the same time as Quatremère’s typological theory at the turn of the 19th century, Durand attempts to establish a systematic method of classifying buildings according to genres and abstracts them into diagrams. He proposes that new types emerge in response to the requirements of a changing society and urban conditions, whereby the typological diagrams are adapted to the constraints of specific sites. This notion of type as model, graphically reducible to diagrams, introduced precepts that are fundamental to working typologically: precedents, classification, taxonomy, repetition, differentiation and reinvention. Thus, Durand’s Précis outlines an important element of the didactic theory of type and constitutes what we understand by typology.

The misunderstanding of type and typology, attacked by many for its perceived restrictions, has resulted in the deliberate rejection of typological knowledge. This is evident in the exotic formal experiments of the past 15 years: every fold, every twist and bend, every swoosh and whoosh is justified as being superior to the types it displaces. However, it remains unclear what these ill properties or characteristics of type are that the novel forms want to replace and to what ends. These architectural experiments have no relevance beyond the formal and cannot be considered an invention, for invention, as Quatremère stated, ‘does not exist outside rules; for there would be no way to judge invention’. In ‘Type? What Type?’ (pages 56–65), Michael Hensel recounts his personal experiences in the early 1990s at the Architectural Association (AA) in London – according to him an important juncture for the theory and experiments of architecture in urbanism – which he argues failed to recognize the need for a wider contextualization of experimentation, due to the casual if not naive treatment of the type. Marina Lathouri in ‘The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies’ (pages 24–31) provides a critical and historiographical discussion of type’s role in defining the architectural object and its relationship to the city. This thematic engagement is complemented by the projects of UNStudio in ‘Typological Instruments: Connecting Architecture and Urbanism’ by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos (pages 66–77). These projects clarify the utilization of design models to synthesize types with the complexities of practice and reality through the instrumentality of typological and serial models of organization. The specific responses demonstrate that typological design models are capable of, and require, their transformation and hybridization in order to fulfil the ambitions and requirements of an architectural project in an urban context.

Typology and the Urban Plan

The coupling of the concept of type as idea and model allows us to discuss its instrumentality in the urban context. The word ‘urbanism’ means ‘of, living or situated in, a city or town’, but it was Ildefons Cerdá – a Catalan engineer and the urban planner of the Barcelona Example – who first invented the words ‘urbanism’ and ‘urbanization’ in his Theory of Urbanization (1867). For Cerdá, urbanism was the science that manages and regulates the growth of the city through housing and economic activities. He understood the word ‘urbs’ at the root of ‘urbanization’ and, in opposition to the notion of the city, proposed that its focus was not the (historical and symbolic) city center but the suburbs. Thus, the process of urbanization inevitably involves multiple stakeholders, a diversity of inhabitants, and a scale beyond that of a single building incorporated in an urban plan. This inclusive urban plan has to be differentiated from the masterplan predicated on singular authority and control. The instrumentality of type in the process of envisioning, regulating and administering the urban plan lies in its ability to act as a pliable diagram, indexing the irreducible typal imprints that serve as the elemental parts to the plan. The diagrams of type, however, are not mere graphic representations of the urban plan, but embody the basic organizational performance, history and meaning of precedent types that are then developed into new design solutions. The function of the diagram hereby is both diagnostic and projective, and at the same time refers to the irreducible structure of the types in question.

In ‘Type, Field, Culture, Praxis’ (pages 38–45) Peter Carl clarifies that ‘types are isolated fragments of a deeper and richer structure of typicalities’, attempting to relate the architectural object to human situations. Typicalities, says Carl, are ‘those aspects common to all’, exerting a claim on freedom, while this freedom depends in turn on that which is common to all for its meaning.

A number of further projects by OMA, Toyo Ito, SANAA and l’AUC provide a second reading of how a recourse to typology is necessary when dealing with the urban context. In the Penang Tropical City (2004) by OMA (pages 78–89), distinct building types are grouped together to form ‘islands of exacerbated difference’ as yet another enactment of Koolhaas’ idea of the ‘Cities within the City’ developed with OM Ungers in 1977. Toyo Ito’s project for the Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan (2001 – see pages 90–3) develops the use of prototypical elements – albeit in a more ‘fluid’ manner – that bears traces to his preoccupations with the problems of collective form that typified the Metabolist movement of the 1960s in Japan. In Ito’s proposal, the city is envisioned as aggregating into a continuous whole, fusing infrastructure, building, open spaces and services into an integrated piece of architecture. l’AUC pursues a re-representation and projection of the metropolitan conditions through typological intensifications of a super-metropolitan matrix in the Grand Paris Stimulé (2008–09 – pages 108–9), which attempts a different approach to city-making. Perhaps the most unusual inclusion is the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (2004) in Kanazawa, Japan, by SANAA (pages 94–101). This project should be understood in relation to other projects such as the Moriyama House in Tokyo (2005) and the recently completed Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne (2010), which rethink the building as a piece of city fabric through the mat-building typology.

Type and the City

If urbanization is concerned with the expansion of human settlement driven primarily by economics, the city on the other hand is the consolidated, concentrated settlement that precedes the urb. It is usually demarcated by a city wall and a point of concentration for people and activities, resulting in a stratified society that is functionally differentiated and politically divided. This city is a historical product and centered on the civic and symbolic functions of human settlement and coexistence. As cities owe their main characteristic to geographical and topographical conditions, and are always linked to other cities by trade and resources, they tend to specialize and form a distinct character. It is this distinct character coupled with the need to accommodate differences that gives rise to the possibility of a collective meaning for the city. This meaning changes over time in response to its evolving inhabitants and external circumstances, but its history is often formalized in the construction of civic buildings and landmarks that express a common identity. These ‘elements of permanence’ in the city are exemplify ed by town halls, libraries, museums and archives. It is through this understanding that we are proposing that the idea of the city can be embodied in these dominant types, communicating the idea of the city in response to specific historical and sociocultural conditions. From Barcelona with its Cerdá housing blocks, London with its Victorian and Georgian terraces and New York with its Manhattan skyscrapers, cities can be understood, described, conceptualized and theorized through their own particular

dominant types. Through Rossi, we learn that a building as an element of ‘permanence’ is able to act as the typological repository of a city’s history, construction and form. For Rossi, type is independent of function and therefore pliable. To understand these types is to understand the city itself.

Pier Vittorio Aureli in ‘City as Political Form: Four Archetypes of Urban Transformation’ (pages 32–7) discusses the instrumentality of paradigmatic architectural archetype as an extensive governance apparatus and proposes that while the evolution of the city can be thought of as the evolution of urban types, its realisation can only happen within a political ‘state of exception’. Similarly, Martino Tattara in ‘Brasilia’s Superquadra: Prototypical Design and the Project of the City’ (pages 46–55) proposes that the ‘prototype’ is the exemplar that does not reproduce itself through a set of norms, prescriptions or rules, but through the authoritativeness of the prototype itself. This ultimately constitutes a new disciplinary operativity by considering the prototype as a ‘seed’ for the idea of the city.

Two projects by DOGMA and Serie offer a possible demonstration of the manifestation of the idea of the city as an architectural project. DOGMA, in their ‘A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of a Post-Fordist City’ (pages 110–19) investigate the possibility by focusing on the relationship between architectural form, large-scale design and political economy. This is rendered less as a ‘working’ proposition and more as an idea of the city brought to its (extreme) logical conclusions. In the Xi’an Horticultural Masterplan project by Serie Architects (pages 120–7), the transformation of an artefact of the city is used to confront the problem of centrality and the possible recuperation of the tradition of city-making in Xi’an, China. The city wall as a dominant type is utilized as the deep structure that sets out a typological grammar for the city.

Typological Urbanism, in conclusion, brings together arguments and projects that demonstrate a commitment to the empowerment of the architect to once again utilize his or her disciplinary knowledge. It is a re-engagement with architecture’s exteriority and architectural experimentation governed by reason and (re)inventions underpinned by typological reasoning. It is an insistence on architecture that not only answers the didactic question of ‘how to?’ but also the meta-critical question of ‘why do?’.