This blog is a repository for research notes and writing snippets pertaining to my ongoing project on the theory of architectural history, and nineteenth-century Brazilian architecture in particular. Feedback, comments, and discussion are welcome!Read More →
This summarized argument will be presented at the 6th meeting of the European Architectural History Network in Edinburgh, 2–5 June, 2021, in the session Split cultures — New dialogues: Research in architectural history and theory, chaired by Brigitte Sölch and Carsten Ruhl. The struggle for rigour in architectural scholarship in post-war Italy resulted in an engaging and diverse body of argumentative and exemplary writings by well-known authors such as Saverio Muratori (1910–1973), Aldo Rossi (1931–1997), and Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994). Their often conflicting positions on the craft of architectural history, its relationship to design practice, and the establishment of disciplinary parameters for either history or design,Read More →
Typology is generally understood to be the processes or operations by which a “concept of a house”—or of any sort of more or less
specialized building—is generated, transformed, and eventually
studied.Read More →
This is the continuation of a previous post on Morphological Studies and Architectural History. The critical role of place and history is restored to architectural design by the Italian morphologists of the postwar period, most notably Saverio Muratori (1910–1973), a practitioner and professor at the University of Rome. He develops the method of procedural typology to provide a contextual tool for rebuilding and infilling in historic Italian sites. Procedural typology is heavily influenced by urban morphology. It departs from the Conzenian method in considering three-dimensional architectural form as developed simultaneously with the parcel patterns that enable it, as well as in positing the generation ofRead More →
The concept of a building type is first articulated in the early nineteenth-century writings of French theoretician Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849). The definition of type is closely associated with imitation as a guiding principle of classicism and, conversely, opposed to the notion of exemplar model. It consists in tracing back to an “original principle” drawn from “the nature of each region, historical notions, and the monuments themselves found in mature art.”1 Type is in turn reported to the expression of character, to which there are three levels: essential character pertains to how a work of architecture respects the universal laws of nature embodied in theRead More →