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.1 What is to be done with this study is, on the other hand, far less generally agreed upon. The Spanish architect, Rafael Moneo famously argued for “the ‘impossibility’ of continuity, and thus of the retrieval of type in its most traditional and characteristic sense. . . .”2 Moneo expressed a modernist worldview that assumes an insurmountable break between past and present and an irrevocable loss of innocence, of sorts, that comes with the intellectual articulation of concepts:
Did not the historical awareness of the fact of type in architectural theory forever bar the unity of its practice? Or, to put it in another way, is not the theoretical recognition of a fact the symptom of its loss?3
The rationale for this argument hinged on the ambiguous role of J.-N. L. Durand’s design method codified in the Recueil et parallèle and Précis des leçons données à l’École polytechnique. The latter’s core teaching, in particular, titled “De la marche que l’on doit suivre dans la composition d’un projet quelconque,”4 poisoned Moneo’s—and other modernists’—understanding of explicit typological operations. These operations are then considered formalist exercises devoid of functional or social meaning. They are, therefore, to be dismissed as mere “reproduction,” in Durand’s method, or worse, morally condemned as “nostalgia,”5 the mortal sin of postmodernity.
More serious students of typology have not been deterred by Moneo’s name-calling, however. Even the militant modernist, Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) rejected a theoretical cut-off date for the concept of building types, which articulated, to him, the interface between two historical subjects: “style being a matter of architectural history, [and] function of social history.”6
Giulio Carlo Argan (1909–1992) provided a solid, if not pioneering, foundation for contemporary typological research by defining typology as a time agnostic “criterion for classification.”7 Argan’s descriptive concept of typology gained operative status thanks to the culturalist theory of Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) and even more so with the design method of procedural typology formulated by Saverio Muratori (1910–1973). Adding to the diverse definitions and uses of typology, Carroll William Westfall more recently construed a didactic model of primal building types understood as the architectural expression of invariable political ends—that is, purposes of the polis.
Notes
- Gianfranco Caniggia, “Metodologia del recupero: lo studio della tipologia processuale nell’indagine e nel piano,” in Ragionamenti di tipologia: operatività della tipologia processuale in architettura (1981; repr., Firenze: Alinea, 1997), 15. ↩
- Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions 13 (1978): 38. ↩
- Ibid., 40. ↩
- Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique, vol. 2 (Paris: l’auteur, 1805), 96. ↩
- Moneo, “On Typology,” 38. ↩
- Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types, Bollingen Series , 35; the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts , 19 (Princeton (N.J.): Princeton University Press, 1989), 6. ↩
- Giulio Carlo Argan, “Tipologia,” in Enciclopedia Universale Dell’arte, vol. 14 (Venezia : Roma: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1966), 1–15. ↩
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