1 ARCHI TECTURAL DESI GN JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 20 2011 11 PROFI LE NO 209 GUEST- EDI TED BY CHRI STOPHER ERC CM LEE LEE& & SAM JACOBY
TYPOL OGI CAL URBA BAN NI SM
2 ARCHI HITEC TECTURAL DESIG DESI GN FORTHCOMI NG2 TI TITLE TLES
MARCH/APRI L 2011 —PROFI LE NO NO210 210 PROTOCELL PROTOC ELL ARCHTECTURE
GUEST-EDI ST-EDITE TED BY BYNE NEI L SPI LLER LLERAN AND RACHEL ARMSTRONG
T hroughout t he age ages s, architects archi tects have at tempt tempted ed to ca capt pture ure the t he essence of l i vin ving g systems systems as as des desi gn i ns nspir pira ati on. H owe oweve ver, r, practi practi ti one oners rs of t he buil buil t envir nvironme onment nt hav have e had had to t o dea deal wit h a fundamental split between the artificial urban landscape and nature owing to a technological ‘gap’ that means architects have been unable to make effective use of biological systems in urban environments. T hi his s i ssue of 2 shows for the first time that contemporary architects can create and construct archit ec ectur tures es th that at are are bottombott om-up, up, synt syntheti hetica callll y biol ogical, green green and have have no recourse recourse to shallow shall ow biomimickry. Synthetic biology will have as much impact on architecture as cyberspace has had – and probably more. Key to these amazing architectural innovations is the protocell. • Contri butors include include:: Marti n Ha H ancz nczyc yc,, Lee Cronin and and M ark M orris. • A rchit ects include: Nic Ni c Cle Cl ear, Iwa I wamotoSc motoScott ott,, Paul Paul Preissne Preissner, r, Omar Kha K han, n, D an Slavin Slavins sky, Philip Beesley and Neri Oxman. • Topics Topi cs i ncl nclude: ude: new smart bi ologi ologica call materi als, surr urrea eal i sm, rui ns, al che chemy, my, eme emergence rgence, carbon carbon capture, urbanism and sustainability, architectural ecologies, ethics and politics.
Volume No ISBN
MAY/JUNE 2011 —PROFI LE NO NO211 211 LATIN AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS
GUEST-EDI ST-EDITO TOR MARI ANA LEGUÍ UÍA A
T he announceme nnouncement nt of Ri Rio o de Janei ro as th the e 2016 Ol ympi ympic c host host cit ci t y has has pl plac ace ed L ati atin n Ameri A merica ca on the world’s worl d’s stage tage.. Now, for t he first time t ime sin since ce the mid- 20th centur centur y when when M ode oderni rni st urba urban n desi gn was was undert undertake aken n on an an epic sca scall e, Lati L atin n Ameri A merica ca i s th the e ce cent ntre re of internati in ternati onal att att enti ention on and archite archit ectural pil grimage grimage.. T hough mas mass migrations migrati ons from t he countr countr ys yside ide and the th e erec erectiti on of i nformal sett sett leme lements nts in t he late late 20th centur centur y left cit cities ies socia ociallll y and and spa spatiti all y divide divi ded, d, L ati n A me meri ri ca is now once again set to go through major change. Since the millennium, resourceful governments and practices have developed innovative approaches to urban design and development less to do wit h utopian ut opian and and totali t otalitari taria an sche scheme mes s and and more to do wi th urba urban n acupunc acupuncture, ture, working worki ng wit hi hin, n, rather than opposing, informality to stitch together disparate parts of the city. Once a blind spot in cities’ representation, informality is now considered an asset to be understood and incorporated. W it h more than 50 pe perr cent cent of t he worl world´s d´s popula populatiti on living li ving in cit ies for the t he fir st ti t i me in human history, hi story, and and an increasing increasing amount amount i n slum slums s, Lati L atin n Ameri A merica ca´s ´s solut i ons to urban ur ban problems represent the vanguard in mitigating strong social and spatial divisions in cities across the globe. • Cont ri butor butors s i ncl nclude: ude: Sa Sas ski a Sa Sas ssen, Herna H ernando ndo de Soto, Ricky Burdett Bur dett and the for former mer mayor mayor of Bogotá, E nri que Peñalosa Peñalosa. Volume No ISBN
• Featured Featured archi tects: Teddy Cruz, Caracas CaracasT hi hinknk- Tank, Jorge Jorge Jaure auregui, gui, A lejandro Echeverr Echeverrii , M M BB and A leja lejandro ndro A rav rave ena na.. • Covers l arge arge-- sc scale ale urban case case studi studies es, such such as as th the e revit ali alis sati ation on of Bogotá Bogot á and Mede M edel li n.
JULY/AUGUST 2011 —PROFI LE NO NO212 212 THE MATHEMATICS OF SPACE
GUESTST-ED EDI TED TEDBY BYG GEORGE L LEGENDRE
O ver the th e last last 15 years years,, contemporary archit archi t ec ectur ture e has has bee been profoundl pr ofoundl y altere alt ered d by the t he advent advent of comp computati utation on and inf ormation techno technology. logy. The ubiquit ous diss disse emin mina ati on of de des sign soft oftwa ware re and numerical f abri brica catiti on machi machine nery ry hav have e rere- actua ctualili sed the t he tradit ional role r ole of ge geome ometr tr y in in architecture and opened it up to the wondrous possibilities afforded by topology, non-Euclidean geome ge omett r y, parametr parametr i c surface des desi gn and other ot her areas areas of mathema mathematiti cs cs.. From Fr om t he technica techni call aspects of scri cripti pti ng code to the biomorphic bi omorphic paradi paradi gms of f orm and its i ts associa ociatiti ons with ge gene netiti cs cs,, the t he i mpac mpactt of computa comput at i on on the t he discipli discipl i ne has has been widely docume d ocument nted. ed. W hat is i s less cl cl ear, and has l arge argell y es esca cape ped d scrut scrut i ny so so far, is the role rol e mathema mathematt i cs i tself has h as pl pla ayed in thi t his s revolut revolutii on. H enc ence e t he ti me has come for desi gners gners,, computati comput ational onal desi desi gne gners rs and engineers engineers to t o tea t ease th the e math mathe emati matics cs out of their respective works, not to merely show how it is done – a hard and futile challenge for the audience – but to reflect on the roots of the process and the way it shapes practices and i nt ntell ellec ectual tual agendas agendas, whil whi l e helpi helping ng defi defi ne new direc dir ectiti ons. T hi his s i ssue of 2 asks: W here do we stand t oda oday? y? W hat is i s up wit h mathemat mathemat i cs i n des desi gn? W ho is doing the th e mos mostt i nt ntere eresti sting ng work? T he i mpac mpactt of mathe math emati matics cs on cont contempora emporary ry creati creati vi vitt y is eff ec ectt i ve vell y explor explored ed on it s own terms. • Contri Cont ri butors incl ude ude:: M ark Burr y, Berna Bernard rd Cache Cache,, Phi Philili ppe M ore orel,l, Ant oine Picon, D ennis Shell den, Fabi She Fabie en Scheurer Scheurer and M i cha chael el Weinstock. Wei nstock. Volume No ISBN
1 ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
GUEST-EDI TED BY CHRI STOPHER CM L EE AND SAM JACOBY
TYPOLOGI CAL URBANI SM PROJECTI VE CI TI ES
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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN VOL 81, NO 1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 ISSN 0003-8504 PROFILE NO 209 ISBN 978-0470-747209
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IN THIS ISSUE
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
GUEST-EDI TED BY CHRI STOPHER CM LEE AND SAM JACOBY
TYPOLOGI CAL URBANI SM: PROJECTI VE CI TI ES
EDITORIAL
H elen Castle ABOUT THE GUEST-EDITORS
Christopher CM L ee and Sam Jacoby SPOTLIGHT
Visual highlights of the issue INTRODUCTION
Typological Urbanism and the Idea of the City
Christopher CM L ee and Sam Jacoby
EDITORIAL BOARD Will Alsop D enise Bratt on Paul Br islin M ark Burry André Chaszar Nigel Coates Peter Cook Teddy Cruz M ax Fordham M assimi li ano Fuksas Edwin H eathcote M ichael H ensel Ant hony Hunt Charles Jencks Bob M axwell Jayne M erkel Peter M urray M ark Robbins D eborah Saunt L eon van Schaik Patrik Schumacher Neil Spiller M ichael Weinstock Ken Yeang Alejandro Zaera-Polo 2
The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies M ari na L athouri A persistent architectural category, type is traced back by L athouri to the 18th century.
City as Politi cal Form: Four
Archetypes of Urban Transformation
Pier Vi tt ori o Aureli Type, Field, Cult ure, Praxis
Peter Carl Brasilia’s Superquadra: Prototypi cal
Design and the Project of the City
M artino Tattara
Type?W hat Type? Further Reflections
Singapore Buona Vista M asterplan
on the Extended Threshold
Competi ti on, Singapore
M ichael H ensel
Toyo I to & Associates, Architects
Typological Instruments: Connecti ng
Archit ecture and Urbanism
Caroli ne Bos& Ben v an Berkel/ UNStudio
21st Century M useum of
Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan
K azuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA The M etropolis as Integral Substance
l ’AU C Ar chitects and Ur banists (François Decoster, Caroli ne Poulin, D jamel K louche) A Simple H eart: Archit ecture on
the Ruins of the Post-Fordist City
D OGM A (Pi er Vi tt ori o Aureli and M arti no Tattara) Xi’an H orticultural
M asterplan, Xi ’an, China
Serie Architects COUNTERPOINT
Transcending Type: Designing for Urban Complexity
D avi d Grahame Shane Penang Tropi cal City,
Penang, Malaysia OM A
Joã o Brav o da Costa As epitomised by OM A’sproject for Penang, the magnit ude of urbanisation in East Asia requiresan i nnovati ve approach to type.
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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
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T: + () Editor H elen Castle Managing Editor (Freelance) Caroline Ellerby Production Editor Elizabeth Gongde
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Front cover: Udayan Mazumdar, Ground Zero, Mumbai, India, DiplomaUnit 6 (tutors: Sam Jacoby and Christopher CM Lee), Architectural Association, London, 2008. © Diploma Unit 6, AA School and Udayan Mazumdar Inside front cover: Concept CHK Design
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EDI TORI AL H elen Castle
Just as grammar in recent years has been revived in the classroom, the resurgence of type in architecture indicates a desire for syntax or underlying order. Type provides what Caroline Bos and Ben van Berkel refer to as ‘a legacy of rationality’. I t has the potential to endow architecture with coherency, logic and structure. In a city context, moreover, it bestows the possibility of order to often complex and unstructured urban situations. For guest-editors Christopher CM L ee and Sam Jacoby, it is reason, but with a definite objective. This issue of 2 comes out of a desire on the guest-editors’ part to promote architects’ ability to assert themselves in the city and an understanding that if architects in the future are going to be anything more than dressers of buildings, responsible for exterior whooshes and folds, then they need to approach their subject with the required ‘disciplinary knowledge’. Chris L ee’s and Sam Jacoby’s preoccupation with type comes out of extensive research, teaching and practice. Both are unit masters at the Architectural A ssociation in L ondon and Sam Jacoby is currently completing a doctorate on the subject; Chris Lee is also codirector, with Kapil Gupta, of award-winning office Serie Architects, a relatively small but incredibly agile and influential practice that has gained international renown for its projects spread across X’ian, H angzhou, Beijing, Chengdu, L ondon, Bratislava and M umbai. For Serie Architects, ‘the notion of type as operative theory’ is ‘generic enough to overcome differences and specific enough to engage and index the cult ural, social and political nuances of its host’. 1 It has the potential to anchor international practice in a way that is both universal and local, providing architectural solutions to urban problems. The desire for underlying order and reason – for anchorage – cert ainly befits the times in which architects are as much at sea in the economic downturn in the West as the tantalisingly large-scale architectural opportunities that Asia and the M iddle East have to offer. As the guest-editors state at the end of their introduction, type is as much about ‘why do’ as ‘how to’. Type requires architects to look beneath the surface to find the commonalities and similarities between built form – the essence of buildings if you like. M etaphysical in scope, it presses on architecture far-reaching but necessary questions, such as ‘W hat is architecture?’ If, as M ichael H ensel suggests in his art icle, it could be a preoccupation that is triggered by the current more serious turn of mind, as it was in the recession of the early 1990s, it is also one that we should not let slip through our fingers before it has gained the full attention it deserves. Type, as L ee and Jacoby demonstrate in this issue, lends order but in setting parameters also provides the essential catalyst for innovative design thinking at the city scale. 1 Note
1. Christopher CM Lee, Worki ng in Series: Christ opher CM Lee and Kapil Gupta/Serie Archi tect s , Architectural Association (London), 2010, p 5. Text © 201 1 J ohn Wiley &Sons Ltd. Image © Steve Gorton
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Serie Architects, Xin Tian Di Factory H, Hangzhou, China, 2010
Serie Architects, Bohácky Residential Masterplan, Bratislava, Slovakia, 2009
: For the project to create an urban top left
: Serie’s principal concern in top right
core for a la rger masterplan of Xin Tian Di, Serie wa s ta sked w ith the conservation of a large disused factory and proposed rethinking the idea of the mat building as a plinth. Here the plinth serves to punctuate the factory as the anchor for the masterplan, with surrounding buildings many times its density. This alterna tive strategy of rethinking what constitutes an urban core eschews the reliance on hyperdense buildings that accumulates pedestrian flows. Instead, it presents the reclaimed void as a new urban core.
designing the masterplan for a residential development – comprising 120 singlefamily dwellings designed by Serie as well as six other architects – is to institute an overall coherence that does not impinge on the heterogeneity of th e villas. To do this, Serie utilised an undulating giant hedge tha t delineates autonomous plots for the various villas. An evolved courtyard type, where rooms are spun off a circular courtyard in different numbers, is used as a typological grammar for the design of the villas.
Sam Jacoby with Type 0 (Max von Werz, Marco Sanchez Castro and Charles Peronnin), Beserlpark, Vienna, 2009 above : In this ma sterplan, the suburban
ideal of living in the park is confronted with the metropolitan typology of the inverted urban courtyard block, resulting in negotiated private and semiprivate spaces within a network of public courtyards/parks and functions.
ABOUT THE GUEST-EDI TORS CHRI STOPHERCM LEE AND SAM JACOBY
Chri stopher CM L ee and Sam Jacoby are the co-di rectors of the new postgraduate Projective Cities Programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Archit ecture in L ondon (projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk), which is dedicated to a research- and design-based analysis of the emergent and contemporary cit y. They have taught t ogether at the AA since and their investigation of the city, undertaken in Diploma Unit from to , has been published in Typological Formati ons: Renewable Bui ldi ng Types and the Ci ty (A A Publications, ). The work has also been widely exhibited, including at the th Architecture Biennale in Venice () and as a solo exhibition at the UT S Gall ery i n Sydney (). Christopher CM L ee is the co-founder and principal of Serie Archit ects. H e graduated with an AA Diploma (H ons), has previously taught H istories and Theories Studies at the AA (–) and was Unit M aster of Intermediate Unit from to and Diploma Unit 6 from to . H e is pursuing his doctoral research at the Berlage Insti tute in Rotterdam on the topic of the dominant type and the city. The relationship between architecture and the city is a problem that has informed Sam Jacoby’s teaching in collaboration with Christopher Lee and his professional work. Jacoby is also the co-director of the Spring Semester Programme at the AA where he also previously taught H istory and Theori es Studies. He was also a studio leader in the BArch programme at the University of Nottingham. H e is currently completi ng a doctoral degree at the Technical University of Berlin on the topic of ‘Type and the Syntax of the City’. In this issue of 2 on Typological Urbanism, L ee and Jacoby recognise the city as a contemporary field, an area of study, and a design and research agenda, bringing together the work and research of contemporary professionals and academics that speculates on the potential of architectural experimentation and the meaningful production of new ideas for the cit y. 1 Text © 2011 John Wiley &Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6(t), 7(t) © Serie Architects; pp 6 (b), 7(b) © Sam Ja coby
top : Christopher CM Lee : Sam Jacoby above
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SPOTLI GHT
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Superquadra 308S
Brasilia, Brazil, 1957–60 The superquad ra housing blocks, designed by Lucio Costa, are the basic unit of the urban realm in B rasilia. Their elevations, foregrounded by trees, are the backdrop to the city.
Type has a strong M odernist pedigree as exemplifi ed by Lucio Costa’s elevations for the superquadra at Brasilia, executed in the 1950s, and Toyo Ito’s much more recent Singapore Buona Vista M asterplan, which is informed in its approach by the 1960s M etabolists. Though type often requires a level of order or systematisation, it does not prevent it from being playful, as demonstrated by SANAA’s museum for Kanazawa where the private and public spaces are entwined in a single building.
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Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects and RSP Architects Planners & Engineers (Pte) Ltd
D
UNStudio
Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan Competition, Singapore, 2000–01
Arnhem Central, The Netherlands, due for completion 2013
For this ITresearch city, Ito envisioned a horizontal urban infrastructure connected by high-speed pedestrian walkways.
In UNStudio’s work, the centralising void space becomes an a daptab le type for spatial organisation, as demonstrated by this public transportation centre and the Raffles City project on pp 74–7.
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Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, 2004 This interior space of t he a rt museum epitomises gallery whiteness while other translucent areas embrace the city and, by extension, the public, with their transparency. Interiority and exteriority and different types are effectively entwined.
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DOGMA (Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara with Alice Bulla)
A Simple Heart: Architecture on theRuins of the Post-Fordist City, European North Western Metropolitan Area, 2002–09 In this project for an archetype for the modern city, DOGMAespouses a repeat able architectural form that enables the city to be based on a rchitecture alone rather than a combination of urban elements.
Text © 201 1 J ohn Wiley &Sons Ltd. Images: pp 8 -9 © Adolfo Despradel/ photograph by Adolfo Despradel; p 10 © Toyo Ito &Associates, Architects; p 11 © Christian Richters; p 12 © Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA; p 1 3 © FRAC Centre Collection, Orléans, Franc e
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I NTRODUCTI ON By Chri stopher CM L ee and Sam Jacoby
TYPOLOGI CAL URBANI SM AND THE I DEA OF THE CI TY
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Yifan Liu, The Great Flight Forward, Chengdu, China, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2008 Urban plan of airport. What defines China’s public image of monumentality and iconicity? The project subverts the idea of the People’s Square and turns its heroic figure into an airport.
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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.
Bolam Lee, Multiplex City, Seoul, South Korea, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2007 above : Model. The reconfigured high-rise is spliced with vertical public spaces and functions as an urban punctuator.
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opposite : Urban plan of Multiplex City. The project aims to exploit the defunct middle floors of multiplexes (multifunctional, hyperdense high-rises) in Seoul and converts them into vertical public spaces.
At the heart of this title of 2 is an attempt to outline a possible position and approach that enables the conjectural impulses of architectural production to recover its relevance to the city. Implicit to this is that the relationship between architecture and the city is reciprocal and that the city is the overt site for architectural knowledge par excellence . This proposition to re-empowe r the arch itect in the context of urban architectural production is founded on the realisation of three essential predicaments that need to be ad dressed by both the profession and aca demia. Firstly, the relentless s peed a nd colossal sc ale of urbanisation, with the current level of around 50 per cent increasing to a pproximately 69 per cent by 2 050 , has resulted in the profession merely responding to these rapid changes and challenges in retrospect. Secondly, the form of urbanisation in emerging cities in the developing countries, and in particular in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, has departed from the Western models of centralised organisation and planning.1 The se para tion of architecture and urban planning into segregated domains – for efficiency and speed – has left each discipline impotent to dea l with the ruptured, decentralised a nd fa st-changing context, whether in Macau, Dubai or Shanghai. Finally, the architecture of this new urbanisation, fuelled by the market economy, is predominantly driven by the regime of difference in search of novelty. Macau built the world’s biggest casino and Dubai the tallest skyscraper, with its Burj Khalifa beating the recently completed S ha ngha i World Finance Center of 2008 to this superlative. With this increasing stultification, the discipline’s inability to confidently and comprehensively describe, conceptualise, theorise and ultimately project any new ideas of architecture in relationship to the city must be confronted and rethought. To ac hieve the sta ted met a-critical a im, this issue tries to dispel the common misunderstanding of the notion of type (and typology) and its common misuse as the ‘straw man’ in architectural experimentation and propositions. It outlines the terms on which the discussion of type and typology can
unfold today in a more precise and considered manner. It re-argues for the instrumentality of type and typology in the field of urbanism and the city, and features four projects that are conventionally not seen as fitting within the framework of typology, proposing that the reconsideration of these projects renews and enriches the understanding of working typologica lly. Similarly, recent projects by young practices further illustrat e th e poss ibility of utilising th e notion of type in informing the ‘idea of the city’.
Type and Typology In common usage the w ords ‘type’ and ‘typology’ have become interchangea ble and understood a s buildings grouped by their use: schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on.2 ‘Type’, how ever, should not be c onfused with ‘typology ’. The suffix ‘-ology’ comes from the Greek logia , which means ‘a discourse, trea tise, t heory 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.3 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, historica l and soc iocultural as pects. The essentia l qua lity 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 (1825) that formally introduced the notion d’architecture into the architectura l discourse. For Quat remère: ‘The w ord 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.’ 4 Type cons eq uently is a n element, a n object, a t hing that em bodies the idea . Type 17
Deena Fakhro, The Holy City and its Discontent, Makkah, Saudi Arabia, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and SamJacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2008 above and centre : Typica l plans, sec tions and views of airport. Once a year, every year, the Holy City of Makkah is flooded by a surge of three million pilgrims, demanding unparalleled infrastructural miracles. To counter the fina ncia l burden of the redundant hajj infrastructure, the gateway airports are opportunistically combined w ith mosque-based Islamic universities: a irportmosques, switching betw een pilgrim surges and student populations.
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top and opposite : An airport, a mosque: a city gateway. In response to the pilgrim surge in Makkah, the project strategically proposes polynodal ga teway airports that disperse congestion m ultidirectionally within Makkah’s valleys.
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 a nd meta physical trad ition, is by Quatremère understood a s the ideal that an architect should strive for but which never fully materialises in the process of crea tive production. The idea of the ‘model’, on the other hand, is developed by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand cis des l eçons in his typological design method of the Pré
d’ar chi tec tu re donné es àl’École royale p olytechnique (1802–05). In the Pré cis , 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. 5 He proposes that new types emerge in response to the requirements of a changing society and urban conditions, whereby the typological diagrams are a da pted to the constra ints 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 cis outlines an important a nd reinvention. Thus Dura nd’s Pré element of the didactic theory of type and constitutes w hat we understand by typology. The misundersta nding of type and t ypology, a tta cked by many for its perceived restrictions, has resulted in the delibera te 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 a rchitectural experiments ha ve no releva nce 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’. 6 In ‘Type? Wha t Type?’ (pages 56 –65 ), Micha el 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 recognise the need for a wider contextualisation of experimentation, due to the casual if not naive treatment of the t ype. Marina Lat houri in ‘The City a s a Project: Types, Typica l Objects a nd Typologies’ (pa ges 2 4–3 1) provides a critical and historiographical discussion of type’s role in defining the architectural object and its relationship to the city. This thema tic enga gement is complemented by th e projects of UNStud io in ‘Typologica l Instruments: Connec ting Architecture and Urbanism’ by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos (pages 6 6–77 ). These projects clarify the utilisa tion of design models to synthesise types with the complexities of practice and reality through the instrumentality of typological a nd serial models of organisa tion. The specific responses demonstrate that typological design models a re capable of, and require, their transformation and hybridisation 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 a s idea a nd model allows us to discuss its instrumentality in the urban context. The w ord ‘urba nism’ mea ns ‘of, living or situa ted in, a city or town’, but it was Ildefons Cerdá – a Catalan engineer and the urban planner of the Barcelona Eixample – who first invented the words ‘urbanism’ and ‘urbanisation’ in his Theory of Urbanizat ion (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 ‘urbanisation’ and, in opposition to the notion of the city, proposed that its focus was not the (historical and symbolic) city centre but the suburbs. 7 Thus the process of urbanisa tion 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 pla n ha s to be differentia ted from the masterplan predicated on singular authority and control. 19
The instrumenta lity of type in t he 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 t he elemental pa rts to the plan. 8 The dia grams of type, how ever, a re not mere graphic representations of the urban plan, but embody the basic organisational performance, history and meaning of precedent types that are then developed into new design solutions. The function of the dia gram hereby is both dia gnostic a nd projective, and at the same time refers to the irreducible structure of the types in question. 9 In ‘Type, Field, Culture, Praxis’ (pages 38 –45) P eter Carl clarifies tha t ‘types a re isolated fragments of a deeper and richer structure of typicalities’, attempting to relate the a rchitectural object to huma n situations. Typicalities, sa ys 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 numb er of further projects by OMA, Toyo Ito, SANAA and l’AUC provide a second reading of how a recourse to typology is necessary when d ealing with the urban context. In the P enang Tropica l City (20 04 ) 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. 10 Toyo Ito’s project for the S inga pore Buona Vista Masterplan (200 1 – s ee 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 20
inclusion is the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (2004) in Kanazawa, Japan, by SANAA (pages 94–101). This project should be und erstood in relation to othe r projects s uch a s the Moriyama House in Tokyo (20 05 ) 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 urbanisation is concerned with the expansion of human settlement driven primarily by economics, the city on the other hand is the c onsolidated, 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. 11 This city is a historical product and centred on the civic and symbolic functions of human settlement and coexistence. As cities owe their main cha racteristic to geographical and topographical conditions, and are always linked to other cities by trade and resources, they tend to specialise a nd form a distinct character. 12 It is this distinct character coupled with the need to accommodate differences that gives rise to the possibility of a c ollective meaning for the city. This mea ning cha nges over time in response to its evolving inhabitants and external circumstances, but its history is often formalised in the construction of civic buildings and landmarks that express a common identity. These ‘elements of permanence’ in the city are exemplified 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 Victoria n a nd Georgian terraces a nd New York with its Manhatta n skyscrapers, cities ca n be understood, described, conceptualised and theorised through their own particular dominant t ypes. Through Rossi, w e learn that a building as
Max von Werz, Open Source Fabric, Zorrozaurre, Bilbao, Spain, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2007 opposite l eft : Urba n plan. The differentiation of urban blocks and their collective voids is utilised to absorb the shifts in the knowledge industry that is to occupy the peninsula of Zorrozaurre. The st ringing together of the exterior void offers t he possibility of coexistence between the models of knowledge environments: the suburban-like technopark and the city-like technopole.
opposite right : Urban plan fragment. Resisting the tendency for singular types, the project introduces the heterogeneity of diverse type-specific environments capable of consolidating leisure networks to attract a lived-in population within the peninsula.
Martin Jameson, Project Runway, Thames Estuary, UK, DiplomaUnit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2008 top : Airport visualisa tion. Hea throw Airport is top of the long list of London’s planning disast ers. The solution: a 12-kilometre (7.5-mile) inhabited bridge across the mouth of t he Tham es Estuary.
above : Fragment model of airport. Incorporating high-speed rail and topped with three runways, this new urban condition manifests a compressed a nd highly varied programme tightly contained within a strict envelope. The impact: regeneration without sprawl, infrastructure without damage to civic life.
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Typological U rbani sm , in
conclusion, brings together arguments and projects that demonstrate a commitment to the empowerment of the architect to once again utilise his or her disciplinary knowledge.
Yi Cheng Pan, Resisting the Generic Empire, Singapore, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2006 top : Mas terplan model. To wrest c ontrol of the ground plane from the proliferating skyscrapers, the project inverts its massing through the cultivation of multiple urban plans within the skyscraper type. This strategy releases th e ground plane for immediate activation by smaller building types (and stakeholders) and creates multiple ‘clustered’ volumes for increased public and private partnerships.
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above : U rban pla n. The project explores the issues of control and difference, and challenges Singapore’s addiction to the ubiquitous high-rise type. It resists the formation of the state-engineered Generic Empire – a city entirely subjugated to the whims of large corporations – by providing a typological framework that cultivates difference through the coexistence of multiple types.
Yifan Liu, The Great Flight Forward, Chengdu, China, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2008 opposite : Mas terplan model of a irport. The People’s Square has become the airport. Its void becomes the runway, its edge the terminals and aerotropolis. By enforcing the edge and limiting its growth, new intimate scales of public spaces derived from the traditional Chinese courtyard-house typology are released and become prominent.
an element of ‘permanence’ is a ble 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 understa nd thes e types is to understa nd the city itself. Pier Vittorio Aureli in ‘City as Political Form: Four Archetypes of Urba n Transformat ion’ (pag es 3 2–7) d iscusses 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 Ta tta ra in ‘Bras ilia’s Superqua dra: P rototypica l 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 a uthorita tiveness 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 b y DOGMA a nd S erie offer a pos sible demonstration of the ma nifestation 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 a nd political economy. This is rendered less a s a ‘w orking’ 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 tra dition of city-ma king in Xi’an, China. The city w a ll as a dominant type is utilised a s the deep structure that s ets out a typological grammar for the city. Typological Ur bani sm , in conclusion, brings together arguments and projects that demonstrate a commitment to the empowerment of the architect to once again utilise 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 a nswers the d idactic question of ‘how to?’ but a lso the meta-critical question of ‘why do?’. 1 Notes 1. The United Na tions expects that the population increase of 2 .3 b illion by 2050 will result in the growth of urbanisation levels in more developed regions from currently 75 per cent to 86 per cent, and from 45 per cent to 66 per cent in less developed regions, a chieving an average of 6 9 per cent. Most of the population growth will take place in urban areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America a nd the Ca ribbean. See United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization , New York, 201 0. Prospects: The 20 09 Revision 2. In part, this tendency to classify group buildings a ccording to use ca n be attributed to Nikolaus Pevsner’s Build ings of England (1951 –75). The original series by Pevsner, for Penguin, has been expanded and is now published by Yale University Press a s Pevsner Architectu ral Guides: Buildin gs
of England,Scotland, Wales and Ireland. 3. Compare with Aldo Rossi, The Architect ure of the City , trans Diane Ghirardo a nd J oan Ockman, MITPress (Cambridge, MA), 198 2. 4. Quatremère de Quincy, ‘Type’, in Encyc lopé di e Mé th odi qu e , Vol 3, 182 5, trans Sa mir Younés, Quatremere De Quincy’s Historical Dictionar y of Architect ure: The True, th e Fictive and the Real , Papadakis Publisher (London), 200 0. 5. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Pré cis of th e Lectu res on Arc hit ectu re , trans David Britt, Ge tty Trust Publications (Los Angeles), 20 00 . Durand’s dia grams primarily capture the structural elements of various building types, comprising a layer of grids tha t denote both structure a nd geometric composition. 6. Quatremère de Quincy, ‘Rule’, in Encyc lopé di e Mé thod iq ue , Vol 3, op cit. 7. The difference betw een ‘urb’ and ‘city’ a nd its implication are developed by Pier Vittorio Aureli in ‘Towa rd th e Archipela go’, in Log 11, 2008. 8. For a more detailed account, see Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby (eds), Typological Format ions: Renewable Bui ldi ng Types and the City , AA Publications (London), 200 7. 9. This understan ding of the diagram is funda menta lly different from interpreting diagrams of flows and pseudoscientific indexes as novel tectonics. 10. Oswald Matthias U ngers, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff and Peter Ovaska, ‘Cities Within the City: Proposal by the Sommerakademie Berlin’, in Lotus International 19, 1977. 11. For a more elaborate description of the evolution of cities and its definition, see Spiro Kostof, City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through Hi story , Tha mes &Hudson (London), 199 9. 12 . Traditiona l cities are defined b y their relat ionships to river banks, se a ports, railways, highlands (hill towns) and so on. Today w e see cities tha t position themselves as knowledge cities, financial cities, medical cities, sport cities a nd so on. Text © 201 1 J ohn Wiley &Sons Ltd. Images © Diploma Unit 6, Architectural Associat ion School of Architecture, London
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M arina Lathouri
THE CITY AS A PROJECT
TYPES, TYPICAL OBJECTS AND TYPOLOGIES MarinaLathouri provides a critical overview of the
historiography of typology, tracing the word ‘type’ back to its 18th-century origins and through to its re-emergence as a standardised objet- type in the Modernist era. She closes by questioning the pertinence of type and typology today. To rai se the question of typology in architecture is to raise a question of t he architectural w ork itself. — Rafael M oneo, ‘On Typology’, 19781
The concept of ‘t ype’ in archit ecture has a function inherently related to the one of language wherein type enables a manner in which to name and describe the artefact, primarily as part of a group of objects. Therefore, as M oneo succinctl y points out, ‘the question of typology’ – ‘typology’ being a discourse (logos ) on ‘type’ – becomes ‘a question on the architectural work i tself ’, a question of what kind of object is a work of architecture. This article will begin by pointing to two characteristics of the question that could help to explain the specific functions of the concept of t ype in architecture. The first is that accounts of type are informed by the different ways of seeing, thinking and producing the work of architecture. The second characteri stic, following on from the first, is that the notion of type, in its various meanings, has played an effective critical role in the confrontations between architecture and the city. Typological debates seek to delineate the ways in which the architectural work, by virtue of its specific conditions of production, engages with its broader milieu – material, urban, civil, political. It is in the basis of these arguments that it seems still possible and relevant to raise the question. W hen it first appears in architecture during the 18th century, the word ‘type’, coming from the Greek typos meaning model, matrix, the imprint or a figure in relief, carries a sense of origin closely j oined to a universal law or natural principle. 24
The notion of type, as the law or principle that might explain how forms are generated thus endowing every element with symbolic significance, gained considerable presence among the Enlightenment architectural theorists. In the article ‘Type’, which Q uatremère de Quincy wrote for the third volume di e of his Encyclopé , published in 1825, type further implied the ‘characteristic form’ or ‘particular physiognomy’ that enables a building to be read as to ‘its fundamental purpose’.2 Transferring ideas developed in the natural sciences and studies of language into the theory of architecture, the word ‘type’ was employed in De Quincy’s text not only to indicate the search for origins but to organise ‘all the different kinds of production which belong to architecture’ by expressing at once general characteristi cs and their ‘particular physiognomy’. T he li nk between form and purpose, general pri ncipl es and ‘t heimprint of t he particular intention of each building’, as JF Blondel would describe the physiognomy or character of the singular artefact in 1749, turned type from its overtly symbolic function to a more signifying one.3 The meaning was to be deri ved from the formal and functi onal context of the work i tself, a set of pre-existent or fixed referents in outside reality and a system inherent in architecture. Nonetheless, this amalgam of type as origin, natural principle, symbolic mark and legible form of a purpose, would be fixed in the practice of the academic architect in the first quarter of the 19th century. The establi shment of architecture as a distinct discipline and profession, however, took place largely in the context of a view of its practice as socially embedded.
JNL Durand, Façade Combinations, 1809 The combina tion or disposition (the French term disposer means ‘to arrange, to put things in a certain order’) of typified elements gives prominence to a method of work that would become part of a radical redefinition of the ambitions of the discipline.
This introduced a historicity into architecture that also reconfigured the notion of type. Conflated wit h t he idea of an artifice socially determined, that is, an outcome of changing social customs and needs rather than of divine or natural origin, type began to designate the process of the formation of a particular building. Signifying a process as much as an object, type claimed a functional justification as well as an active role in the process of design. It was in these terms that i t became extraordinarily evocative in late 19th and early 20th century. Not a fixed ideal to i mit ate or aspire to, but instead a historicall y conti ngent idea, subjected to functi onal and programmati c changes and eventually, as we shall see, to the overriding law of economy. H aving establi shed a fundamental connection between architecture and society within an abstract and flexible view of hi story made the noti on of t ype more instrumental t o ‘a comprehension of a kind of evolution in architecture’ and, ultimately, to a cultural genealogy of society.4 Suspended between an evolving archit ectural specifi cit y and a general schema, the notion of type brought together the appeal to specificity, the myth of cultural (and ultimately national) integrity and historical dimension. At this point, the question of type and typology became a logical extension of the ideology that extended architecture’s boundaries far beyond the limits customarily ascribed to it either as an art or as a prosaic utility, transforming the figure of the architect into a social redeemer. Objet-Type and Standard Product: The New City
In these terms, the Moderni st categories of the ‘typical object’ and the ‘standard product’ are symptomatic of the new understanding of the role of architecture in the articulation and expression of ‘external change or internal demands’ – spatial, material, economic, social. I n fact, external changes and needs were internalised and as M anfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co put i t, the noti on of t ypical, now identified wi th t he standard, succeeded in ‘expressing the presuppositions for the construction of the New City’.5 Walter Gropius’ rhetoric in T he New Archit ecture and the Bauhaus , published in 1937, is tell ing: ‘the reit eration of “typical” (ie typified) buildings while “increasingly approximating to the successive stages of a manufacturing process”, “notably enhances civic dignity and coherence”.’6 H ere the ‘typical buildi ng’, identi cal with t he ‘typified’ object, became, primarily through industrial manufacturing, ‘a fusion of the best of its anterior forms – a fusion preceded by the elimination of the personal content of their designers and all otherwise ungeneric or non-essential features’.7 It was precisely this particular mode of production that, while addressing ‘the needs of the urban industrial population’,
entailed the principles for the emergence of a new harmonious social order.8 ‘Such an impersonal standard,’ which was also described by G ropius as a ‘norm’, ‘a word deri ved from the carpenter’s square’, functioned as an ideal to educate and nurture the inhabitants of the new city, as citizens of a democracy linked in an intrinsically spatial field. The connection between industri al production and a normative framework for the growing urban population had already been established in the early days of M oderni sm: Typisierung and the objet- type are but examples of it. W hat was different now was that the concepts of the typical and standard, incorporated into a set of new economies – material, technical, spatial, visual and graphic – became the physical prerequisite for producing the social fi eld. I n fact, they provided, through the very features of their design, a diagrammatic manifestation of this field. Their graphic formulations exemplified a form of production of the urban environment, considered as the logical precondition of moral regeneration and civic happiness. The ‘typical’ did not provide just a model for the producti on of t he singular artefact – be it a buil t component, a piece of furniture, a dwelling unit or the urban block. It provided a framework for conceptualising architecture as part of a social and ideological agenda. It had a strong beari ng on architectural arguments that sought to formalise the connection between the singular and processes of production of t he collective. I t was precisely t his articulation of t he indi vidual and the collective that insinuated type in the social and poli ti cal aspirati ons of M odernism. 25
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’.
26
In these terms, the ethical value of the M oderni st t ype consisted in the combination of the ideal of architectural perfection with the laws of economy and the reality of mass producti on. This sense of architectural perfection was succinctl y expressed in Karel Teige’s words, written in 1932, as ‘any “ideal proposal” that would be technically and economically capable’ of realisation.9 Thus, the ‘ideal proposal’, ‘a stri ctly standardised element’, was an analyti cal scheme in which programmatic functions and architectural elements on the one hand, and economic and technical variants on the other, could be unified around an idea of dwelling in the modern city. 10 Furthermore, this idea of dwelling was not so much concerned with the domestic in terms of spatial scale, but incited a programmatic and ideological link between the reality of mass producti on, a culture of dwell ing and the ideals of the future – the ideals of the new relationship between the individual, the social and the city. This is reflected in t he plans of individual dwelling units which were specific enough yet strategically general, on the one hand, to represent a fragment of inhabitable terrain that could be mapped and regulated, and on the other, to effectively project a schema of life across the entire social body. To recapitulate, at the heart of the programme of the objet type is a procedure by which a series of distinct but repetitive functi ons or acti vities are imposed on t he individual. By incorporating the indi vidual, t hus controlled, wit hin a system, the growth of t hat system is both ensured (by mult ipl ication of the typified elements) and regulated (by repetition of established functions). Put succinctly, the individual is rendered typical , in order to contribute to the generative and regulative operations of the city, that is, a type of development. Urban Typologies: The City as History
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 questi on raised in the rethi nking 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 Saveri o M uratori and Ernesto Rogers in the 1950s, and later, Aldo Rossi and Giulio Carlo A rgan. Despit e the often confli cting att it udes 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’ (preesistenz e ambientali ). In t hese studi es, undoubtedly displaying aspects of t he
Walter Gropius, Copper-Plate Houses, 1932 opposite : Gropius’ Copper-Plate Houses for mass-production: a kit of standardised elements – programmatic, architectural, technical – enabling the investigation of systems of inhabitation held to arise within, and produce, urban space. From Walter Gropius, The New Archit ecture and the Bauhaus published in 1937.
The Evolution of the Ideal Type from Paestum to the Parthenon, from the Humber to the Delage below : A basic notion of progress is here linked w ith the idea l of perfection in architecture, with the idea of it as an autonomous technical product. From Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture , 1923.
contemporaneous critique of the Functionalist city, any construction was thought as ‘a completed cultural history’.11 T he architectural work was analysed 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 ti me, and therefore typical; that is, consti tuent 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 t ime. This method brought together i deas on hi story and principles of morphology already formulated in the 1930s by thinkers such as H enri Focillon. In particular, Focillon’s idea of art as a system in perpetual development of coherent forms12 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.13 A work of art, according to Focil lon, was ‘an attempt to express something that is unique’, but it was likewise ‘an integral part of a system of highly complex relationships’.14 Forms thus acquire in their stratified evolution a life that follows its own trajectory and can be generali sed 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 clari ty. 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 specifica ). M oreover, if the ‘ideal of an individual archit ecture’ 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’.15 H istory here shift s into the realm of memory, and the singular form was not only to signify its own distinct i ndividuality; i t 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. I f t he 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 it s multiple actuali ti es. I t is precisely t his dialectics which, for Rossi, was to ultimately constitute the structure of the cit y, a ‘collective possession that’, in its turn, ‘must be presupposed before any significance can be attributed’ to t he individual work.16 27
For Rossi, the relationship between locus and citizenry is to inform the city’s predominant image. M any of the emerging forms of urbanity, however, are partially or completely novel systems of relations and, often, novel institutional orders. N ew processes of economic and cultural activity problematise the traditional bond between territory and people, and citizenship is often constituted in a radically different way.
As he wrote in the early 1960s, ‘the city is in itself a repository of history’.17 This could be understood from two dif ferent points of view. I n the first, the cit y 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, t he ‘collective imaginati on’. This leads to one of Rossi’s prominent ideas that the city is the locus of the ‘relationship of the collecti ve to i ts place’.18 And it is type, this time as an element of design, which enables the formal articulations of this relationship. I n this notion of type, we see an attempt to reinvest t he work of architecture with a dimension of meaning, something that is not dissimi lar 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. Politics of Type: The Contemporary City
One could now attempt to reinstate this suggestion in contemporary terms. Prior to that, however, the question ought to be posed as to whether the question of type and typology is still pertinent. If it is concerned with ‘a question of the archit ectural work itself ’, there are certain crit eria that provide an overall different framework for thinking about the architectural work and its engagement with the city. The first of these criteri a is, broadly speaking, historical. Every t ime brings specific condit ions to t he manner i n whi ch the claims on architecture and the city are made. So, the very meaning of type, architectural work and city cannot be separated from the historical sit uati ons within which it functions. It is worth noting at this point that in the ideas discussed here, type as model and natural principle, legible form of a purpose, a diagram of the new and the locus of collective memory, the relation to language has always been implicit, and indeed, operative. As Moneo wri tes, even ‘the very act of naming the architectural object is a process that from the nature of language, is forced to typify’.19 Yet this can only operate within a general logic of signification that confers meaning on the object by situating it in a relational structure or network. This brings us to the second criterion, which is social. In order for an artefact to be recognised as such, it has to abide by the broad parameters operative in a particular community. 28
Hannes Meyer, Co-op Vitrine with Co-op Standard Products, Basel, 1925 opposite : The exhibition piece consist ed of arrays of 36 mass-produced items from cooperative factories. It is through the repeatability of the serial product that an effect of the collective is to be created.
E May and E Kaufmann, Furnishings of Small Apartments with Folding Beds, Frankfurt, 1929 below : The virtues of econom y in the production of forms of living considered ‘typical’ of the ‘modern age’.
This is, for i nstance, what the categories of the ‘typical object’ and the ‘standard product’ attempted to entirely reconfigure. They were part of a rhetoric whose aim was to produce a new and disti nctive way of talki ng about architecture by turning ‘particulars into abstract generalities’ such as the individual, the ‘dwelling unit’, the ‘collective’ and so on.20 I n new urban formations, however, or existing cities which are inscribed with a mult ipl icity of economies and identi ti es – ethnical, racial, cultural and religious – representations of a globality which have not been recognised as such or are contested representations, a single model or method cannot be imposed. The material (and immaterial) forces that mould these communities are diverse and produce a distinctive inter-urban and intra-urban geography. Each of these communities establishes a logic of signification that presupposes a specific understanding of what meaning is, how it operates, the normative principles it should abide by, its social function and so on. For Rossi, the relationship between locus and citizenry is to i nform the city’s predominant i mage. M any of t he emerging forms of urbanity, however, are partially or completely novel systems of relations and, often, novel institutional orders. New processes of economic and cultural activit y problematise the traditional bond between territory and people, and citizenship is often consti tuted in a radicall y different way. In this context, how can the work of architecture engage with the city in terms of its structuring? H ow can the multi ple regimes of the architectural project address the new modes of producti on of the urban environment and a very dif ferent account of the poli ti cal role of archit ecture in thi s environment? Is it possible that t he architectural project still engages conceptions of space, norms of use and modes of appropriation that are not simply forms of mediation between polarities such as individual/collective, architectural/urban, past/present, new/ existing but become effective in a more relational configuration? It seems to me that the question of t ype and typology could become extremely effective if the architectural project is rethought in terms of a method that may define the general coordinates within which architectural works and urban strategies can be distinguished, yet their delimitations are precisely negotiated. M oreover, the question cannot be framed simpl y in relation to formal or methodological issues, but within a scheme that redefines the aesthetic coordinates of the community through implementing the connections between spatial and formal practices, forms of life, conceptions of thought and figures of the community. At the very end, it is an architectural question which implements the presupposition of politics, if politics ‘revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’.21 1 29
30
Ludwig Hilberseimer, Vorschlag zur Citybebauung, 1930 opposite top : From the serial product to the typified structural element to the mass-produced living unit to the plan, identifiable architectural strategies formalise procedures and a general system that, while disposing the individual within an ever-growing multitude, produces new figures of the community.
Notes 1. Ra fael Moneo, ‘On Typology’, in Oppositions 13, 1978, p 23. 2. Quatremère de Quincy, Encyc lopé di e Mé th odi qu e, , Vol 3, Pa ris, 18 25. Architecture 3. Ja cques–François Blondel, Cours d’archit ecture , Vol 2, Pa ris, 1771–1777, p 229. 4. ‘While a simple notion of type of progress might aspire to the “perfectibility” of each type, only an internal understanding of the constructive laws of types, and the dynamic t ransformations of these laws under the threat of external change or internal demands, could open the w ay to a comprehension of a kind of evolution in architecture.’ Anthony Vidle r, ‘ The Id ea o f Type: The Tran sform at ion of th e Academic Ideal, 1 750–1830’, in Oppositions , 8, 1977, p.108. 5. Manfredo Tafuri and Frances co Da l Co, Modern , Abrams (New York), 198 6, p 326 . Architecture 6. Walter Gropius, The New Architect ure and the , Faber and Faber (London), 1937, p 27. Bauhaus 7. ‘A standa rd may be defined a s tha t simplified practical exemplar of anything in general use which embodies a fusion of the best of its anterior forms – a fusion preceded by the elimination of the personal content of their designers and all otherwise ungeneric or non-essential features. Such a n impersonal sta ndard is called a “norm”, a word derived from a carpenter’s squa re.’ Walter Gropius, ibid. p 26. 8. Walter Gropius, ‘Die S oziologischen Grundlagen der Minimalwohnung’, in CIAM, Die W ohnung für das Existenzmini mum , Englert und Schlosser (Frankfurt), 1 930, pp 13–23 . The sa me text is in English in Walt er Gropius, ‘The Sociologic al Prem ises for the Minimum Dwelling of Urban Industrial Populations’, in The Scope of Total Archit ecture , Harper (New York), 195 5, pp 1 04–11 8.
Aldo Rossi, Composition with Modena Cemetery, 1979 opposite bottom : The art of codification and disposition of residual typological meanings suggests the work of architecture primarily as a register and instrument of collective memory, and the city as the context within which this memory can become active.
BBPR Architects, Velasca Tower, Milan, 1954 below : Through the use of specific formal elements, the building, also presented by Ernesto Rogers at t he last CIAM meeting in the Netherlands village of Otterlo (1959) where it caused fierce arguments, becomes a historically constituted signifier establishing a discourse on the city.
9. Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling , trans Eric Dluhosch, MITPress (Cambridge, MA and London), 2002 [Nejmensíbyt , Václav Petr (Prague), 1932], p 12. 10. Ibid, p 252. 11. Saverio Muratori, Studi per un’operante storia , Pligrafico dello Stato (Rome), urbana di Venezia 1960, p 2. An earlier version appears in Palladio 1–2 (1959), pp 97–106. Saverio Muratori (1910– 73) had come from Rome where he was a ssociated with the Gruppo degli Urbanisti Romani (GUR) and began his research on th e city of Venice when h e was asked to teach at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura in 1950. 12. Henri Focillon, La Vie des Formes , Ernst Leroux (Pa ris), 1 934. The first t ranslat ion into English was by Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler, The Life of Forms in Art , Yale University Press (New Ha ven, CT), 19 42. 13. Henri Focillon, L’An M il , Armand Colin (Paris), 1952. 14. The Life of Forms in Art , op cit, p 6. In fact, in L’aven ir de l ’est hé , published in 1929, ti qu e Etienne Souriau is the first one to define aesthetics in terms of a ‘science of forms’ ( science des ): a science that studies forms in their own formes structuring. Opposing the tendency of the time to reside on the psychological analysis of the pleasure of the artist and the viewer, Souriau and Focillon considered the artwork as if it was bearer of an autonomous sense. 15 . Ernesto Rogers, ‘ The Ima ge: The Architec t’s Inalienable Vision’, in Gyorgy Kepes (ed), Sign, , Studio Vista (London), 1966, Image and Symbol p 242. 16. Alan Colquhoun, Modernity and t he Classical Traditi on: Architect ural Essays 19 80 –19 87 , MIT
Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989, p 249. 17. Aldo Rossi, The Archit ecture of th e City , The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (New York) and MITPress (Cambridge, MA), 198 2, p 12 7. The first edition of this book, taken from Rossi’s lectures, appeared in 1966. 18. Ibid, p 128. 19. Rafael Moneo, ‘On Typology’, in Oppositions 13, 1978, p 23. 20. Adrian Forty discusses these categories (the individual, the human) in relation to the rhetoric of modernism. He notes: ‘… a ma rked tendency to turn particulars into abstract generalities, for example, wa lls become “the w all,” streets “the street,” a path becomes “the route,” a house “the dwelling,” and so on.’ Adrian Forty, Words and , Build ings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture Thames &Hudson (London), 2000 . 21. Jacques Rancière, The Politi cs of Aesthetics: , trans Gabriel The Distribut ion of the Sensible Rockhill, Cont inuum (New York), 2 004 [first published in France under the title Le Part age du Sensibl e: Esthé ti que et Poli ti que , La FabriqueEditions (Paris), 2000, p 13.
Text © 2011 J ohn Wiley &Sons Ltd. Images: p 26 © Illustrat ion from Walte r Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Faber and Faber (London), 1937; p 27 © FLC/ADAGP, Paris a nd DACS, Londo n 201 0; p 2 8 © gta Archives/ETH Zurich; p 29 © MITPress 2002. Reprinted court esy of the MITPres s from Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, t rans. Eric Dluhosch, 20 02; p 30(t) © published in Entfaltung Einer Planungsidee (Berlin: Ullstein: 1963, pp 18-19, ill 7). Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer. Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer Papers, Ryerson and B urnham Archives, The Art Institut e of Chicago. Digital File 0703 83.1 00914 -01 © The Art Institute of Chicago; p 30(b) © Eredi Aldo Rossi; p 31 © Enzo & Pa olo Raga zzini/CORBIS
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Pier Vit torio Aureli
CI TY AS POLI TI CAL FORM FOUR ARCHETYPES OF URBAN TRANSFORMATI ON PierVittorioAureli focuses on the category of archetype as an
alternative to the idea of type. Four examples – the axial streets of Renaissance Rome, the 17th-century Parisian place , the 19thcentury independent block in Berlin and the 20th-century Viennese superblock – are explored here to describe the emergence of modern urban forms that explicitly embody power relations.
The cit y is the most explicit index of power relationships. Walls, squares and streets are not only meant to support the functioning of the city, but they also form an extensive governmental apparatus. Without proposing a cause-and-effect relati onship between form and politi cs, the intenti on here is to trace the political origin of quintessential city projects within the history of the modern city. The aim is to test the political instrumentality of architectural form. For this reason, instead of focusing on the city at large, the focus will be on paradigmatic architectural archetypes. The category of archetype that will be advocated here will not be the way Carl G Jung defined it, as a universal contentless form, nor as innate pattern of behaviour.1 I nstead, following Gi orgio Agamben, the idea of archetype as example will be proposed: neit her a specific nor a general form, but a singular formal event that serves to define the possibility of a milieu of forms.2 Following such definition an archetype could be Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1785) whose form was interpreted by Michel Foucault not onl y as the model for that type of surveillance, but as an example through which it is possible to define a part icular paradigm of spatial governance.3 The category of archetype is advanced here as an alt ernati ve to the idea of type. If type traditionally indicates the idea that regulates the development of a group of forms (and for this reason is irreducible to any particular form), archetype offers the possibility of addressing a found singular form as a definition for a possible group of forms. I n architecture, an archetype is thus 32
a paradigmati c form t hrough which it is possible to il luminate a particular critical passage in the development of the city. In the following notes, the political form of the modern city will be defined by addressing four archetypes: the papal axial streets of 16th-century Rome, the Parisian plàce of the 17th century, the independent building block in 19th-century Berlin and the 20th- century V iennese superblock. The sequence of these four archetypes attempts to synthetically describe the emergence of modern urban forms that embodied specific power relationships within the city, especially those related to the rise of economic accumulation and management as a response to parti cular conflicts in the cit y. The aim of this essay is to att empt a short and concise outline of a politi cal history of t he modern city, and the way its ethos, made of urban management on the one hand and conflict on the other, was embodied and represented by the use of cert ain archit ectural forms. The argument is that while the changes of the city can be thought of as the evolution of urban types, its realisation can only happen wit hin a polit ical ‘state of excepti ons’, in which the exemplarit y of specific and singular forms plays a leading role in resetting the urban condition. The essay counters the current mainstream of evolutionary and empirical research on the city that portrays urban space as an evolutionary and self-organising organism. Against this idea, the cit y emerges as a locus of a permanent political conflict of which architectural form is one of the most extreme and radical manifestati ons.
01
Axial Rule in Renaissance Rome The reinvention of Rome as the capital of Christianity between the 14th and 16th centuries can be considered as one of the most antagonistic processes of urban transformation in the Western world. This was mainly due to two specific conditions of the city: its complex topography and geography, and its idi osyncrati c politi cal regime. Unlike any other major medieval city in Europe, the major symbolic and power centres in Rome – the Capitol, the Cathedral of St John and the Vatican – were not l ocated in the city centre, but at t he city margins.4 T his geography contributed to make the city centre an unresolved multipolar field of forces contested by the different powers represented by these centres. The political regime consisted of a non- dynastic monarchy where each pope was elected at a very old age in order to prevent too long a span of his reign, meaning he had only a very short ti me in which to i mplement reforms and to leave his legacy on the city form. The extreme political discontinuity between successive papacies meant popes’ efforts most often did not follow on from one another, and at best had contrasting aims. These extreme conditions resonated within a chaotic urban form made of an archipelago of clusters, each of them dominated by competing clans or dynasties. On top of everything, the conflict between secular and religious power – represented within the city by the polar contraposition between the Campidoglio and the Vatican – gave to the different forms of conflict an acute political dimension that triggered the church to engage in the management of the city. It is for this reason that, parallel with the building of new monuments and t he restoration of ancient ones, those popes who wanted to leave their mark on the city’s urban form engaged with the design of new cit y streets. This took the form not only of the opening of new or the completion of old streets, but also in a diffuse management of urban space. Facing a situation of extreme backwardness and political uncertainty due the consequences of the Great Western Schism, and the exil e of popes in Avignon (1378–1417), Pope M art ino V (pope from 1417 to 1431) instit uted the M agistri V iarium, public administrators who were responsible for the management of the streets.5 Their task was not only the physical maintenance of space in terms of circulation and hygiene, but also to reclaim politi cal control of t his space from the opposing clans that contended it. I t must be considered that in Rome at t he time there were no proper streets and public space was more the int erstice between the diff erent clusters of buildings. I nsti tuting the M agistri V iarium created the possibili ty of an organic totalising space of control that would surpass the local scale of the buil ding. What is interesti ng here is that this was organised not in terms of mil it ary control, but through the insti tuti on of a civic body whose power was administrative and managerial rather than coercive, and thus more adaptable to being diffused within rather than simply i mposed on the city. The opening and management of new streets was also directed towards the possibilit y of making t he cit y a Bibli a Pauperum, an urban text whose message could be accessible to the pil grims coming t o the Et ernal Ci ty. Yet the central issue of the street project was that, like in ancient Rome, representation and urban management were fused in the same architectural art efact. In Rome urban circulati on acquired thi s ambivalent meaning of both ceremonial display and urban control.
Via Giulia, Rome, 1508– The geometrica l regularity of the street offers the possibility of c ontrolling private property by means of public space. Public space appears as regular, universal, efficient and magnificent, and in this way conceals its vested (and partial) interests.
The awarenessof circulation as a means of power soon resulted in a precise and archetypical form: the axial street, of which D onato Bramante’s design for Via Giulia (1508) can be considered t he most radical example.6 The almost 1,000-metre (3,280-foot) long street that cut through the city fabric running parallel to the river Tiber (and to Via dell a L ungara, its twin street on the other ‘suburban’ side of the river), was, above all, a strategic li nk connecti ng two important elements of medieval Rome: the 15th-century Ponte Sisto, the only bridge built after the fall of t he Roman Empire, and the commercial core of the city inhabit ed by the emerging class of bankers. The spati ali ty of Via Giulia is the direct product of the culture of perspective and it s application i n the representati on of reali ty. The evoluti on of the science of perspective during the 15th century needs to be understood not only as a means to represent in a mathematically correct way the depth of space, but also because its mathematical implications were a framework within which to reimagine the reform of urban space according to the universal and abstract pri nciples of spatial organisation. The unprecedented axial form of Via Giulia represents the concrete application of this culture to the real body of the city. The perfect linear geometr y of the street was intended to organise in one spatial gesture not only a proper circulation space but also a strongly defined interdependence between public and private space, by making the public space – the perfectly shaped void of the vi a recta – both the access to and control of t he private properties along the street. 33
02
The Place Royale, Paris, 1605–12 Engraving after Claude Chastillon, 1677. The Pla ce Royale w as b uilt by Henry IV starting in 1605 and was completed in 1612. According to the original project, the ground floor of the buildings around the square wa s intended to host a silk workshop. The squa re fused economic necessity and ceremonial representation within one simple space.
The formal ‘genericness’, the emphasis on space over the monumentality of architecture, can be seen as an anticipation of the biopolitical techniques of urban management implied in the theories of the raison d’é tat in which power is no longer identifi ed in the symbolic and plastic fi gure of the sovereign, but is distributed throughout the whole social body of the city.
34
Economic Empowerment in t he Place Royale, Paris A similar concern informs the design of another fundamental archetype of modern city spatiality: the Place Royale (1605, later known as Place des Vosges) i n Pari s. I f Via Giuli a was meant to be the urban pendant of a gigantic monumental form – the Palazzo dei Tribunali where Pope Juli us II intended to concentrate all the juridical and administrati ve functions of the city – the Place Royale was conceived as a monumental space enclosed by a cohesive and quasianonymous residential architecture. This architecture consisted of a row of apartments with a portico on the ground floor. The port ico was the circulati on space for the silk workshop that, according to the original project for the square, was to be located on the ground floor.7 The square itself is thus an empty space carved within the fabric of the cit y. Its extreme regulari ty, its lack of outstanding monumental features, the sense of calm evoked by the endless fenestrations and the repetition of a few decorative elements, realised the political desire to overcome any specific symbolic identity. This desire for a ‘generic’ architecture can be linked to H enri I V ’s impetus to overcome the extreme religious conflicts that were characteristic of France towards the end of the 16th century. The formal ‘generi cness’, the emphasis on space over the monumentality of architecture, can be seen as an anticipation of the biopolitical techniques of urban management tat in which power is implied in the theories of the rai son d’é no longer i denti fied in the symbolic and plasti c figure of the sovereign, but is distributed throughout the whole social body of the city. In this respect it is interesting to note that although the square was intended for royal gatherings and representations, its planning was guided by the requirement to gain income from the rental of apartments on the upper floors and the commercial activit ies in the workshops on the ground floor. Instead of a monumental architecture, the pragmati c monarchy of H enry IV assumed the economic management of the city in the form of producti on workshops and houses for rent. T he economicraison d’être of the city thus becomes the very source of the square’s architectural grammar. As in the case of Via Giulia, it is evident how the evolution of an urban type depends not only on use, but also on the political instrumentality of the most immanent conditions of the city, such as circulati on, the relati onship between public and private space, economic regime, and organisation of production. For this reason the neat form of the Place Royale can be seen as the urban space that inaugurated an architecture of the city made of distances, voids and repetitions of the same architectural elements, and thus able to be the flexible framework for the city’s development and its consequent (often unpredictable) economic transformations. W hil e the architecture of Via Giulia result ed in the contrast between the overall layout of the street and the individualit y of the buildings along it , in the Place Royale the individuality of the architecture is totally absorbed in the uniformity of the space. I n this sense, the ‘empty space’ of the Place Royale, its uniformity, its regularity, represents precisely the ubiquity and the infinity of the space, and not only the image but also the substance of power within the city. Space is here a framed void: the mere potentiality of social and economic relationships, the possibility of circulation, and thus of empowering the state per via economica .
03
Bourgeois Berlin and the Independent Building Block An alternative to thi s type of urban form that characterised the development of the European city between the 17th and 18th centuries is Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s ‘incremental’ masterpl anning of Berl in between the 1820s and 1841. If 16th-century Rome and 17th-century Paris were developed through the opening of regular spaces within the medieval fabric of the city, Schinkel returns to the archetype of the isolated building block as the primary element of the city. Examples of this are his most important buildings in Berlin, such as the Neue Wache (N ew Guard H ouse, 1816), the Al tes M useum (1823–30) and the Bauakademie (1832–6). A ll were intended by the Prussian architect not only as objects per se, but also as strategic stepping stones for a punctual urban reform of t he cit y. Indeed, the pavil ion-like appearance of these buildings implies a space characterised no longer by the cohesive spatiality of the Baroque city where all the buildings are rigidly aligned along the streets and squares, but by the free and unpredictable association of the buil dings themselves. H istorians such as Fri tz Neumeyer have int erpreted such urban forms as implied in Schinkel’s pavillionaire architecture as the spatial rendering of the emerging bourgeois ethos of 19th- century Berlin.8 According to Neumeyer, Schinkel’s archetype of the building-as-individual can be understood as the architectural analogue of the free bourgeoisie initiative no longer constrained by the social and politi cal rigidity of Baroque absolut ism. In this sense it i s import ant to consider that Berlin’s urban form was strongly defined by the application of the Polizeiw issenschaft , the apparatus of political and social control developed through a sophisticated regime of urban poli cing.9 The tenets of such a regime consisted in the ubiquit ous int ernal control of t he city t hrough pervasive economic and social legislation in which power was completely identified in the principle of economic and social utility. W ithin such a liberal framework where control is exercised by the production of situated freedoms rather t han by impositi on of a strict social order, the cit y is no longer a rigid sett ing f or the representation of power, but a flexible and incremental accumulati on of always changing urban situations. The multiplicity of urban space that forms between Schinkel’s isolated blocks can thus be interpreted not only as the analogue of the bourgeois liberal initiative, but also as the topographical product of the regime that governed such an initi ative. The urban incrementalism implied in Schinkel’s archetype of the isolated block can be interpreted as the product of an urban ethos in which the growth of the city requires a certain openness of the city space. For this reason the spatial openness that has always been emphasised in Schinkel’s approach to the city can be seen as the ultimate liberal tactic in which topographic flexibility and dissolution of rigid masterplanning becomes the ultimate form of urban governance.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Bauakademie, Berlin, 1832–6 Photograph from Schinkel’s Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe of 1837.
The urban incrementalism implied in Schinkel’s archetype of the isolated block can be interpreted as the product of an urban ethos in which the growth of the city requires a certain openness of the city space. 35
04
Karl Ehn, Karl-Marx-Hof, Vienna, 1927–30 View of the courtyard showing the communal services such a s the kindergarten and gardens. Closure and selfsufficiency a re monumentalised a gainst the openness and infinity of the bourgeois city.
The archetype of the closed monumental courtyard clearly separated from the city but fully accessible by the community of workers that inhabited each superblock introduced a type of space that is neither public nor private.
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Closure and Obstruction: The Viennese Superblock The tradit ion of urban form i ll ustrated so far can be summarised as the progressive prevalence of space over form. T he archetypes that we have seen share the common denominator of being the result of politics via urban management rather than of explicit political representation. As we have seen, the emphasis on urban management finds its spatial analogue in a city where flexibility and openness towards urban development is theraison d ’ê of tre the city archetypes. I t is not by chance that t he legacy of such a tradition will find its logical conclusion in the emergence of social housing for the workers. As is well known, the discipline of urbanism emerged from the crisis brought about by industrial development, but the heart of such a crisis is precisely capitalism’s attempt to tame and control the labour force needed for its own development. Such control consisted of t he evoluti on of rati onal crit eria for city planning where rationality is the reduction of urban form to the principles of utility and social control. A decisive counterarchetype to t his traditi on (and in this discourse to the tradition of urban form illustrated so far) is the development of the Gemeindebauten in Vienna, the social housing superblocks built by the Social Democratic Party between 1923 and 1934.10 The fundamental archetype of such development is the rather introverted urban form of the H of : the monumental courtyard of the historic city. Rather than the rational forms of the Siedlungen (prewar housing estates) i n Berli n, or t he tradition of the Garden City, the Viennese municipali ty revisited the monumentality of the H of in order to counter the principle of utility and control implied in the typologies of mass dwelling. M oreover, they decided to l ocate the superblocks within the historic city in close proximity to its strategic points, such as the metro stations, bridges and important traffic routes, rather than to expand the peri phery. Wit hin this framework, the closed forms of the superblocks countered the managerial workings of the city by opposing its flows and networks with the obstructive closure of its introverted space.
Friedrich Gilly, Perspectival Study with Landscape, c 1800 This famous draw ing anticipates the theme of the city as made by architectural blocks freely composed within space. However it will be precisely such ‘autonomy’ of architectural form from the geometric constraints of the traditional topography of the city that will allow a more flexible, and thus more efficient, mana gement of urban space.
As we have seen, the category of publ ic space has developed as a means to define, frame and control the access to and the maintenance of private property and its urban dimension: landownership. The defined geometr y of Via Giulia or the Place Royale was intended, above all, as the instrumentalisation of private property for the sake of urban development. In this case, public space is the bindi ng force, the common interest that forms and defines the development of pri vate space. I t is for this reason that public space has to remain open, neutral and universal. The archetype of the closed monumental courtyard clearly separated from the city but fully accessible by the community of workers that inhabited each superblock introduced a type of space that is neither public nor private. Such space is common and shared by those who live around it. The proximity of the H of reflects the necessity for the limits that each community requires in order to manifest itself. H owever, the li mits of such community are not economic, but politi cal, motivated by the desire for politi cal emancipati on (and separation) rather than just (economic) upgrading of the urban condition in the name of social utility. I f the urban openness and rationali ty i mplied in archetypes such as Via Giulia, the Place Royale and Schinkel’s self-standing building blocks were intended as a way to accommodate the economic and administrative conditions of the city, in the Viennese Gemeindebauten the same conditions in the form of social housing were turned into an archipelago of fi nit e monumental f orms against, yet withi n, the very body of the existi ng manageri al cit y. In the urban gesture of the H of , the city is no longer conceived as an infinite space for development, but as a dialectical arena of conflicting parts (the H of as the architecture of the proletariat versus the apartment blocks of the bourgeoisie). Yet this conflict is not left before or beyond the project. I n theGemeindebauten it is instrumentalised as its very core. The sense of closeness implicit in the archetype of theH of resonates the working class’s partiality against the bourgeoisie’s general interest. Unlike many archetypes of the modern city, the H of was assumed not as a managerial apparatus, but as a critical challenge to the ubiquity of urban space, and thus as a political caesura within the infinite and totalising apparatus that is the modern city. 1
Notes 1. See Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and Collect ive Unconscious , trans Gerhard Adler and RFC Full, Princeton University Press (New York), 2nd ed n, 19 81 . 2. This definition is an att empt to ada pt Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the idea of example as a method of research. See Giorgio Agamben, The Signatur e of all Things , trans Luca di Santo and Kevin Atell, Zone Books (New York), 2009. 3. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans Alan Sheridan, Penguin Books (London), 1977, pp 195–228. 4. See Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Architett ura alla corte papale del Rinascimento , Electa (Milan), 200 3. 5. Enrico del Re, ‘I Maestri di Strada’, in Archivio della Regia Societa Romana di St oria Patria , XLII , 1920, p 101. 6. On the project and development of Via Giulia, see Luigi Sa lerno, Luigi Spezzaferro and Manfredo Tafuri, Via Giulia, un utopia urbana del Cinquencento , Staderini (Rome), 1972 . See also Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante , Tha mes & Hudson (London), 197 7. 7. See Hilary Ballon, The Paris of Henry I V: Architecture and Urbanism , MITPress (Cambridge, MA), 1991, pp 57–113. 8. Fritz Neumeyer, ‘Space for Reflection: Block versus Pavilion’, in Franz Schulze (ed), Mies van der Rohe: Criti cal , Museum of Modern Art (New York), 1 989 , p 1 96 . Essays 9. See Michel Foucault, Securit y, Territ ory, Populati on , Palgrave Macmillan (London), 200 7. 10. For a comprehensive overview of Red Vienna, see Eve Balu, The Architectur e of the Red Vienna 191 9–193 4 , MIT Press (Cam bridge, MA), 19 99 . See a lso Manfredo Tafuri, Vienna Rossa , Electa (Milan), 1980. Text © 201 1 Joh n Wiley &Sons Ltd. Ima ges © Courtesy of the author
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Peter Carl
TYPE, FI ELD, CULTURE, PRAXI S 38
H ere, PeterCarl substitutes the term ‘type’ for the typical, and ‘typology’ for typicality. In so doing he frees up the notion of type for contemporary design, liberating it from the strictures of its performance history and precedents that have often veered towards standardisation.
The word ‘typi cal’ applies to phenomena ranging from the least to the most important. To describe something as ‘typical’ can mean that it is boringly repetitive, or that it is characteristic, or that it is ultimately typical (either general, like a ‘law’ of physics, or uni versal, li ke an ethical principle or a divinity). The word acknowledges that different things may have common elements, aspects, properties, behaviours, meanings, and so on; and it therefore invokes the similitudes that range from logical identity to set theory to varieti es of analogy to metaphor to concept and symbol. In this rich and vast thematic field, lying between ambiguity and continuity in difference, the varieties of typicality related to architecture have attracted novelists, artists, film-makers, designers and thinkers. W ithin architecture since the Enlightenment, however, the somewhat narrower concept of typology has dominated, perhaps because of the importance of theory in this period. I n ancient N ear Eastern texts, the frequency with which the prefix bit - (house) appli es to houses, palaces, temples and such settings as the New Year’s festival house (bit - akitu ) suggests the importance of ‘dwelling’ as a metaphor of ordering. Alexandria seems to have discovered the procedure of composing with symbolic ‘types’ (domes, arches, colonnades, halls, exedrae) t hat permeated Roman imperial architecture and passed thence to Byzantine, Umayyad and Romanesque architecture, and was recovered again i n t he Italian
Outdoor Bed in the Roofscape of Le Corbusier’s Villa Shodhan (1951) opposite : While acknowledging the
Type, Stereotype and the Market – the BedroomPlanner from IKEA below : Ikea products and, in the
custom of outdoor sleeping, the bed also draws on several themes in Le Corbusier’s iconography: the horizon and the archipelago, the ‘universe of our eyes’ (Iconostase A3), a nd the a lchemical bed (Iconostase D3), a nd is part of a vertical sequence in which water is related to oculi.
corner, Bob from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks , a series which a rranged people, things, settings, lifestyles in a semiotic system according to market categories, for broadcast as a soap opera for prime-time television.
Renaissance.1 A lexandria also seems to have been t he source for a theoretical attitude (for example, euhemerism, mechanics) and its attendant perspectivism, therefore the background to Vitruvius, where one finds the designation genera (for example, for his types of houses, VI .I II .1). Alberti treats architecture as a theme among many others pertaining to his culture; but with Serlio, writing about architecture becomes properly theoretical, striving to be as clear a demonstration as the Euclidean assumptions with which he begins. Contemporary theory on typology in architecture seems to recognise four historical phases: 1) the 18th century, culminating in Quatremère de Quincy’s tent, cave and hut,2 bearing hallmarks of species identification in zoology (for example, his contemporary Cuvier) and codified in the design-procedures of JNL D urand;3 2) earl y M odernist ‘Functi onali sm’, particularly wit h regard t o housing, ranging from efficiency (ergonomics/Taylori sm, industrial producti on) to poeti cs (L e Corbusier);4 3) the 1960s and 1970s reaction to this inheritance, largely oriented about A ldo Rossi, but bearing hallmarks of t he classifications of D urand; 4) the recent present, with the advent of digital design techniques, notably parametric control of formal types. I n all of t hese, the main topic of interest has been the type and its variation. This coincides historically with the development of the human ‘subject’ or ‘agent ’ in economic, psychological or social theory. Alt hough all four histori cal phases of t ypology accompanied theories of the city, the nature of the relationship between types and their aggregation never attracted the interest that did typological variation.5 T his, too, corresponds to the difficulty the economic, psychological and social sciences have had i n t hematising the context(s) in which i ndividual agents or subjects play out their li ves. I f the term ‘cult ure’ only became current with the Enl ightenment (making a concept out of what arguably was being lost), the emphasis upon individual rights, politically, and upon the agent or subject, in all other fields, left the identi ty of ‘context’ to a range of concepts such as family, neighbourhood, class, socioeconomic category or sheer statistical description of trends and t endencies. Accordingly, as the architectural type prevails against the white of the theoretical page or against a grid like that of D urand (both versions of ‘space’), t he subject or agent prevails against an equally flat, abstract background.6 W ith the recent attunement to information as the basis of continuity, it seems that type has been inscribed in the effort to bring reality to a single horizon of representation, in which, ideally, all relations are expli cit, even calculable (as in, for example, a
parametric field).7 That is, ‘space’ as a field has given way to a type of field comprising entities that obey mathematical or logical (algorithmic) operati ons.8 Type Versus Typicality Typology is the very embodiment of conceptual thinking: it isolates similarities (categories) from the flux of reality in order to make purified clusters of these similarities suitable for manipulation (insertion back into reality). The natural home of a type is the taxonomy. Accordi ngly, there ari ses a tension between the conceptual field for types and the concrete topographies which we inhabit – a tension which is customarily seen to be resolved through variation of the types. From a descriptive point of view, the most important aspect of architectural types is their heuristic value; they embody considerable experience or knowledge regarding sizes, constructi on, use-patterns, and so on. However, design too often reifies this knowledge, closing off the true depth of typicality. For example, the type ‘bedroom’ tends to solicit a medium-sized room with a bed, side table, window, closet, and access to a WC; whereas the typical situations of sleep, dreams, sex, illness, death, open much more profound and rich possibilities of interpretation (evident, for example, in the sleeping terrace beneath the canopy of L e Corbusier’s Villa Shodhan, 1951). 39
M ore fundamentally, it is not obvious how to establi sh the criteria with regard to a type for dwelling – according to individual ergonomics, to bed and table, to the middle-class apartment or house, to ‘functions’ or decorum, to the market, to a building or urban block or city or region, to the primordial condit ions of nature, to culture. D welling, properl y understood, is more profound than the efficient or attractive accommodation of a li festyle – it comprises orientation in reali ty. Once the question is put this way, it is immediately obvious that types are isolated fragments of a deeper and richer structure of typicalities.9 The pri ncipal di ff erence between typology and typicality is that the former concentrates upon [architectural] objects, the latter upon human situations. We may be instructed here by the manner in which typicalities operate in language. By ‘language’ is not meant the structurali sm of French li nguisti cs – an effort to translate all of language into a grammar of messages (or ‘code’) – but rather language as a framework for understanding (both each other and, collectively, our possibilit ies in the world).10 M utual understanding depends upon the element of recognition without which we would be compelled to invent language from scratch at each meeting. The element of recognit ion is carried by the typicalities, defined as those aspects commonto- all . W hat is common-t o-all exerts a claim upon freedom; freedom depends upon what is common-to-all for its meaning (freedom would otherwise be alienation). L anguage does not occur by itself or in a void, but is the most important means by which human freedom is embedded in a deep structure of claims or dependencies (typicalities). As a framework for understanding, language disposes these typicalities in strata. M ost immediate (and ephemeral) are common meanings (employing words, phrases, idioms, sequences of exchange, as in bartering or arguing a case in law), accents of sounds, as well as the specifically grammatical aspects of verbs, subjects, modifiers. Even this is only the referential surface of the much deeper structure of dependencies.11 Beneath t his lie the gestures which customarily or habitually accompany linguistic exchange (bodily orientation; for example, dialogue is customarily faceto- face). Beneath that li e the sit uati ons in which certain kinds of discourse typically happen; for example, across the diningroom table/across the boardroom table (often stereotyped in li terature, film or t heatre). These situati ons are the receptacles of referential structures (claims) both synchronic and diachronic. All of t his is suscepti ble to poeti c transformation (creativity) w it hin t he li mit s of r ecognit ion .12 Against the run of phil osophy (and by definit ion, t heory) since the Enlightenment, recognition implies the universality of the one world of which we are all part, the ult imate dimension of t ypicali ty.13 I f ‘context’ indeed operates like language, the stratification of typicalities invokes a communication ‘up and down’ the strata. 40
… without a concrete language, there is no formal language – no logic, no mathematics, no geometry, no ‘form’, and certainly no capacity to use these analogically (for example, to convert any of it into ‘architecture’). The more primordi al aspects of a situation are more stable than the choice of words (a dining-table discussion can veer from affection to anger to silence to plate-throwing). In other words, if we are to transcend the sort of context in which types are simply reified units/data which can be packed/arranged/ disposed according to formal (explicit) criteria, we are obliged to acknowledge that any proper understanding of context exhibits the depth-structure of typicalities. It is precisely this depthstructure that is ‘flattened’ to a single horizon of representation when architecture is reduced to form and space and then even furt her t o informati on. It is now dogma within the AI community that there is no way that algorithmic code can create a dialogue from its own resources (that is, not prescripted);14 and of course dialogue is the heart of anything called social or poli ti cal (public). Thi s is a more technical (and negati ve) description of what H eidegger f ramed as ‘language is the house of Being’ – a formulation intended to grasp the orienting (ontologically) requirement of ‘dwelling’.15 Representations of cities by architects, planners or theorists rarely grasp typicality in t hese terms. The standard of what i s possible remains the D ubli n of Joyce’s Ulysses (in particular, the necessity of crime, disease, ignorance or partial understanding, wit, conflict and so on, to the constant renewal in history of a civic ethos). Complexity Versus Richness The progressive conversion of architecture to form/ space to information, in which the concept of type has played a significant role,16 may be seen as an effort to convert richness (the depth-structure) into complexity (formal manipulation of types).17 The first operates implicitly, li ke metaphor, whereas the second operates explicitly like code or axiomatic geometry or logic. Acknowledging t he history of aborti ve efforts since
The structure of typicality at the scale of a room: Reconstruction of a Shrine from Level VI of Catal Hoyuk, Turkey, c 6th Millennium BC Nature is most typical, most common to all, a nd a rchaic cultures cha racteristically interpret the exchange with human culture in terms of dwelling (house/temple), a s here. The shrines a re distinguishable from the dwellings only by the presence of the horned stanchions, buchrania, etc, which develop carefully placed and oriented settings within that of the dwelling.
L eibniz to ‘translate’ human language into formal language, and therefore the lack of need to worry about this problem at a primary level, we may ask about the nature of the dialogue between concrete richness and formal complexity (that is, between a designer or user and form or code), which is the most common manifestation. The first and most f undamental aspect of t his reciprocit y is that it never happens the other way around; without a concrete language, there is no formal language – no logic, no mathematics, no geometry, no ‘form’, and certainly no capacity to use these analogically (for example, to convert any of it into ‘architecture’).18 Again, a concrete language is not intrinsic to speakers or writers; language as a framework for understanding needs the whole cultural ecology (and its history) in which humans dwell , from nature to citi es (the conditions for freedom). Secondly, not only does concrete language enable analogical treatment of formal languages, formal languages positively require analogical conversion/translation in order to qualify as architecture. Everything needed for this purpose must be added to ‘form’ – materials (and their properties), use, scale, location – before ‘meaning’ can be broached. Similarly, the chief virtue of an architectural type – its encapsulation of experience – needs to be carried ‘in the head’ while manipulating the type.19 Finally, the phenomenon referred to above as ‘flattening’ arises from any attempt to ‘translate’ the concrete order into a formal order – that is, to convert the ‘depth’ of rich intensity into the ‘flatness’ of formal extensity.20 The promise of simulation (end-to-end control, analysis) is defeated by the practicalities of extensity. Russell Smith’s user’s guide to his Open [ Source] D ynamic Engine (from 2001) allows one to appreciate the complexity of code required to establish a digital simulation of so-call ed physics; that is, a digital context i n which ‘gravity’
appears to affect objects, such as a bouncing ball.21 This context is essentially a Galilean/Newtonian ‘laboratory’, a conceptual space wholly devoted t o the physical phenomena of interest (ballistics, collision-detection, destruction). All other relations to ‘reality’ are contingent (one is free to endow a shape with the ball istic and colli sion properties of a golf ball , but, when imported into a game or animation, to render the shape as a bear, adding at every collision a sound clip of a wasp bouncing off a window). The example can be generali sed: in such a regime, all shapes have the status of type; the type is embedded in a system; the capacity for any sort of system of this kind (layered, stochastic) to accommodate the full depth of reality (or dwelling) invokes such vast code as to defeat reasonable analysis or even computation. Perhaps possible in principle, it is the complexit y which inhibi ts deploying a parametric l ayering exhaustive enough to generate a relatively straight for ward topography such as that of the insulae at Pompeii (whose main consti tuent i s the type or genera of the Roman house). The last century of ‘housing’ – characteri sticall y a patterned distribution of units/types with access – would seem to indicate that the converse is also the case; that type invokes system. Such topographies are a species of simulation, a regime dominated by transparency of connectivity and control, normally carried by the ordering type of the ‘geometric system’ (also the underlying continuity of ‘network’), in which (formal) variation of type is the pri ncipal vehicle of meaning. Neither dwelli ng nor cit ies are systems, or systems of systems (acknowledging the importance of those aspects which work best as systems – plumbing, energy distribution, traffic).22 The more the context for type is a system, the less possible is dwelling. The worry is that this motive has come to dominate architectural design and the making of urban contexts. 41
The structure of typicality at the scale of a town: Fondamenta Bonini, Venice Although progressively becoming a nosta lgic museum-city, Venice is a mong the examples of a topography developed according to sequences of interiors marked by public involvement. Everything including the Church of the Gesuati, the buildings, rooms, doors, w indows, the paving and edging of the Fondamenta and the mooring poles make up a hierarchical medley of typical situations (all, as it were, ‘islands’ in the sea). It remains to be demonstrated how such a hierarchical topography of interiors can be developed vertically.
Type Versus History The affiliation of type with concept has allowed it to flourish as part of grander type-like concepts such as epochs, historical periods, styles and Z eitgeist . Here, in the impossibi li ty of making history an object of science (hoping to replace symbolic interpretation with immanent demonstration) or of planning, we discern the highest aspiration and dilemma of typological thinking.23 W hether stri ving to recover t he civic quali ti es of medieval European towns or to invent new topographies capable of resisting the sheer accumulati on characteristic of the giant cities of global capitalism, typology would seek to recover t he meaning of civic life through the formal variati on of types.24 Attempting to derive a context from types inevitably finds itself in the stark schematism of L edoux’s utopia of Chaux. H is programme of salvation is characteristi c of the genre of arranging people in space so that the spatial order might magically stand for, or even promote, civic or ontological order (the so-called Ideal City, dating from Vitruvius: city reduced to perfected type). Exemplifying the correlation of type/field with subject/space, Chaux proposes a reciprocity between the neo-M asonic theatre-factory of the central circle and types of people (woodcutter, river manager and so on) embodied in the ‘houses’ which populate the surrounding English Garden – or, more accurately, which populate Ledoux’s didactic text as a relentless taxonomy of plans, sections, elevations, perspectives.25 re Obeying L edoux’s quixoti c eff ort to reconcil ecaractè with formal variation (architectur e parlante ), these houses are ‘little monuments’. This attachment to t he monument shows the tendency for types to adhere to the conceptual clarity necessary for the gnostic-utopian purpose of trying to control history, of trying to make a project of meaning or culture.26 The moti f of t he litt le monument was central to Rossi’s early architecture, thereby making it difficult to reconcile with 27 the segments of his Archit ett ura dell a citt à which argued for 42
urban conti nuity. The use of dramatic shadows in Rossi’s drawings was not for the purpose of articulating profiles, but rather to juxtapose the explicitly abstract/atemporal types with a sign for t emporality/history. He created images composed entirely of haunted monuments/concepts (la cit táanaloga ), equally at home in architectural treatises from Scamozzi to D urand as well as in the mimeti c art of painting. That is, he superimposed the conceptual field of types upon the pictorial field inherited from late Romanti c perspectivism. His drawings and sketches took advantage of the enigma of familiarity central to pittura metafisica (notably de Chi rico and M orandi).28 De cle Chirico had inverted the pompous self-assurance of fin de siè European cities29 fi rstl y through simpl y repeati ng the technique by which these comprehensive programmes of didactic goodness were produced – a field of moral types obeying the laws of perspective (culture as picture). Secondly, however, he distressed the perspective towards an indeterminate projective space, altered the customary relations of scale, emphasised the emptiness between framing elements and (limp) monuments, and made figural the shadows created by the low, transit ional li ght (of history). By means such as these, and with Nietzsche in his ear, de Chirico exposed the motives behind the stulti fying project of earnest goodness as the response to anxiety, nervous wit or melancholia. Rossi embraced both the procedure and its negation (perhaps inspired by Adorno’s negative dialecti c), and thereby exposed t he ghost in t he prevaili ng machinery of goodness through drawings and buildings whose austerity ironically passed for modesty of intentions and recovery of meaning.30 I n other words, there is a fundamental simi larity between the conceptual field and the perspectival disposition of didactic monuments,31 and a fundamental discontinuity between both and the concrete, situati onal topography of actual cities. It was in perspective representation that we discovered ‘things as such’, whereby all phenomena became ‘things’, types, concepts,
Typicalities are never abstract forms, processes or relationships, but are rather embedded within constituencies – even the isosceles triangle has a specifi c history, people and culture attached to it.
credible only when ‘placed’ within a milieu with the consistency of geometry, but whose own status as a fragile hypothesis could be saved by a frame. On this basis, a type is far less determined by any int rinsic properties than by the mode of isolati on that is the context for its use (a background for the ‘shading’ which makes things ‘real’). Architectural design has too often become the securing and constant reaffirmation of this field, assigning it to concrete settings in actual cities (to such an extent that a properly situational topography is now mostly restricted to the historical cores of vast urban regions). Throughout the Enlightenment, from the encyclopaedia and museum to fragment/field to the grey of the CAD screen, this background – prior to any concept – has retained its essential characteristic as the theatre-laboratory for design, for analysis, for making a project of meaning (references, beauty, health, efficiency, monetary value). The apparatus of codes and techniques in whi ch types such as high- ri se offices or housing are embalmed further inhibits a more nuanced, more creative interpretation responding to the depth- structure of typicali ti es. Seeking to fulfil the happy ending always promised by theory, the heuristic value of types succumbs to their use as instruments of salvation (from everything which does not participate in the perfection of the concept, or of form). Typology is a leading concept within an architectural procedure comprising the orchestration of concepts, striving to conflate formal coherence and moral perfection.32 The procedure inevitably supports the impression that history is not the basis for continuity (therefore ethics), but rather for the familiar choice between death/ decay and revolution/ newness. Topography of Praxis The alternati ve to a field of t ypes (or agents/subjects) is the structure of involvements with people and things that comprises urban praxis (situations). Out of urban praxis – actions and
reflections – grows everything that constitutes ‘culture’ or ‘city’, and certainly anything related to ethics or morals (neither of which, along with politics, can be inscribed in a system). Accordingly we may be more critical regarding the standard generalisations of city – form/morphology, space, zones, abstract machine, network; and we may speak of the city as a topography of praxis. In this we follow Alva Noë in acknowledging that ‘consciousness’ is far less a property of brain, or ‘mind’ (of agents/subjects), than it is of the urban praxis/culture in which we are always already involved.33 Typicalities are never abstract forms, processes or relationships, but are rather embedded within constituencies – even the isosceles triangle has a specific history, people and culture attached to it.34 So much more is the case with habits, customs, language and so on. We have seen that such structures are deeply resistant to modelling or simulation – it is even doubtful t hat one could properl y model the processes and situations involving only food.35 I t is a mark of human fini tude that we have only representation to mediate between historical situations and universal conditions. If a city is our most concrete receptacle of these universal conditions, and if we are not to find ourselves in the conflict between conceptual fields and the urban topography of praxis, it would seem best to treat the knowledge or experience embodied in a wellformulated type somewhat like the Rhetorical topos – a commonplace that operates like a question, soliciting debate and commitment to a theme or topic.36 I n this manner, the type remains open to the deep context on which it depends for meaning (that is, it migrates towards the structure of typicalities), and therefore resists incorporation in a system. The centre of gravit y of what is typical i s praxis, the depth of whose contexts manifest themselves as architectural and topographic horizons. 1 43
Typology as System: Kowloon, Hong Kong The lowe r level of buildings , in the region of 10 to 12 storeys, was the average building height in Kowloon prior to the explosion in the housing market. No amount of formal variation could save the subsequent industrial multiplication of apartment types into towers often only one apartment deep.
Notes 1. According to J McKenzie, The Art and Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt 30 0 BC – AD 70 0 , Yale University Press (New Ha ven, CT), 2007 , cha pters 9, 12 –14. gypti enne: 2. Quatremère de Quincy, De l’arc hit ect ure é
consid é ré e dan s son origi ne, ses pr in ci pes et son goût, et c ompa ré e sous les m êmes rap port s àl’ arch it ect ure grecque , Paris, 1803, p 239. ci s des leçons d’arc hi tect ure 3. JNL Durand, Pré donné es àl’ Écol e pol ytech ni qu e , Paris, 1802–5. 4. Le Corbusier embodied both approaches. On Taylorism, see M McLeod, ‘” Architecture or Revolution”, Taylorism, Technocra cy, a nd Soc ial Cha nge’, Art Journal , Summer 1983, pp 132–46. On the poetics of his apa rtment, see P Carl, ‘The Godless Temple – Organon of the Infinite’, Journal of Archit ecture , Vol 10, 20 05, pp 2–28. 5. Anthony Vidler’s brief introduction to Oppositions 6 (197 6), ‘The Third Typology’ w as more sugges tive of th e possibilities than were the a ctual design proposals of the period. If the aggregation of a partment types in the Unite d’Habitation allowed speculations on a vertical city that was in fact a building, the urban blocks as work ed out for the Internationales Bau Ausstellung (IBA) proposals in Berlin were little more than horizontal buildings of this kind, with hollow centres. 6. Exemplary in this respect is P B ourdieu’s diagram of the ‘social positions’ of Paris of the 1970s (Pierre
44
While losing the s ubtle differentiation of activities as seen at mid-century, the urban topography of Kowloon seems robust enough to a bsorb the new densities. However, this sort of topography did not guide the expansion of Hong Kong, which favoured the usual parameters for systematic distribution in ‘space’ of 40-storey walls of apartment types.
Bourdieu, La Distinction. Critique sociale de jugement, Paris , 1979, fig 5). It comprises a Cartesian plot with the ratio of cultural and economic capital on the x-axis, capital volume on the y-axis, a nd types of Pa risians distributed across the resulting field (‘space’). 7. In physics, the shift from treating matter a nd energy to information and energy (Wheeler’s ‘it from bit’) was prompted by Claude Shannon’s famous paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, 1 948, which, though ‘in no way necessary for [his] present theory’ (p 11), showed that information exhibited entropy, according to a formula like tha t of B oltzmann. 8. S Kwinter’s article of 1986 anticipated the introduction into architecture of this form of field – calculable, rather than spatial (‘La Cittá Nuova: Modernity and Continuity’, ZONE 1/2 : The Contemp orary City , Zone Books (New York), 1986). 9. This distinction wa s first dra wn by D Vesley 30 yea rs ago. See now his Architecture in the Age of Divided
Representat ion: The Question of Creativit y in the Shadow of Product ion , MITPress (Cambridge, MA), 2004, chapters 2 and 8, and particularly the role of what he terms ‘pa radigmatic situation’. 10. Nor, therefore, is meant the ‘language of architecture’ as any sort of formal system. S Lavin argues that the 18th-century reformulation of hieroglyphs is the principal vehicle by which Quatremère registers ‘type’ as a constituent of his concept of architecture as a
[social] lang uage : ‘Type and its me aning w ere impressed on the book of architecture in a langua ge “of form and line”’. See S Lavin, Quatr emère de Quin cy and th e Inventi on of a Modern Language of Archit ectur e , MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 19 92 , p 95. The third phase of architectural typology wa s strongly influenced by the debates surrounding structuralism and linguistics – at the time, one often heard of a ‘grammar of types’. 11 . This structure, the moments of commona litywithin-difference (continuity), gives rise to geometry in its Platonic–Pythagorean form, whose connection with logos ha s been obscured since Descartes’ mat hema tisat ion of geometry. The arythmos of the logos is treated by H-G Ga damer in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studi es on Plato , Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 198 0. S till the best account of the structure of embodiment is that of M Merleau-Ponty, La Phenomenologie de la percept ion , Gallimard (Paris), 1949. 12. With respect to w hat is said below, the difficulty/ reward of understanding J oyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) differs from that of understanding highly technical language as richness differs from complexity; the highly referential language of the former contrasts with the highly specific terminology and formulations of the latter. 13. It is important to distinguish universality from generality. This a mbiguity da tes from Aristotle’s doub le use of katholou in the Metaphysics (where it refers to
the ultimate conditions of Being, universal) and in the Organon (where it refers, for example, to all triangles, the general). 14. Issues ignored here include wha t might be the identity of entities discoursing in these terms, what the y might ‘d iscus s’. The Turing Test , by pla cing th e whole burden upon the human half (basically, by reducing the huma n to a Cartesian sceptic), obscures the depth of reality needed for anything like language as used by humans (and, I would suggest, by animals; is there explicit or implicit continuity between language a nd a n ecology understood genetically?). What has happened in practice is more likely to be the case – the adaptability on the part of humans to the binary milieu of computing as it is currently configured (nothing in betw een it w orks/it doesn’t) is ea sed/ blurred by the referential/ana logical richness of wha t is displayed on screens. 15 . M Heideg ger, ‘B uilding, Dwe lling, Thinking’, in A Hofstadter, t rans, Poetr y, Language, Thought , Ha rper & Row (New York), 1 97 1. 16. For example, the ‘primitives’ that come with every CAD package are types of this kind, as are the routines/ algorithms by w hich they are ma de to interact (for example, B ooleans, sweeps). 17.According to the neurophysiologist Colin Blakemore (interview on Radio 4, 1992): ‘Complexity is like the molecular structure of the Himalayas, richness is like the human brain or language.’ 18 . See E Husse rl, ‘The Origins of Geometry ’, Appendix VI of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology , Northwestern University Press (Evanst on, IL), 19 70 , pp 353 –78. The contrary is claimed by the theory of ‘emergence’, which, however, seems to be more interested in the systematic mathematics which lead to emergence than with the quite different properties of wha t ha s emerged (when one arrives at the level of ant colonies, for example). 19 . The lead ing exam ples often used to justify a typological ‘approach’, medieval Italian tow ns w ere not the product of theory; rather theory seeks to account for wha t is appa rently ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’, ‘organic’. The experience which types c arry, the ba sis of their heuristic value, is transmitted differently under such conditions. They a re not forms set w ithin ‘knowledge’ as such, but a re part of a more elaborate civic praxis involving guilds and their social, political and symbolic cycles, how the modes of fabrication and decorum promote certain sizes, ma terials, iconography, h ow a ll of this reconciles civic conflict with the Christian year, the cycles of season, the possibilities of sa lvation a t the end of t ime, a nd so forth. This civic praxis is one
version of interpretation according to the depth-structure of typicalities, which is la ter flattened to the theoretical concept of type. 20 . To its ad herents, of course, this is a positive desideratum. See, for example, GL Legendre’s paea n to ‘surface’ a s a gainst ‘depth’ in the opening remarks of his ijp: the book of surfaces , Architectural Associa tion Publications (London), 2003 . Ma nuel De Landa ’s advocacy of reality as a version of Foucault’s ‘ab stract machine’ (A Thousand Years of Non- Linear Hi story , Zone Books (New York), 1997) follows M Castell’s ‘network society’ (M Castells, The Rise of the Network Societ y , Wiley/Bla ckwell (Oxford), 19 96 ), th ough note the useful correctives to digital ‘transcendence’ at the beginning of S Graham, ‘Strategies for Networked Cities’, in L Albrechts a nd S Mandelbaum, The Network Society: A New Context for Planni ng? , Routledge (Oxford), 2005, pp 95 ff. 21 . ww w.ode. org/ode-latest-userguide.htm l. 22. Still harbouring the early Modernist aspiration to be the means of empowerment of ‘the people’, housing has never escaped its preoccupation with provision for great numbers – a phenomenon of mass culture. However, if w ealth ena bles emancipation from the regime of ‘housing’, it is curious that the results are usually restricted to variations of the type of middle-class dwelling (more space, more rooms, better materials, unusual forms). 23 . This has its origins in the Romant ic struggle with the notion of the philosophical system, in which the supposed counterform of na ture and th e a rts – poesie – wa s swiftly absorbed into the conceptual framework of aesthetics a nd the fi ne arts: see, for example, FWJ Schelling, The Philosophy of Art , tra ns DW Stott, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1989. 24 . The preoccupat ion with type ha s never successfully been a ble to redeem its formalism through the occa sional appeal to biblical hermeneutics, to the P latonic idea, to the Idealist idea, to Jungian archetypes. Anthony Vidler’s ‘The Idea of Type: The Tran sforma tion of th e Aca dem ic Ideal, 17 50–183 0’, for example, distinguishes the instrumenta l hut of La ugier from the s ymbolic Temple of Solomon (see Oppositions 8, 19 77, pp 95–115). 25. Of course, the English Garden may also be read as a didactic text of this kind. CN Ledoux, L’Architecture
consi dé ré e sous l e rapp ort de l ’ar t, des m oeurs et de l a lé gislat ion , Paris, 1804. 26 . On this, see E Voegelin, Science, Politic s and Gnosticism , Chicago University Press (Chicago, IL), 1968. 27. A Rossi, Architett ura della città , Marsilio (Padua), 1966. 28 . The obviously silly mumblings about ‘fa scism’
with respect to Rossi’s projects were interesting only for having this element of familiarity in common. With respect to commemorative monuments and familiarity, see DL Sherman, The Construc ti on of Memory in Int erwar France , Chicago University Press (Chicago, IL), 19 99 . This is a sensitive point, since it touches on the moment when recognition in language or understanding is balanced between creative interpretation and the movement from persuasion to propaganda to coercion. 29. Wonderfully characterised in his Hebdomeros , Peter Owen Ltd (New York), 1992. 30. D Leatherbarrow, draw ing on Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography (1981), argues for the role of memory in Rossi’s concept of type. I am grateful to him for a copy of his unpublished chapter, ‘Buildings Remember’, in Buildi ng Time , forthcoming. 31. Even if the imagery a nd motives seem to lie at opposite sides of the architectural deba te of the period, Rossi’s typological thought is not intrinsically different from the intentionally empty formal variation of types in Tschumi’s Pa rk de la Villette (198 7) schem e. Ross i empha sised the pictorial field, Tschumi empha sised the conceptual field. Both only acknowledged what is already present in Durand. 32. Le Corbusier never gave up trying to reconcile morality, proportions a nd st anda rdised manufacturing, from his ea rly treatment of the ‘sta ndard’ to the pun on droiture (‘rectitude’, combining the right angle with legal rights), towards the end of his career. 33. A Noë, Out of Our Heads: W hy You Are Not
Your Brain, and Other Lessons from t he Biol ogy of Consciousness , Hill &Wang (New York), 2 00 9, a work which augments with the latest research the more philosophically profound M Merleau-Ponty, La phenomenologie de la percept ion , op cit. 34. For which reason, I usually refer to the order of typicalities as ‘institutiona l order’. There are at lea st three levels of institution in this sense: the formal institution (for example, parliaments, post offices), the informal institution (modes of association in pubs, factories), and the most fundamental stratum of language (customs and so on). 35. See C Steel, Hungr y City: How Food Shapes Our Lives , Cha tto &Windus (London), 2008 , a nd LR Kass,
The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Human Nature , Chicago University Press (Chicago, IL), 199 9. action poé tiqu e are 36. Le Corbusier’s Obj et s àré examples of this form of interpretation. Text © 2011 John Wiley &Sons Ltd. Images: pp 38, 4 1-4 © courtesy of Peter Carl; p 39 © Used w ith the permission of Inter IKEASystems B V
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M artino Tattara
BRASI LI A’S PROTOTYPI CAL DESI GN The prototype for Brasilia was captured by L ucio Costa’s 1957 competition entry that constituted no more than a written description, a few sketches and a drawing of the superquadra. MartinoTattara describes Costa’s vision for the city’s residential blocks that so effectively defi ned the urban realm of Brazil’s new capital.
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Proliferation of the Superquadra Prototype After the construction of the first superquadra, the original model was used by many architects for the construction of more than 100 quadras along both the northern and southern residential axes of the city.
SUPERQUADRA AND THE PROJECT OF THE CI TY
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One of the most compelling aspects of the pilot plan for Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, inaugurated 50 years ago after three years of hasty construction, is the single unified manner in which it tackled both architecture and the city. In his proposal for the Plano piloto (pilot plan), Lucio Costa (1902–98) – the w inning architect of the 19 57 national competition to design the new capital for Brazil – quite consciously deployed architecture and urbanism in order to define a s pecific idea of the urban realm. Through a text (the competition report), a few sketches, and a drawing of the plan of the city, the architect wa s a ble to clearly describe at once all that was necessary to initiate and control the development of a city that a few years later would become the administrative and symbolic capital of the country and today its sixth la rgest metropolitan region. To understa nd t his unique approach to the project of the city, it is necessary to examine one part of the city’s pilot plan: the project for the ‘superquadra’, the solution advanced by Costa to tackle the problem of housing and what he would call the city’s ‘residential scale’, 1 and which, as revealed by the architect in an interview, represents the most positive outcome of the whole 48
project, 2 despite the city still today being commonly identified with the buildings masterly designed by Oscar Niemeyer along its monumental axis. Costa’s competition report, the Memória descritiva do Plano piloto , was, not mistakenly, immediately recognised by the competition’s jury as the most extraordinary part of his submission. In the text, his single solution to the residential problem calls for a continuous sequence of large blocks set in double or single lines along both sides of the residential highway a xis, each surrounded by bands of greenery planted with trees. 3 The c ity’s residential system would not be formed by the linear disposition of urban blocks, but rather by a superquadra – a large-scale 300 x 300 metre (984 x 984 foot) urban block. What is striking here is how the description of the superquadra begins by tackling those aspects that would normally be considered, in relation to the residential problem, as secondary. Costa defines the superquadra thus: [In every block ] where one particular type of tree would predominate, the ground would
be carpeted with grass and shrubs and foliage will screen the internal grouping of the superblock from the spectator: who will get a view of the layout through a haze of greenery. This will have the t wo-fold a dvanta ge of guaranteeing orderly planning, even when the density, category, pattern or architectural standard of individual buildings are of a different quality; and, at the same time, it will provide the inhabitants with shady avenues down which to stroll at leisure, in addition to the open spaces planned for their use in the internal pattern of the superblock. 4 The stra tegic relevance of th e landsc ape in Costa’s proposal was confirmed a few years later, in 1958, in a debate published in 1 , 5 in which Costa affirmed that each ‘block must be surrounded by trees’, as the overall objective of the project was to see the minimum of houses because: ‘We must be prepared to have buildings that have no significa nce.’6 The principles a t the origin of the superquadra are not the typological definition of the residential units nor the architectural
Plan for a Residential Superquadra opposite: Although never fully realised, each quadra was originally intended to be surrounded by a 20 metre (65.6 foot) wide green belt planted with a single species of tree, thus differentiating each quadra from the others.
Lucio Costa, Sketch of the neighbourhood unit, 1950s below: The green belt around ea ch quadra wa s meant to generate a sense of belonging among residents without engendering a closed urban entity.
Through a text (the competition report), a few sketches, and a drawing of the plan of the city, the architect was able to clearly describe at once all that was necessary to initiate and control the development of a city that a few years later would become the administrative and symbolic capital of the country and today its sixth largest metropolitan region.
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Classic Neighbourhood Unit Aerial view of the ‘clas sic’ neighbourhood unit (Superquadras 108S, 308S, 1 07S and 307S), considered as the one that best represents Costa’s original conception.
The only two rules determined by the architect are very different to those norms traditionally contained in urban building codes, as in this case they dictate the relational aspects between the buildings and the open space around them. The height of the buildings, over six fl oors, led to the defi nition of the scale of each block, controlling both the quality of the open space and the variation of the number of inhabitants.
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Plants, trees and landscape acquire a primary role in opposition to what is traditionally intended as the object of architectural design. In this fi rst defi nition of the superquadra, it is surprising to recall hints of a phenomenological nature, here used to evoke the quality of the spatial experience that can be favoured by the precise articulation and distribution of trees and of the lawns between buildings.
layout of the buildings (which, within the entire set of materials of the competition submission, are generically indicated as slabs while their planimetric distribution is simply suggested by one sketch), but the system of trees and the composition of the horizontal surface. Plants, trees and landscape acquire a primary role in opposition to what is traditionally intended as the object of architectural design. In this first definition of the superquadra, it is surprising to recall hints of a phenomenological nature, here used to evoke the quality of the spatial experience that can be favoured by the precise articulation and distribution of trees and of the la wns betw een buildings. Trees placed along the perimeter not only contribute to defining the spatial identity of each block but consequently – through the use of different arboreal species used to create diversity among the multiplicity of the blocks — also set the physical and social dimension of every ‘neighbourhood unit’ by creating an edge which is both permeable and crossable. In each block, the residential buildings are arranged in numerous and varying ways, thus achieving ample variations of the value of density, ‘always provided that two general principles are observed: uniform height regulations, possibly six storeys raised on pillars, and separation of motor and pedestrian traffic’. 7 52
The only tw o rules determined by the architect are very different to those norms traditionally contained in urban building codes, as in this case they dictate the relational aspects between the buildings and t he open space a round them. The height of the buildings, over six floors, led to the definition of the scale of each block, controlling both the quality of the open space and the variation of the number of inhabitants. Each building was to be placed on top of pillars because, as explained in the report, the horizontal surface belongs to the collectivity and it must be possible to go from one edge of the city to the other in a comfortable a nd sa fe ma nner. The role of the pillars is to mediate between the buildings and the horizontal datum, to define the ground condition of every unit; their presence grants the right to free movement, provides uninterrupted views and offers a shadowed and protected space from the frequent rains. The land on top of w hich every building is constructed is defined by the architect as a ‘projection’: private ownership here does not concern the property of the land – whose nature remains public – but its projection, the potential to build on top of a certain portion of land whose nature remains untouchable. In order to guarantee spatial continuity, the ground floor of each building is the object of a careful landscape design aimed at coordinating the multiple-height levels of the horizontal surfaces: that of the ground,
sloping down eastwards, and the ground floor of each residentia l building. The coordination between these two surfaces prevents uncontrolled differences betw een the natural surface of the block and the artificial surface of the pillars, thus avoiding the generation of residual spaces and barriers that would diminish the possibility of views and pedestrian acc ess. After ta ckling ot her complementa ry aspects (among them, the position of the public facilities, the social structure of each block, the problem of land property in relation to public access and the process of construction), Costa confirms that if the impossibility of a certain level of quality of the architectural object is to be accepted, the coherence of the ensemble is achieved thanks to the careful composition of those aspects traditionally considered complementary. The green belt along t he perimeter of every block, the relationship between the landscape and the isolated building, the overall scale of the urban composition, the right to mobility, the simple rule dictating the necessity for every residential building of land on the ground by means of pillars, and the collective dimension of the horizontal plane; these were not only rules for the architects who would build all of the remaining quadras along the city’s residential axis, but architectural devices that define what can be identified as an urban typology.
Superquadra 308S, Brasilia, Brazil, 1957–60 Through a very simple abstrac t elevation of the residential slabs in the superquadra they become a generic background with nature at the forefront.
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below: The superquadra 308 was meant to be the prototype for the construction of the other quadras along the city’s residential axis.
opposite: The trees of the green belt and the pilotis under each residential slab define a continuous public canopy freely used by both residents and visitors.
The superquadra is not a part of the city whose meaning can be reduced to the relationship it establishes with other urban elements, but a microcity where the rapport between interior and exterior is dissolved in a miniaturised representation of the urban complexity.
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Different from the traditional urban block, which is part of the urban tissue, or in other words an ensemble of buildings organised through a precise logic, according to which to every space is associated a special character, 8 th e principles desc ribed by Costa in his competition report define a new urban entity able to foster new w ays of living. The superqua dra is not a part of t he city whose meaning ca n be reduced to the relationship it establishes with other urban elements, but a microcity where the rapport between interior and exterior is dissolved in a miniaturised representation of the urban complexity. Tha nks to its exemplary na ture, the superquadra could be defined as a prototype. The example is not th e ‘empirical application of a universal concept, but the singularity and the qualitative completeness that, when speaking of the “life of the mind”, we attribute to the idea’. 9 What can be defined as exemplary does not reproduce itself through the normativeness
of command or the prescription of norm, but ‘through the authoritativeness of the prototype itself, which is a species made of a single individual’. 10 Translat ing this definition to the domains of architecture and urbanism, the superquadra, and also in general terms the pilot plan for Brasilia, offer the constructors of the new capital the authoritativeness of the prototype, whose strength does not lie in the prescriptive character of its rules, but in the exemplary way the model has been consciously composed. The s uperqua dra prototype is not only exemplary of a residential system, but is also the seed of an idea of the city as it offers itself as an example. This fundam enta l cha racteristic of Costa’s approach to planning pervades the entire text of the competition report to form the idea of the new capital – a city that is at the same time the rule and model for its future development w ithin the territory of the Brazilian federal district. 1
Notes 1. A few years after its inauguration, the city was described by Lucio Costa as the interaction of four different scales: the monumental scale, the residential scale, the gregarious scale and the bucolic scale. See Lucio Costa, ‘Sôbre a construção de B rasília’, in Alberto Xavier (ed), Lucio Costa: sôbre arquitetura, UFRGS (Porto Alegre), 1962, pp 342–7. 2. Farés el-Dahd ah, ‘Introduction: The Superquad ra and the Importance of Leisure’, in Farés el-Dahdah (ed), Lucio Costa: Brasília’s Superquadra , Prestel (Munich/ New York), 200 5, p 1 1. 3. Lucio Costa, Memória descritiva do Plano piloto , 1957, point 16 (the text of the competition report is available in English at www. infobrasilia. com. br/pilot_plan. htm). 4. Ibid. 5. Lucio Costa, Arthur Korn, Denys Lasdun and Peter Smithson, ‘Capital Cities’, in 1 11, November 1958, pp 437–41. 6. Ibid. 7. Lucio Costa, Memória descritiva do Plano piloto , op cit, point 16. 8. S ee Philippe Panerai, Jea n Castex and J ean-Charles Depaule, Isolato urbano e città contemporanea , CittàStudi (Milan), 199 1, pp 122–3. 9. Paolo Virno, Mondanità. L’idea di mondo tra esperienza sensibile e sfera pubblica , Manifestolibri (Rome), 19 94, pp 105–7. 10. Ibid. Text © 2011 J ohn Wiley &Sons Ltd. Images : pp 46-7 © Martino Tatta ra, diagram by Martino Tatta ra; p 49 © Casa de Lucio Costa; p 50 © Martino Tatta ra; pp 5 3-5 © Adolfo Despradel/photographs by Adolfo Despradel
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M i chael H ensel
TYPE? WHAT TYPE?
FURTHER REFLECTI ONS ON THE EXTENDED THRESHOLD
Michael Hensel draws a parallel between the present and a
moment in the early 1990s when typology seemed poised to come to the fore. H e highlights how despite a promising start this interest slipped away and was supplanted by an obsession with topography and highly complex surfaces, leading to a primacy of the individual built form over the urban.
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This issue of 2 offers an opportunity to revisit a critical yet overlooked juncture in the early 1990s, a time of economic downturn duri ng which swift and significant changes in architectural theory and experimentation occurred. The consequences of these changes continue to greatly affect practice and the built environment today and relate to questions of di screte form and typology in architecture. The aim of this article is to re-examine this juncture and its ongoing repercussions, as well as bringing to attention an immense, yet missed, opportunity for a fundamental revision of the product of architectural and urban design practice. The account bri ngs together a more general di scussion as well as personal experiences and realisations over two decades. It commences wit h the decision in 1992 to j oin the then newly establi shed graduate design programme at the Architectural Association (AA) in L ondon directed by Jeff rey Ki pnis and Don Bates. The programme introduced a seri es of radical ideas and design experi ments, the theoretical basis of which is rooted in Ki pnis’ seminal article ‘Towards a New Architecture’ published in 1 Folding i n A rchit ectur e in 1993.1 H ere, Kipnis launched a fundamental critique of Postmodern practice, which contained an elaboration of five points or principles aimed at overcoming collage as the then prevailing mode of design (in direct response to an analogous attempt by Roberto M angabeira Unger during the ANYONE conference in 1990).2 A longside this was his discussion of two differing modes of actualising the principles: D eFormati on, wit h an emphasis on t he articulation of monolithic built form, and InFormation, with an emphasis on questions of programme while de-emphasising form. In rejecting Postmodern collage, Kipnis offered a detailed account of proposed design concepts and methods that would result in designs with entirely new characteristics or, to use his own expression, new architectural ‘effects’.3 As graduate students we were as astounded as we were int rigued by the raw potential of t his discourse. Naturally we wished to examine the projects cited in Kipni s’ article. W hile it was clear that t he DeFormationist schemes were poised entirely outside of the canon of established architectural typologies, they were as unbuilt as they were underpublished, and their material articulation, the relation of the built volume to t he ground and the context were difficult to grasp. In the context of the new graduate design programme we aimed to tackle this problem, yet with the added aim of the eventual ultimate dissolution of built form into a tectonic landscape that would no longer be based on a traditional process of subdividing the site, allocating plots and floor-area ratios in order then to allocate typologies and extrude discrete volumes. A technique termed ‘graft ing’4 was used to concurrently derive multiple organisational layers for an urban and architectural design from a heterogeneous graphic space. The underl ying interest derived from Kipni s’ fascinati on with t he American artist Jasper Johns’ ‘crosshatch’ paintings that defied any att empt at tradit ional decompositi on into fore-, middle- and background. Instead the paintings constituted, in Kipnis’ view, the elaboration of a new and deep middle-ground. I f an analogous architecture were possible, this would entail that built form no longer be extruded into a figure-ground relation but, instead, built mass and landscape surface would engage in the formation of a heterogeneous and
Johan Bettum, Michael Hensel, Chul Kong and Nopadol Limwatankul, A Thousand Grounds: Tectonic Landscape – Spreebogen, A New Governmental Centre for Berlin Urban Design Study, Graduate Design Programme (tutors: J effrey Kipnis and Don Bates), Architectural Association, London, 1992–3 opposite : Conceptual model indicating the folding of landscape and built mass into one another. below : Programme and event map showing all systems that organise the site and its potential for use over time. below : Axonometric indicating spatial transitions and degrees of interiority in conjunction with landscape surfaces and other spatial elements such a s plantation fields a nd densities.
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If an analogous architecture were possible, this would entail that built form no longer be extruded extr uded into int o a fi gureground relation but, instead, built mass and landscape surface would engage in the formation of a heterogeneous and coherent amalgam that would no longer be decomposable. coherent amalgam that would no longer be decomposable. Although it was clear that developing an architectural anall ogue t o Johns’ ‘new ana ‘new middl mi ddl e-gr e-ground ound’’ was was not possi bl ble e in a singular project, let alone a graduate design thesis, my colleagues Johan Bettum, Chul Kong and Nopadol L i mwatankul and I nevert heless emba mbark rke ed on thi th i s at tempt under the keen supervision of Kipnis and Bates. T he i nt nte ernati onal Spree Spreeboge bogen n competi competi t i on for a new new governmental centre in Berlin was chosen as the context for the project project as it off offe ere red d the t he opportuni opportuni t y to t o concurrentl concurrently y pursue pursue an urban, landscape and architectural design project. Based on a ‘graft graft ’ deve developed by our colle coll eague A mna Emir Emi r and the t he design approach elaborated by Kipnis, several key items were produced to describe the project intentions: 1) a programme and event map that contained information about (planned and unplanned) activities, circulation, landscape items and surf urfa ace ces s for programme and and publi c appropria appropri at i on, ass assembl mbly y fields, time-specific plantation schemes and lighting systems, river regulation and flooding areas – in short all systems that organise the site and its potential for use over time;5 2) an axonome xonomett ri c that t hat elaborat elaborat ed spat spat i al trans t ransii t i ons and and de d egre gree es of interiority in conjunction with landscape surfaces that make up the tectonic landscape together with other spatial elements such as plantation fields and densities; and 3) a conceptual model that indicated the folding of landscape and built mass into one another, using colour-coding for the various surface systems that make up the tectonic landscape. Eventually, however, we did not succeed in defining the actual tectonic of the intended tectonic landscape, though the foundation for a new se seri es of experi experi mentati mentations ons towards towards thi t his s ai ai m had h ad bee been l ai d. T he si gnifi ca cance nce of the t he expe xperi ri ment is i s not i n it i t s appare pparent nt proximity to what has come to be termed ‘landscape urbanism’, but instead in its organisation of the various items and systems that would eventually culminate in an urban and architectural project that redefines a heterogeneous spatial scheme based on extended spatial transitions and the ult imate extens extension and fine fi ne diss dissolut olution ion of t he materi materia al threshold which had previously resulted in the dichotomous division of the figure from the ground and the inside from the outside – in short the ushering in of the end of type. In this might lie perhaps one of the greatest potentials with regard to Kipnis’ heralded emergence of new institutional ‘f‘form’ orm’ and and social social formati f ormati ons ons.. It I t onl y dawned dawned on on us much more recently that there would have been some rather interesting precursors to this to be found throughout architectural history, which might have served to inform an ini ti al approa pproach ch towards towards art articulati iculating ng a materi materia al resolut olution ion for 58
AA Graduate Design Group, Changliu Grouing Area Masterplan, Haikou, Hanian Hanian Island, Island, China, China, Graduate Design Programme (tutors: Jeffrey Jeffrey Kipnis, Bahram Shirdel and Michael Hensel), Architectural Association, Lond London, 1993– 1993–4 4 opposite top : 1/5,0 1/5,0 00 mod el of the masterplan for a new city for 600,000 inhabitants at 70 per cent of the final density. density. The model indicates b uilding volumes volumes and densities, road and harbour infrastructure, green and reserved areas, and in the centre (in blue) the Central Business District. opposite bottom : 1 /20,00 0 ma sterp sterplan lan showing singlesingle-,, mixed-, multiple- and differential-use areas, road, rail and harbour infrastructure, parks and landscape elements, 40 integrated farmer’s and fishermen’s villages, and reserved land for future development.
below left : Various Various plan dia grams elab orating different
combinations of buildings combinations buildings a nd ha rd and soft landscape. The diagrams indicate potentials for folding buildings and landscape into one anot her her.. The The left a nd right perimeters are cha racterised by standard piloti buildings raised from the ground, while the landscaped a rea along the central axis shows an incr increasing easing degree degree of a more complex relationship between landscape and buildings. below right : Sectional sequence elaborating the transition from the standard piloti building typology to the areas where buildings and landscape fold into one another.
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Chris Lee, Gallery Project for Spitalfields Market, London, AA Diploma Unit 4 (tutors: Ben Ben van Berkel and Michael Hensel), Architectural Association, Lond London, 1995– 1995–6 6 below Left: 1/100 model showing the pa rtly burrowed Left: burrowed spa tial organisation of the gallery scheme inspired by Greg Lynn’s theoretical elabora tions on differential gravities. The The spatia l scheme is based on relinquishing the dichotomous division between figure and ground, which become indivisible and non-decomposable. Right: Plan organisation of the gallery project showing the various inclined circulation surfaces inspired by Paul Virilio’s and Claude Parent’s notion of oblique space.
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Nasrin Kalbasi and Dimitrios Tsigos, Copenhagen Playhouse Competition, Copenhagen, Denmark, AA Diploma Unit 4 (tutors: Michael Hensel and Ludo Grooteman), Architectural Association, London, 2001–02 below : Two views of the digital mod el showing the transitions from closed surfaces to the striated organisation of the envelope and the semi-burrowed multiple ground configuration engendered by the continuous surface. opposite, bottom left : Geometric study of striation density, orientation and curvature and the resultant viewpoint-dependent visual transparency of the envelope. opposite, bottom right : Study of gradual size transitions of the striated envelope and its smooth transformation into furniture-scale and ergonomics-related requirements. In this scheme the rotation of the elements along their longitudinal axis occurs in the areas of size transitions to acc ommodate the furnishing of space on a human scale. In doing so the design diverges from the striation projects of Bahram Shirdel and the sculptural works of Raimo Utriainen which are characterised by parallel and straight elements.
the scheme.6 With this project the best we could achieve was to help make more specific the questions regarding the art iculation of a tectonic landscape. W hat was to follow, however, was the swift and ultimate shift away from what had just come into our grasp. Numerous influences and developments concurred in time with our efforts described above. Various publications, symposia, teaching programmes and projects of this and the directly following period attest to a shift in interest away from typology towards both topography and topology. W hile the former might suggest a relationship to the above, the latter swiftly shifted back towards the articulation of exotic yet di screte built form. I n the wake of t his shift, in the following year’s AA’s graduate design programme, then co-directed by Kipnis and Bahram Shirdel, the emphasis also shifted. The possibility of working on a life project of a masterplan for a new city in China enforced a faster pace of experimentation and production. In tandem with this development, Kipnis and Shirdel developed a new interest in the group form or field condition of fl ocks and swarms, in particular schools of fish. W hile this consti tut es a weak form wi th smooth edges, the figure nevertheless consists of discrete elements that are all simi lar yet indi vidual; in other words coherent yet varied.7 The masterpl an for the new city in China that was developed by the AA’s graduate design group in 1993–4 shows then a clear return to buildings as figures set firmly against the ground. Again the scheme was developed from a grafted graphic space, yet, while the heterogeneous art iculation and use of the datum prevails, the landscaped surface and the built volumes are in general clearl y separated. While some surfaces were designed to be continuous from exterior to interi or or f rom envelope to landscape, these occasions remained largely gestural and the discreteness of the volumes was left i ntact. This characteristi c can also be identified in some of the key projects of the time, for instance FOA’s Yokohama Ferry Terminal (1994), which constitutes a vari ation of L e Corbusier’s Vill a Savoye diagram (1928–9) with a more articulated roof garden surface that continues as a circulation surface and connects to the ground of the city, though, alas, the terminal constitutes a discrete form. On a larger scale it is interesting to observe that the swarm or school of fish actually prevailed in the form of current di scourses of so-called parametri c urbanism. If one examines, for instance, Zaha Hadid’s pri ze-winning masterplan for Kartal in Istanbul (2006) it is clear that a specific block typology was computationally (parametrically) 61
