I recall a denunciation of Peter and Alison Smithson for their temerity in ‘thinking they had invented a type’ (the ‘street in the sky’ in this case) - as if this were an error of the self-evident sort. But at other times, the identity of a given type seems to be a deeper and weightier matter. In this sense, typology seems to be empirical, and the type to be a product of its environment and historical and cultural circumstance. The typologist as a figure - the identifier and categoriser of types - seems like a butterfly collector roaming cities and towns in search of examples and pinning them in neat rows. However, the use and meaning of type is broadly ambiguous and inconsistent. It isn’t, as far as I can see, bound to a particular subculture or style - and is as likely to crop up on the fringes of parametricist urbanism as in the rhetoric of new generation of PoMo nostalgics. Typology is a term you still hear today, and the identification of architectural type is - if not all that common as a heuristic in the contemporary design process - then certainly at least still a major frame of reference for interpretation. J.N.L Durand – Precis des leçons d’Architecture (1802–5) vol 1 pt 2 plates 10–11
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |