Front CoverGUEST-EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER CM LEE & SAM
JACOBY
TYPOLOGICAL URBANISM
01|2011
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN VOL 81, NO 1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 ISSN
0003-8504
PROFILE NO 209 ISBN 978-0470-747209
2
TYPOLOGICAL URBANISM: PROJECTIVE CITIES
5 EDITORIAL
Helen Castle
8 SPOTLIGHT
14 INTRODUCTION
Typological Urbanism and the Idea of the City Christopher CM Lee
and Sam Jacoby
24 The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies
Marina Lathouri
A persistent architectural category, type is traced back by
Lathouri to the 18th century.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Will Alsop Denise Bratton Paul Brislin Mark Burry André Chaszar
Nigel Coates Peter Cook Teddy Cruz Max Fordham Massimiliano Fuksas
Edwin Heathcote Michael Hensel Anthony Hunt Charles Jencks Bob
Maxwell Jayne Merkel Peter Murray Mark Robbins Deborah Saunt Leon
van Schaik Patrik Schumacher Neil Spiller Michael Weinstock Ken
Yeang Alejandro Zaera-Polo
3
56 Type? What Type? Further Refl ections on the Extended Threshold
Michael Hensel
66 Typological Instruments: Connecting Architecture and Urbanism
Caroline Bos & Ben van Berkel/ UNStudio
32 City as Political Form: Four Archetypes of Urban Transformation
Pier Vittorio Aureli
38 Type, Field, Culture, Praxis Peter Carl
46 Brasilia’s Superquadra: Prototypical Design and the Project of
the City Martino Tattara
90 Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan Competition, Singapore Toyo Ito
& Associates, Architects
94 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa
Prefecture, Japan Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA
102 The Metropolis as Integral Substance l ’AUC Architects and
Urbanists (François Decoster, Caroline Poulin, Djamel
Klouche)
110 A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of the Post-Fordist
City DOGMA (Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara)
120 Xi’an Horticultural Masterplan, Xi’an, China Serie
Architects
128 COUNTERPOINT
78 Penang Tropical City, Penang, Malaysia
OMA João Bravo da Costa
As epitomised by OMA’s project for Penang, the magnitude of
urbanisation in East Asia requires an innovative approach to
type.
4
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 PROFILE NO 209
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Front cover: Udayan Mazumdar, Ground Zero, Mumbai, India, Diploma
Unit 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
01|2011
EDITORIAL Helen 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’. It 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 Lee and Sam Jacoby, it is reason, but
with a defi nite 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 Lee’s and Sam Jacoby’s
preoccupation with type comes out of extensive research, teaching
and practice. Both are unit masters at the Architectural
Association in London and Sam Jacoby is currently completing a
doctorate on the subject; Chris Lee is also co- director, with
Kapil Gupta, of award-winning offi ce Serie Architects, a
relatively small but incredibly agile and infl uential practice
that has gained international renown for its projects spread across
X’ian, Hangzhou, Beijing, Chengdu, London, Bratislava and Mumbai.
For Serie Architects, ‘the notion of type as operative theory’ is
‘generic enough to overcome differences and specifi c enough to
engage and index the cultural, 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 –
certainly befi ts 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 Middle
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 fi nd the
commonalities and similarities between built form – the essence of
buildings if you like. Metaphysical in scope, it presses on
architecture far-reaching but necessary questions, such as ‘What is
architecture?’ If, as Michael Hensel suggests in his article, 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 fi
ngers before it has gained the full attention it deserves. Type, as
Lee 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, Working in Series: Christopher CM Lee
and Kapil Gupta/Serie Architects, Architectural Association
(London), 2010, p 5.
Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Steve Gorton
6
Serie Architects, Xin Tian Di Factory H, Hangzhou, China, 2010 top
left: For the project to create an urban core for a larger
masterplan of Xin Tian Di, Serie was tasked with 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 alternative strategy of
rethinking what constitutes an urban core eschews the reliance on
hyperdense buildings that accumulates pedestrian fl ows. Instead,
it presents the reclaimed void as a new urban core.
Serie Architects, Bohácky Residential Masterplan, Bratislava,
Slovakia, 2009 top right: Serie’s principal concern in designing
the masterplan for a residential development – comprising 120
single- family dwellings designed by Serie as well as six other
architects – is to institute an overall coherence that does not
impinge on the heterogeneity of the villas. To do this, Serie
utilised an undulating giant hedge that 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
masterplan, 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.
7
ABOUT THE GUEST-EDITORS CHRISTOPHER CM LEE AND SAM JACOBY
Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby are the co-directors of the new
postgraduate Projective Cities Programme at the Architectural
Association (AA) School of Architecture in London
(projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk), which is dedicated to a
research- and design-based analysis of the emergent and
contemporary city. They have taught together at the AA since 2002
and their investigation of the city, undertaken in Diploma Unit 6
from 2004 to 2009, has been published in Typological Formations:
Renewable Building Types and the City (AA Publications, 2007). The
work has also been widely exhibited, including at the 10th
Architecture Biennale in Venice (2006) and as a solo exhibition at
the UTS Gallery in Sydney (2009).
Christopher CM Lee is the co-founder and principal of Serie
Architects. He graduated with an AA Diploma (Hons), has previously
taught Histories and Theories Studies at the AA (2009–10) and was
Unit Master of Intermediate Unit 2 from 2002 to 2004 and Diploma
Unit 6 from 2004 to 2009. He is pursuing his doctoral research at
the Berlage Institute 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 History and Theories Studies. He was also a
studio leader in the BArch programme at the University of
Nottingham. He is currently completing 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, Lee and Jacoby
recognise the city as a contemporary fi eld, 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 city. 1
Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6(t), 7(t) ©
Serie Architects; pp 6(b), 7(b) © Sam Jacoby
top: Christopher CM Lee above: Sam Jacoby
8
SPOTLIGHT Brasilia, Brazil, 1957–60 The superquadra housing blocks,
designed by Lucio Costa, are the basic unit of the urban realm in
Brasilia. Their elevations, foregrounded by trees, are the backdrop
to the city.
Superquadra 308S
9
Type has a strong Modernist 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
Masterplan, which is informed in its approach by the 1960s
Metabolists. 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.
10
Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan Competition, Singapore, 2000–01
For this IT research city, Ito envisioned a horizontal urban
infrastructure connected by high-speed pedestrian walkways.
Toyo Ito & Associat es, Architects and RSP Architects Planners
& Engineers (Pte) Ltd
G
Arnhem Central, The Netherlands, due for completion 2013 In
UNStudio’s work, the centralising void space becomes an adaptable
type for spatial organisation, as demonstrated by this public
transportation centre and the Raffl es City project on pp
74–7.
D UNStudio
11
12
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa
Prefecture, Japan, 2004 This interior space of the art 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.
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA
G
13
A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of the Post-Fordist City,
European North Western Metropolitan Area, 2002–09 In this project
for an archetype for the modern city, DOGMA espouses a repeatable
architectural form that enables the city to be based on
architecture alone rather than a combination of urban
elements.
DOGMA (Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara with Alice
Bulla)
Text © 2011 John 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 13 © FRAC Centre Collection,
Orléans, France
G
1414
1515
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 defi nes
China’s public image of monumentality and iconicity? The project
subverts the idea of the People’s Square and turns its heroic fi
gure into an airport.
16
Bolam Lee, Multiplex City, Seoul, South Korea, Diploma Unit 6
(tutors: Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural
Association, London, 2007 above: Model. The reconfi gured high-rise
is spliced with vertical public spaces and functions as an urban
punctuator.
opposite: Urban plan of Multiplex City. The project aims to exploit
the defunct middle fl oors of multiplexes (multifunctional,
hyperdense high-rises) in Seoul and converts them into vertical
public spaces.
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.
17
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-empower the architect in the context of
urban architectural production is founded on the realisation of
three essential predicaments that need to be addressed by both the
profession and academia. Firstly, the relentless speed and colossal
scale of urbanisation, with the current level of around 50 per cent
increasing to approximately 69 per cent by 2050, 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
separation of architecture and urban planning into segregated
domains – for effi ciency and speed – has left each discipline
impotent to deal with the ruptured, decentralised and fast-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 Shanghai World Finance Center of 2008 to this
superlative. With this increasing stultifi cation, the discipline’s
inability to confi dently and comprehensively describe,
conceptualise, theorise and ultimately project any new ideas of
architecture in relationship to the city must be confronted and
rethought.
To achieve the stated meta-critical aim, 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 fi eld of
urbanism and the city, and features four projects that are
conventionally not seen as fi tting within the framework of
typology, proposing that the reconsideration of these projects
renews and enriches the understanding of working typologically.
Similarly, recent projects by young practices further illustrate
the possibility of utilising the notion of type in informing the
‘idea of the city’.
Type and Typology In common usage the words ‘type’ and ‘typology’
have become interchangeable and understood as buildings grouped by
their use: schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on.2 ‘Type’,
however, should not be confused with ‘typology’. The suffi x
‘-ology’ comes from the Greek logia, which means ‘a discourse,
treatise, theory or science’. Thus typology is the discourse,
theory, treatise (method) or science of type. Its reduction to
categories of use is limiting, as buildings are independent from
their function and evolve over time, as Aldo Rossi and
Neo-Rationalism have already argued.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, historical and sociocultural aspects. The essential
quality of change and transformation rather than its strict
classifi cation or obedience to historical continuity endows type
with the possibility to transgress its functional and formal
limitations.
For the defi nition of the word ‘type’ in architectural theory we
can turn to Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy’s masterful
explanation in the Dictionnaire d’architecture (1825) that formally
introduced the notion into the architectural discourse. For
Quatremère: ‘The word type presents less the image of a thing to
copy or imitate completely than the idea of an element which ought
itself to serve as a rule for the model.’4 Type consequently is an
element, an object, a thing that embodies the idea. Type
18
Deena Fakhro, The Holy City and its Discontent, Makkah, Saudi
Arabia, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby),
Architectural Association, London, 2008 above and centre: Typical
plans, sections and views of airport. Once a year, every year, the
Holy City of Makkah is fl ooded by a surge of three million
pilgrims, demanding unparalleled infrastructural miracles. To
counter the fi nancial burden of the redundant hajj infrastructure,
the gateway airports are opportunistically combined with
mosque-based Islamic universities: airport- mosques, switching
between pilgrim surges and student populations.
top and opposite: An airport, a mosque: a city gateway. In response
to the pilgrim surge in Makkah, the project strategically proposes
polynodal gateway airports that disperse congestion
multidirectionally within Makkah’s valleys.
19
is abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and literal. Its
idea guides or governs over the rules of the model. This idea,
following a Neoplatonic and metaphysical tradition, is by
Quatremère understood as the ideal that an architect should strive
for but which never fully materialises in the process of creative
production. The idea of the ‘model’, on the other hand, is
developed by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand in his typological design
method of the Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École
royale polytechnique (1802–05). In the Précis, developed almost at
the same time as Quatremère’s typological theory at the turn of the
19th century, Durand attempts to establish a systematic method of
classifying buildings according to genres and abstracts them into
diagrams.5 He proposes that new types emerge in response to the
requirements of a changing society and urban conditions, whereby
the typological diagrams are adapted to the constraints of specifi
c sites. This notion of type as model, graphically reducible to
diagrams, introduced precepts that are fundamental to working
typologically: precedents, classifi cation, taxonomy, repetition,
differentiation and reinvention. Thus Durand’s Précis outlines an
important element of the didactic theory of type and constitutes
what we understand by typology.
The misunderstanding of type and typology, attacked by many for its
perceived restrictions, has resulted in the deliberate rejection of
typological knowledge. This is evident in the exotic formal
experiments of the past 15 years: every fold, every twist and bend,
every swoosh and whoosh is justifi ed as being superior to the
types it displaces. However, it remains unclear what these ill
properties or characteristics of type are that the novel forms want
to replace and to what ends. These architectural experiments have
no relevance beyond the formal and cannot be considered an
invention, for invention, as Quatremère stated, ‘does not exist
outside rules; for there would be no way to judge
invention’.6
In ‘Type? What Type?’ (pages 56–65), Michael Hensel recounts his
personal experiences in the early 1990s at the Architectural
Association (AA) in London – according to
him an important juncture for the theory and experiments of
architecture in urbanism – which he argues failed to recognise the
need for a wider contextualisation of experimentation, due to the
casual if not naive treatment of the type. Marina Lathouri in ‘The
City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies’ (pages
24–31) provides a critical and historiographical discussion of
type’s role in defi ning the architectural object and its
relationship to the city. This thematic engagement is complemented
by the projects of UNStudio in ‘Typological Instruments: Connecting
Architecture and Urbanism’ by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos
(pages 66–77). These projects clarify the utilisation of design
models to synthesise types with the complexities of practice and
reality through the instrumentality of typological and serial
models of organisation. The specifi c responses demonstrate that
typological design models are capable of, and require, their
transformation and hybridisation in order to fulfi l the ambitions
and requirements of an architectural project in an urban
context.
Typology and the Urban Plan The coupling of the concept of type as
idea and model allows us to discuss its instrumentality in the
urban context. The word ‘urbanism’ means ‘of, living or situated
in, a city or town’, but it was Ildefons Cerdá – a Catalan engineer
and the urban planner of the Barcelona Eixample – who fi rst
invented the words ‘urbanism’ and ‘urbanisation’ in his Theory of
Urbanization (1867). For Cerdá, urbanism was the science that
manages and regulates the growth of the city through housing and
economic activities. He understood the word ‘urbs’ at the root of
‘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 urbanisation
inevitably involves multiple stakeholders, a diversity of
inhabitants, and a scale beyond that of a single building
incorporated in an urban plan. This inclusive urban plan has to be
differentiated from the masterplan predicated on singular authority
and control.
20
The instrumentality of type in the process of envisioning,
regulating and administering the urban plan lies in its ability to
act as a pliable diagram, indexing the irreducible typal imprints
that serve as the elemental parts to the plan.8 The diagrams of
type, however, are 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 diagram hereby is both diagnostic
and 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) Peter Carl clarifi
es that ‘types are isolated fragments of a deeper and richer
structure of typicalities’, attempting to relate the architectural
object to human situations. Typicalities, says Carl, are ‘those
aspects common to all’, exerting a claim on freedom, while this
freedom depends in turn on that which is common to all for its
meaning.
A number of further projects by OMA, Toyo Ito, SANAA and l’AUC
provide a second reading of how a recourse to typology is necessary
when dealing with the urban context. In the Penang Tropical City
(2004) by OMA (pages 78–89), distinct building types are grouped
together to form ‘islands of exacerbated difference’ as yet another
enactment of Koolhaas’ idea of the ‘Cities within the City’
developed with OM Ungers in 1977.10 Toyo Ito’s project for the
Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan (2001 – see pages 90–3) develops
the use of prototypical elements – albeit in a more ‘fl uid’ manner
– that bears traces to his preoccupations with the problems of
collective form that typifi ed 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 intensifi cations of a
super-metropolitan matrix in the Grand Paris Stimulé (2008–09 –
pages 108–9), which attempts a different approach to city-making.
Perhaps the most unusual
inclusion is the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (2004) in
Kanazawa, Japan, by SANAA (pages 94–101). This project should be
understood in relation to other projects such as the Moriyama House
in Tokyo (2005) and the recently completed Rolex Learning Centre in
Lausanne (2010), which rethink the building as a piece of city
fabric through the mat-building typology.
Type and the City If urbanisation is concerned with the expansion
of human settlement driven primarily by economics, the city on the
other hand is the consolidated, concentrated settlement that
precedes the urb. It is usually demarcated by a city wall and a
point of concentration for people and activities, resulting in a
stratifi ed 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 characteristic to
geographical and topographical conditions, and are always linked to
other cities by trade and resources, they tend to specialise and
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 collective meaning for the city. This meaning
changes 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 exemplifi
ed by town halls, libraries, museums and archives. It is through
this understanding that we are proposing that the idea of the city
can be embodied in these dominant types, communicating the idea of
the city in response to specifi c historical and sociocultural
conditions. From Barcelona with its Cerdá housing blocks, London
with its Victorian and Georgian terraces and New York with its
Manhattan skyscrapers, cities can be understood, described,
conceptualised and theorised through their own particular dominant
types. Through Rossi, we learn that a building as
21
Max von Werz, Open Source Fabric, Zorrozaurre, Bilbao, Spain,
Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby),
Architectural Association, London, 2007 opposite left: Urban 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 stringing together of the
exterior void offers the 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-specifi c environments capable of consolidating leisure
networks to attract a lived-in population within the
peninsula.
Martin Jameson, Project Runway, Thames Estuary, UK, Diploma Unit 6
(tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural
Association, London, 2008 top: Airport visualisation. Heathrow
Airport is top of the long list of London’s planning disasters. The
solution: a 12-kilometre (7.5-mile) inhabited bridge across the
mouth of the Thames Estuary.
above: Fragment model of airport. Incorporating high-speed rail and
topped with three runways, this new urban condition manifests a
compressed and highly varied programme tightly contained within a
strict envelope. The impact: regeneration without sprawl,
infrastructure without damage to civic life.
22
Yi Cheng Pan, Resisting the Generic Empire, Singapore, Diploma Unit
6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural
Association, London, 2006 top: Masterplan model. To wrest control
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 the ground plane
for immediate activation by smaller building types (and
stakeholders) and creates multiple ‘clustered’ volumes for
increased public and private partnerships.
above: Urban plan. 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: Masterplan model of airport.
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.
Typological Urbanism, 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.
23
an element of ‘permanence’ is able to act as the typological
repository of a city’s history, construction and form. For Rossi,
type is independent of function and therefore pliable. To
understand these types is to understand the city itself.
Pier Vittorio Aureli in ‘City as Political Form: Four Archetypes of
Urban Transformation’ (pages 32–7) discusses the instrumentality of
paradigmatic architectural archetype as an extensive governance
apparatus and proposes that while the evolution of the city can be
thought of as the evolution of urban types, its realisation can
only happen within a political ‘state of exception’. Similarly,
Martino Tattara in ‘Brasilia’s Superquadra: Prototypical Design and
the Project of the City’ (pages 46–55) proposes that the
‘prototype’ is the exemplar that does not reproduce itself through
a set of norms, prescriptions or rules, but through the
authoritativeness of the prototype itself. This ultimately
constitutes a new disciplinary operativity by considering the
prototype as a ‘seed’ for the idea of the city.
Two projects by DOGMA and Serie offer a possible demonstration of
the manifestation of the idea of the city as an architectural
project. DOGMA, in their ‘A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins
of a Post-Fordist City’ (pages 110–19) investigate the possibility
by focusing on the relationship between architectural form,
large-scale design and political economy. This is rendered less as
a ‘working’ proposition and more as an idea of the city brought to
its (extreme) logical conclusions. In the Xi’an Horticultural
Masterplan project by Serie Architects (pages 120–7), the
transformation of an artefact of the city is used to confront the
problem of centrality and the possible recuperation of the
tradition of city-making in Xi’an, China. The city wall as a
dominant type is utilised as the deep structure that sets out a
typological grammar for the city.
Typological Urbanism, in conclusion, brings together arguments and
projects that demonstrate a commitment to the empowerment of the
architect to once again 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
answers the didactic question of ‘how to?’ but also the
meta-critical question of ‘why do?’. 1
Notes 1. The United Nations expects that the population increase of
2.3 billion 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, achieving an average of 69 per cent. Most of the
population growth will take place in urban areas in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America and the Caribbean. See United Nations, Department
of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World
Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision, New York, 2010. 2. In
part, this tendency to classify group buildings according to use
can be attributed to Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England
(1951–75). The original series by Pevsner, for Penguin, has been
expanded and is now published by Yale University Press as Pevsner
Architectural Guides: Buildings of England,Scotland, Wales and
Ireland. 3. Compare with Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City,
trans Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA),
1982. 4. Quatremère de Quincy, ‘Type’, in Encyclopédie Méthodique,
Vol 3, 1825, trans Samir Younés, Quatremere De Quincy’s Historical
Dictionary of Architecture: The True, the Fictive and the Real,
Papadakis Publisher (London), 2000. 5. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand,
Précis of the Lectures on Architecture, trans David Britt, Getty
Trust Publications (Los Angeles), 2000. Durand’s diagrams primarily
capture the structural elements of various building types,
comprising a layer of grids that denote both structure and
geometric composition. 6. Quatremère de Quincy, ‘Rule’, in
Encyclopédie Méthodique, Vol 3, op cit. 7. The difference between
‘urb’ and ‘city’ and its implication are developed by Pier Vittorio
Aureli in ‘Toward the Archipelago’, in Log 11, 2008. 8. For a more
detailed account, see Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby (eds),
Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City, AA
Publications (London), 2007. 9. This understanding of the diagram
is fundamentally different from interpreting diagrams of fl ows and
pseudoscientifi c indexes as novel tectonics. 10. Oswald Matthias
Ungers, 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 defi nition, see
Spiro Kostof, City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through
History, Thames & Hudson (London), 1999. 12. Traditional cities
are defi ned by their relationships to river banks, sea ports,
railways, highlands (hill towns) and so on. Today we see cities
that position themselves as knowledge cities, fi nancial cities,
medical cities, sport cities and so on.
Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Diploma Unit 6,
Architectural Association School of Architecture, London
242224
THE CITY AS A PROJECT
TYPES, TYPICAL OBJECTS AND TYPOLOGIES
Marina Lathouri 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.
Marina Lathouri
To raise the question of typology in architecture is to raise a
question of the architectural work itself. — Rafael Moneo, ‘On
Typology’, 19781
The concept of ‘type’ in architecture 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 Moneo succinctly points out, ‘the
question of typology’ – ‘typology’ being a discourse (logos) on
‘type’ – becomes ‘a question on the architectural work itself ’, 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 specifi c functions of the
concept of type in architecture. The fi rst is that accounts of
type are informed by the different ways of seeing, thinking and
producing the work of architecture. The second characteristic,
following on from the fi rst, 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 specifi c 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.
When it fi rst appears in architecture during the 18th century, the
word ‘type’, coming from the Greek typos meaning model, matrix, the
imprint or a fi gure in relief, carries a sense of origin closely
joined to a universal law or natural principle.
The notion of type, as the law or principle that might explain how
forms are generated thus endowing every element with symbolic
signifi cance, gained considerable presence among the Enlightenment
architectural theorists. In the article ‘Type’, which Quatremère de
Quincy wrote for the third volume of his Encyclopédie, 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 characteristics and their ‘particular physiognomy’.
The link between form and purpose, general principles and ‘the
imprint of the 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 derived from the
formal and functional context of the work itself, a set of
pre-existent or fi xed 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 fi xed in the
practice of the academic architect in the fi rst quarter of the
19th century. The establishment of architecture as a distinct
discipline and profession, however, took place largely in the
context of a view of its practice as socially embedded.
2525
This introduced a historicity into architecture that also reconfi
gured the notion of type. Confl ated with the idea of an artifi ce
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 justifi cation as well as an active role in the process
of design. It was in these terms that it became extraordinarily
evocative in late 19th and early 20th century. Not a fi xed ideal
to imitate or aspire to, but instead a historically contingent
idea, subjected to functional and programmatic changes and
eventually, as we shall see, to the overriding law of
economy.
Having established a fundamental connection between architecture
and society within an abstract and fl exible view of history made
the notion of type more instrumental to ‘a comprehension of a kind
of evolution in architecture’ and, ultimately, to a cultural
genealogy of society.4 Suspended between an evolving architectural
specifi city and a general schema, the notion of type brought
together the appeal to specifi city, 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 fi gure of the architect into a
social redeemer.
Objet-Type and Standard Product: The New City In these terms, the
Modernist 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. In
fact, external changes and needs were internalised and as Manfredo
Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co put it, the notion of typical, now
identifi ed with the standard, succeeded in ‘expressing the
presuppositions for the construction of the New City’.5
Walter Gropius’ rhetoric in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus,
published in 1937, is telling: ‘the reiteration of “typical” (ie
typifi ed) buildings while “increasingly approximating to the
successive stages of a manufacturing process”, “notably enhances
civic dignity and coherence”.’6 Here the ‘typical building’,
identical with the ‘typifi ed’ 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 Gropius as a ‘norm’, ‘a word derived 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 fi eld.
The connection between industrial production and a normative
framework for the growing urban population had already been
established in the early days of Modernism: Typisierung and the
objet-type are but examples of it. What 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.
In fact, they provided, through the very features of their design,
a diagrammatic manifestation of this fi eld. Their graphic
formulations exemplifi ed 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 production of
the singular artefact – be it a built 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 bearing on architectural
arguments that sought to formalise the connection between the
singular and processes of production of the collective. It was
precisely this articulation of the individual and the collective
that insinuated type in the social and political aspirations of
Modernism.
JNL Durand, Façade Combinations, 1809 The combination or
disposition (the French term disposer means ‘to arrange, to put
things in a certain order’) of typifi ed elements gives prominence
to a method of work that would become part of a radical redefi
nition of the ambitions of the discipline.
262
In these terms, the ethical value of the Modernist type consisted
in the combination of the ideal of architectural perfection with
the laws of economy and the reality of mass production. This sense
of architectural perfection was succinctly 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 strictly standardised element’, was an
analytical scheme in which programmatic functions and architectural
elements on the one hand, and economic and technical variants on
the other, could be unifi ed 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 production, a
culture of dwelling and the ideals of the future – the ideals of
the new relationship between the individual, the social and the
city. This is refl ected in the plans of individual dwelling units
which were specifi c 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
functions or activities are imposed on the individual. By
incorporating the individual, thus controlled, within a system, the
growth of that system is both ensured (by multiplication of the
typifi ed 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
question raised in the rethinking 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 fi gure of the ‘existing
city’.
But to defi ne the ‘existing city’, how its identity is to be
understood and engaged with, proved a rather complex task. Nothing
illustrates more clearly this diffi culty than the historic
research done in Italy by Saverio Muratori and Ernesto Rogers in
the 1950s, and later, Aldo Rossi and Giulio Carlo Argan. Despite
the often confl icting attitudes 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’ (preesistenze ambientali). In these
studies, undoubtedly displaying aspects of the
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’.
272
contemporaneous critique of the Functionalist city, any
construction was thought as ‘a completed cultural history’.11 The
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 time,
and therefore typical; that is, constituent 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 time. This
method brought together ideas on history and principles of
morphology already formulated in the 1930s by thinkers such as
Henri 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 Focillon, 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 stratifi ed evolution a life that follows its own trajectory
and can be generalised 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 specifi c 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 clarity. 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 ‘specifi c essence’ (essenza specifi
ca).
Moreover, if the ‘ideal of an individual architecture’ 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
History here shifts into the realm of memory, and the singular form
was not only to signify its own distinct individuality; it 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 specifi c
time and place, but also embodied the memory of previous forms and
functions.
If the 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 its multiple actualities. It is precisely this dialectics which,
for Rossi, was to ultimately constitute the structure of the city,
a ‘collective possession that’, in its turn, ‘must be presupposed
before any signifi cance can be attributed’ to the individual
work.16
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 Architecture 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 with the ideal of perfection in architecture, with the idea
of it as an autonomous technical product. From Le Corbusier,
Towards a New Architecture, 1923.
28
As he wrote in the early 1960s, ‘the city is in itself a repository
of history’.17 This could be understood from two different points
of view. In the fi rst, the city 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,
the ‘collective imagination’. This leads to one of Rossi’s
prominent ideas that the city is the locus of the ‘relationship of
the collective to its place’.18 And it is type, this time as an
element of design, which enables the formal articulations of this
relationship.
In this notion of type, we see an attempt to reinvest the work of
architecture with a dimension of meaning, something that is not
dissimilar 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 architectural work itself ’, there are certain
criteria that provide an overall different framework for thinking
about the architectural work and its engagement with the
city.
The fi rst of these criteria is, broadly speaking, historical.
Every time brings specifi c conditions to the manner in which 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 situations 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 writes, 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 signifi cation 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.
For Rossi, the relationship between locus and citizenry is to
inform the city’s predominant image. Many of the emerging forms of
urbanity, however, are partially or completely novel systems of
relations and, often, novel institutional orders. New processes of
economic and cultural activity problematise the traditional bond
between territory and people, and citizenship is often constituted
in a radically different way.
29
This is, for instance, what the categories of the ‘typical object’
and the ‘standard product’ attempted to entirely reconfi gure. They
were part of a rhetoric whose aim was to produce a new and
distinctive way of talking about architecture by turning
‘particulars into abstract generalities’ such as the individual,
the ‘dwelling unit’, the ‘collective’ and so on.20 In new urban
formations, however, or existing cities which are inscribed with a
multiplicity of economies and identities – 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 signifi cation that
presupposes a specifi c 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
inform the city’s predominant image. Many of the emerging forms of
urbanity, however, are partially or completely novel systems of
relations and, often, novel institutional orders. New processes of
economic and cultural activity problematise the traditional bond
between territory and people, and citizenship is often constituted
in a radically different way.
In this context, how can the work of architecture engage with the
city in terms of its structuring? How can the multiple regimes of
the architectural project address the new modes of production of
the urban environment and a very different account of the political
role of architecture in this environment? Is it possible that the
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 confi guration?
It seems to me that the question of type and typology could become
extremely effective if the architectural project is rethought in
terms of a method that may defi ne the general coordinates within
which architectural works and urban strategies can be
distinguished, yet their delimitations are precisely negotiated.
Moreover, the question cannot be framed simply in relation to
formal or methodological issues, but within a scheme that redefi
nes the aesthetic coordinates of the community through implementing
the connections between spatial and formal practices, forms of
life, conceptions of thought and fi gures 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
Hannes Meyer, Co-op Vitrine with Co-op Standard Products, Basel,
1925 opposite: The exhibition piece consisted 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 economy in the
production of forms of living considered ‘typical’ of the ‘modern
age’.
30
31
Notes 1. Rafael Moneo, ‘On Typology’, in Oppositions 13, 1978, p
23. 2. Quatremère de Quincy, Encyclopédie Méthodique, Architecture,
Vol 3, Paris, 1825. 3. Jacques–François Blondel, Cours
d’architecture, Vol 2, Paris, 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 transformations of these laws under the
threat of external change or internal demands, could open the way
to a comprehension of a kind of evolution in architecture.’ Anthony
Vidler, ‘The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the Academic
Ideal, 1750–1830’, in Oppositions, 8, 1977, p.108. 5. Manfredo
Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Abrams (New
York), 1986, p 326. 6. Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the
Bauhaus, Faber and Faber (London), 1937, p 27. 7. ‘A standard may
be defi ned as that simplifi ed 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 an impersonal standard is called a
“norm”, a word derived from a carpenter’s square.’ Walter Gropius,
ibid. p 26. 8. Walter Gropius, ‘Die Soziologischen Grundlagen der
Minimalwohnung’, in CIAM, Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum,
Englert und Schlosser (Frankfurt), 1930, pp 13–23. The same text is
in English in Walter Gropius, ‘The Sociological Premises for the
Minimum Dwelling of Urban Industrial Populations’, in The Scope of
Total Architecture, Harper (New York), 1955, pp 104–118.
Aldo Rossi, Composition with Modena Cemetery, 1979 opposite bottom:
The art of codifi cation 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.
Ludwig Hilberseimer, Vorschlag zur Citybebauung, 1930 opposite top:
From the serial product to the typifi ed structural element to the
mass-produced living unit to the plan, identifi able architectural
strategies formalise procedures and a general system that, while
disposing the individual within an ever-growing multitude, produces
new fi gures of the community.
BBPR Architects, Velasca Tower, Milan, 1954 below: Through the use
of specifi c formal elements, the building, also presented by
Ernesto Rogers at the last CIAM meeting in the Netherlands village
of Otterlo (1959) where it caused fi erce arguments, becomes a
historically constituted signifi er establishing a discourse on the
city.
9. Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, trans Eric Dluhosch, MIT
Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 2002 [Nejmensí byt, Václav Petr
(Prague), 1932], p 12. 10. Ibid, p 252. 11. Saverio Muratori, Studi
per un’operante storia urbana di Venezia, Pligrafi co dello Stato
(Rome), 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 associated with the Gruppo degli Urbanisti Romani
(GUR) and began his research on the city of Venice when he was
asked to teach at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura in
1950. 12. Henri Focillon, La Vie des Formes, Ernst Leroux (Paris),
1934. The fi rst translation into English was by Charles Beecher
Hogan and George Kubler, The Life of Forms in Art, Yale University
Press (New Haven, CT), 1942. 13. Henri Focillon, L’An Mil, Armand
Colin (Paris), 1952. 14. The Life of Forms in Art, op cit, p 6. In
fact, in L’avenir de l’esthétique, published in 1929, Etienne
Souriau is the fi rst one to defi ne aesthetics in terms of a
‘science of forms’ (science des formes): a science that studies
forms in their own 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 Image: The Architect’s Inalienable Vision’, in Gyorgy Kepes
(ed), Sign, Image and Symbol, Studio Vista (London), 1966, p 242.
16. Alan Colquhoun, Modernity and the Classical Tradition:
Architectural Essays 1980–1987, MIT
Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989, p 249. 17. Aldo Rossi, The
Architecture of the City, The Institute for Architecture and Urban
Studies (New York) and MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1982, p 127. The
fi rst 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 marked tendency to turn particulars
into abstract generalities, for example, walls become “the wall,”
streets “the street,” a path becomes “the route,” a house “the
dwelling,” and so on.’ Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A
Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, Thames & Hudson (London),
2000. 21. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The
Distribution of the Sensible, trans Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum
(New York), 2004 [fi rst published in France under the title Le
Partage du Sensible: Esthétique et Politique, La Fabrique- Editions
(Paris), 2000, p 13.
Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 26 © Illustration
from Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Faber
and Faber (London), 1937; p 27 © FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London
2010; p 28 © gta Archives/ETH Zurich; p 29 © MIT Press 2002.
Reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press from Karel Teige, The Minimum
Dwelling, trans. Eric Dluhosch, 2002; 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 Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital
File 070383.100914-01 © The Art Institute of Chicago; p 30(b) ©
Eredi Aldo Rossi; p 31 © Enzo & Paolo Ragazzini/CORBIS
32
FOUR ARCHETYPES OF URBAN TRANSFORMATION
Pier Vittorio Aureli 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 19th-
century 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.
Pier Vittorio Aureli
The city 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 relationship
between form and politics, the intention 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 defi ned it, as a
universal contentless form, nor as innate pattern of behaviour.1
Instead, following Giorgio Agamben, the idea of archetype as
example will be proposed: neither a specifi c nor a general form,
but a singular formal event that serves to defi ne the possibility
of a milieu of forms.2 Following such defi nition an archetype
could be Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1785) whose form was
interpreted by Michel Foucault not only as the model for that type
of surveillance, but as an example through which it is possible to
defi ne a particular paradigm of spatial governance.3 The category
of archetype is advanced here as an alternative 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 defi nition for a possible
group of forms. In architecture, an archetype is thus
a paradigmatic form through which it is possible to illuminate a
particular critical passage in the development of the city.
In the following notes, the political form of the modern city will
be defi ned 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 Viennese superblock. The sequence of these four
archetypes attempts to synthetically describe the emergence of
modern urban forms that embodied specifi c power relationships
within the city, especially those related to the rise of economic
accumulation and management as a response to particular confl icts
in the city. The aim of this essay is to attempt a short and
concise outline of a political history of the modern city, and the
way its ethos, made of urban management on the one hand and confl
ict on the other, was embodied and represented by the use of
certain architectural 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 within a political ‘state of
exceptions’, in which the exemplarity of specifi c 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 city emerges
as a locus of a permanent political confl ict of which
architectural form is one of the most extreme and radical
manifestations.
33333
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
specifi c conditions of the city: its complex topography and
geography, and its idiosyncratic political 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 located in the city centre, but at the city margins.4 This
geography contributed to make the city centre an unresolved
multipolar fi eld 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 time in which to implement 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 confl ict 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 confl ict 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 the
restoration of ancient ones, those popes who wanted to leave their
mark on the city’s urban form engaged with the design of new city
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 exile of popes in Avignon (1378–1417), Pope Martino
V (pope from 1417 to 1431) instituted the Magistri Viarium, 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 political
control of this space from the opposing clans that contended it. It
must be considered that in Rome at the time there were no proper
streets and public space was more the interstice between the
different clusters of buildings. Instituting the Magistri Viarium
created the possibility of an organic totalising space of control
that would surpass the local scale of the building. What is
interesting here is that this was organised not in terms of
military control, but through the institution of a civic body whose
power was administrative and managerial rather than coercive, and
thus more adaptable to being diffused within rather than simply
imposed on the city.
The opening and management of new streets was also directed towards
the possibility of making the city a Biblia Pauperum, an urban text
whose message could be accessible to the pilgrims coming to the
Eternal City. Yet the central issue of the street project was that,
like in ancient Rome, representation and urban management were
fused in the same architectural artefact. In Rome urban circulation
acquired this ambivalent meaning of both ceremonial display and
urban control.
The awareness of circulation as a means of power soon resulted in a
precise and archetypical form: the axial street, of which Donato
Bramante’s design for Via Giulia (1508) can be considered the 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 della Lungara, its twin street on the other
‘suburban’ side of the river), was, above all, a strategic link
connecting two important elements of medieval Rome: the
15th-century Ponte Sisto, the only bridge built after the fall of
the Roman Empire, and the commercial core of the city inhabited by
the emerging class of bankers. The spatiality of Via Giulia is the
direct product of the culture of perspective and its application in
the representation of reality. The evolution 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 principles 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 geometry of the street was intended to
organise in one spatial gesture not only a proper circulation space
but also a strongly defi ned interdependence between public and
private space, by making the public space – the perfectly shaped
void of the via recta – both the access to and control of the
private properties along the street.
Via Giulia, Rome, 1508– The geometrical regularity of the street
offers the possibility of controlling private property by means of
public space. Public space appears as regular, universal, effi
cient and magnifi cent, and in this way conceals its vested (and
partial) interests.
01
34
Economic Empowerment in the 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) in Paris. If Via Giulia was meant to be the urban pendant
of a gigantic monumental form – the Palazzo dei Tribunali where
Pope Julius II intended to concentrate all the juridical and
administrative functions of the city – the Place Royale was
conceived as a monumental space enclosed by a cohesive and quasi-
anonymous residential architecture. This architecture consisted of
a row of apartments with a portico on the ground fl oor. The
portico was the circulation space for the silk workshop that,
according to the original project for the square, was to be located
on the ground fl oor.7 The square itself is thus an empty space
carved within the fabric of the city. Its extreme regularity, 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 specifi c
symbolic identity.
This desire for a ‘generic’ architecture can be linked to Henri
IV’s impetus to overcome the extreme religious confl icts that were
characteristic of France towards the end of the 16th century. 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’état 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. 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 fl oors and the commercial activities in the workshops on the
ground fl oor. Instead of a monumental architecture, the pragmatic
monarchy of Henry IV assumed the economic management of the city in
the form of production workshops and houses for rent. The economic
raison 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 circulation, the relationship 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 fl exible framework for the city’s development and
its consequent (often unpredictable) economic transformations.
While the architecture of Via Giulia resulted in the contrast
between the overall layout of the street and the individuality of
the buildings along it, in the Place Royale the individuality of
the architecture is totally absorbed in the uniformity of the
space. In this sense, the ‘empty space’ of the Place Royale, its
uniformity, its regularity, represents precisely the ubiquity and
the infi nity 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.
The Place Royale, Paris, 1605–12 Engraving after Claude Chastillon,
1677. The Place Royale was built by Henry IV starting in 1605 and
was completed in 1612. According to the original project, the
ground fl oor of the buildings around the square was intended to
host a silk workshop. The square fused economic necessity and
ceremonial representation within one simple space.
02
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’état 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.
35
Bourgeois Berlin and the Independent Building Block An alternative
to this type of urban form that characterised the development of
the European city between the 17th and 18th centuries is Karl
Friedrich Schinkel’s ‘incremental’ masterplanning of Berlin 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 (New Guard House, 1816), the Altes Museum
(1823–30) and the Bauakademie (1832–6). All were intended by the
Prussian architect not only as objects per se, but also as
strategic stepping stones for a punctual urban reform of the city.
Indeed, the pavilion-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 buildings themselves.
Historians such as Fritz Neumeyer have interpreted 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 political rigidity of Baroque absolutism. In this
sense it is important to consider that Berlin’s urban form was
strongly defi ned by the application of the Polizeiwissenschaft,
the apparatus of political and social control developed through a
sophisticated regime of urban policing.9 The tenets of such a
regime consisted in the ubiquitous internal control of the city
through pervasive economic and social legislation in which power
was completely identifi ed in the principle of economic and social
utility. Within such a liberal framework where control is exercised
by the production of situated freedoms rather than by imposition of
a strict social order, the city is no longer a rigid setting for
the representation of power, but a fl exible and incremental
accumulation 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 initiative. 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 fl exibility 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.
03
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.
3636633666666
Closure and Obstruction: The Viennese Superblock The tradition of
urban form illustrated so far can be summarised as the progressive
prevalence of space over form. The 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 fi nds its
spatial analogue in a city where fl exibility and openness towards
urban development is the raison d’être of the city archetypes. It
is not by chance that the legacy of such a tradition will fi nd 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 the evolution of rational criteria for city planning
where rationality is the reduction of urban form to the principles
of utility and social control. A decisive counterarchetype to this
tradition (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 Hof: the monumental courtyard of the
historic city. Rather than the rational forms of the Siedlungen
(prewar housing estates) in Berlin, or the tradition of the Garden
City, the Viennese municipality revisited the monumentality of the
Hof in order to counter the principle of utility and control
implied in the typologies of mass dwelling. Moreover, they decided
to locate the superblocks within the historic city in close
proximity to its strategic points, such as the metro stations,
bridges and important traffi c routes, rather than to expand the
periphery. Within this framework, the closed forms of the
superblocks countered the managerial workings of the city by
opposing its fl ows and networks with the obstructive closure of
its introverted space.
04 Karl Ehn, Karl-Marx-Hof, Vienna, 1927–30 View of the courtyard
showing the communal services such as the kindergarten and gardens.
Closure and self- suffi ciency are monumentalised against the
openness and infi nity 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
inha