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Type versus typology Introduction

Sam Jacoby

To cite this article: Sam Jacoby (2015) Type versus typology Introduction, The Journal of
Architecture, 20:6, 931-937, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2015.1115600

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Type versus typology
Introduction
Sam Jacoby
During the eighteenth century, conventions of imita-
tion and truth-to-nature were replaced by concepts
of abstraction and objectivity. This profoundly
changed the knowledge and practice of many disci-
plines. With disciplinary knowledge commonly
thought to derive from the past and to be defined
by a problem of origins, the very search for origins
disclosed a richer problematic: that of development.
The enquiries into development had several impli-
cations. If knowledge was not a static or universal
truth but continuously developing, then considering
the present and future was at least as vital as con-
cerns with the past. This led to an understanding of
history as contingent and development as contex-
tual, which meant that explanations were only poss-
ible in relative and comparative terms. Consequently,
classification became important to establish compar-
able, shared criteria. By the early nineteenth century,
the introduction of ‘type’ as a conceptual and ‘typol-
ogy’ as a formal means of comparison in architecture
provided complementary ideas through which both
an existing knowledge of form and a modern form
of knowledge could be consolidated.
Type originally denoted a medium of non-imita-
tive reproduction, as in its use in Johann Gutenberg’s
modern printing press in the mid-fifteenth century.
Similarly, typology indicated a reasoning by
analogy, with the study of scriptures interpreting
the Old Testament as prefiguring the events of the
New Testament.1 Typology was a correlating of
# 2015 RIBA Enterprises
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of Architecture
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Architectural Association School of Architecture,
London, United Kingdom
(Author’s e-mail address: sam@aaschool.ac.uk)
symbolic meaning, and not just a study of types.
The religious meaning still defined the late eight-
eenth-century entry of ‘Type’ in Denis Diderot’s
and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopé-
die, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des
arts et des métiers (1751–72). When the Encyclopé-
die was subsequently modernised by separating
it into discipline-specific dictionaries, Antoine-
Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy was the first
formally to introduce the concept of ‘type’ to archi-
tecture in the third volume of his Encyclopédie méth-
odique: Architecture in 1825. His secular definition
distinguished between type as an epistemological,
metaphysical and aesthetic category, and a model
serving the methodical approach to design. This
asserted their interrelationship but also a hierarchy,
with type embodying an irreducible and generic
idea through which a principled reasoning was
bestowed on the rules of the typological model for
design.
Re-examining Quatremère, some one hundred
and forty years later in the context of architectural
design, Giulio Carlo Argan defined typology as
‘not just a classifying or statistical process but one
carried out for definite formal ends’, with the analy-
sis and reduction of the physical functions of build-
ings and their configurations taking place in a
‘typological series’.2 Following on from Argan,
Aldo Rossi posited that type is ‘the very idea of archi-
tecture, that which is closest to its essence’, whereas
typology is ‘the analytical moment of architecture’,
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Type versus typology
Introduction
Sam Jacoby
through which a formal constant in a ‘study of types
of elements that cannot be further reduced’ can be
recognised.3 In turn analysing Rossi, Rafael Moneo
also argued for a double function of description
and design: ‘Type is a diffuse concept that contains
a constructive solution—one that gives rise to a
space and is resolved in a given iconography—but
it also speaks of a capacity to grasp, protect, and
make sense of those contents that are implicit in
its use’.4
Since Quatremère, and possibly even prior to him,
the meaning of type has continuously transformed.
The diversity of interpretations is apparent in contra-
dictory uses ranging from normative, immutable
types derived from the past, to a positivist gener-
ation of new morphological forms or ‘evolutionary’
series of formal typologies. Although everyday prac-
tice remains reliant on the use of building types and
urban morphologies, type and typology are today
often discarded as conservative, static norms. Ironi-
cally, this is attributable to Neo-rationalism’s last
coherent typological discourse in the 1960s.
Despite great efforts to revitalise typology and
expand its application to the city and morphology,
Neo-rationalism could neither successfully challenge
the Modern Movement’s conflation of type and
typology, nor overcome the reduction of typology
to a descriptive classification of functions. Repeated
attempts to shift a descriptive use to an analytical
frame, in order to make typology operative to
design, mostly failed. This explains the everyday
misuse of typology in the sense of genre—an expla-
nation through common function rather than organ-
isational or structural form—and a lack of distinction
between type and typology, between conceptual
and formal reasoning. As Micha Bandini observed,
by the late 1970s typology had simply become a
conventional explanation of received form.5 When
in 1985 a last desperate attempt to restore hope in
the discourse of type was made by Vittorio Gregotti
in ‘The Grounds of Typology’, he declared:
We must accept that throughout the seventies it
has been an improper use of the notion of type
which has proved, in good or bad, most productive.
I believe that today a serious debate on the notion
of building type and on its value (not ideological
but also as a concrete project tool) can only lead
to a thorough rediscussion.6
Disregarding a questionable if symptomatic synon-
ymous use of type and building type, Gregotti was
too late to change the consensus by practitioners
and academics alike that typology had failed either
to deliver a viable synthesis of theory and practice,
or to develop an urban design method that could
supplant the Modern Movement’s planning doc-
trine. So architecture began to turn expectantly
towards the diagram, which promised at first a
formal invention liberated from the strictures of
typology, history, process and function. But, return-
ing to Gregotti’s hope vested in a productive re-
discussion of typology, I would claim that a contem-
porary discourse significantly differs from the Neo-
rationalist debates by entering the discussion
through precisely this question of the diagram.
All architectural practices that rely on diagrams in
the derivation of form, can be considered equally to
rely on a typological analytic. To overcome the exist-
ing historiographical separation between a typologi-
cal or diagrammatic discussion, one could use the
term ‘typological diagram’, meaning a diagram

that is specific to the discipline of architecture in its
production of form and knowledge, and is framed
in both typal and typological terms. This typological
diagram is an abstraction arising from a set of
related conceptual, descriptive and design problems,
and first emerged in the eighteenth-century dis-
course on architectural history by Julien-David Le
Roy, whose work had a significant influence on Qua-
tremère and his contemporary Jean-Nicolas-Louis
Durand. I develop these arguments further in
‘Typal and typological reasoning: a diagrammatic
practice of architecture’.
Representative of the position taken by key propo-
nents of the diagram, Jeffrey Kipnis believes that the
dynamic formalism of the diagram changes architec-
ture from a cultural discourse and institutional cri-
tique to an internal disciplinary consideration.7 I
would counter that any typological discourse
shows that these are inseparable, that form is also
always defined by material, historical, environmental
and socio-cultural contexts. Typological as well as
diagrammatic production instrumentalises both
internal and external relationships, which are no
longer meaningful if architecture is solely explained
in terms of architecture’s autonomy. In addition,
Kipnis’s claim that the causality of the diagram is
objective while its effects are subjective, thereby
offering a simultaneity of generic and specific
form, is a familiar explanation of the architectural
diagram as mediating between generic and specific
descriptions (especially those related to form).
However, this is a fundamental typological
problem. One important purpose of the typological
diagram then is to define organically or to limit poss-
ible manifestations of an idea without restricting it to
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a finite formal representation. The typological
diagram provides both a critical, conceptual frame-
work and a practical, formal design approach.
The Symposium ‘Type versus Typology’ was con-
vened to re-discuss the relevance of type and typol-
ogy to contemporary architectural practice and
research: it was organised by the Projective Cities
(MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design) pro-
gramme on 7th February, 2014, at the Architectural
Association School of Architecture in London. Pre-
sentations in their order were: ‘Typal and Typological
Reasoning’ by Sam Jacoby, ‘Type and Ambition’ by
Lawrence Barth, ‘The Diagrammatic Construction
of Type’ by Hyungmin Pai, ‘Building Types and
How They Change over Time’ by Philip Steadman,
‘The Typological Burden’ by Tarsha Finney, ‘The
Fourth Typology’ by Christopher Lee, and a
keynote lecture, ‘Type, Iconography, Archaeology,
and Practice’ by Rafael Moneo. For this special
issue of The Journal of Architecture, some of these
presentations have been expanded and reworked.
Hyungmin Pai’s argument for a ‘diagrammatic
construction of type’ is central to both the Sym-
posium and this publication. As first discussed in
the book The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architec-
ture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (2002),
he expands on his proposition that: ‘In modern archi-
tecture, the diagram has become form, and form has
become a diagram.’8 A typological tradition deriving
from a Beaux-Arts training and the functional
diagram arising from scientific management in the
United States converged in the ‘modern’ diagram
in the first half of the twentieth century in architec-
ture. Designing a plan for a building in the nine-
teenth-century Beaux-Arts tradition meant first
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Type versus typology
Introduction
Sam Jacoby
developing a parti and analytique, which facilitate a
transposition of the esquisse into the specifics of a
design—in the process adumbrating a typological
diagram of specific formal relations. The parti was
replaced by the modernist functionalist diagram
and its generalised relationships. ‘If we define the
diagram as a kind of drawing that possesses instru-
mental relevance within a system of relations, the
Beaux-Arts plan was the diagram par excellence’.9
It used a system of central axes to organise the
plan diagrammatically and to imagine a subject
moving through its spatial order. Although the func-
tional diagram, when applied to architecture, no
longer represented a moving body or material, its
function was, like that of the parti, still to indicate
spatial boundaries and order. Now, however, it
employed dispersed references and a considered
programme. Thus, for Pai, type is less an outcome
of ‘a tightly woven analogical system but a loose dia-
grammatic configuration’.10
A diagrammatic set of relationships is also dis-
cussed in Christopher Lee’s ‘Type and the develop-
mental city: housing Singapore’, which argues that
type, as a contextual phenomenon and disciplinary
tool, emerges in Singapore as still in a state of
becoming. The ‘dominant types’ of housing tower
and slab block, and the idea of a developmental
city are contingent spatial, social, economic and pol-
itical instruments deployed in parallel. Unlike Euro-
pean types, whose meanings derive from an
historical process, the dominant types of Singapore,
Lee posits, do not yet carry an historical burden and
still have an immediacy in reorganising spatial and
social relationships. This synthesis between effect
and political representation is exploited in a series
of public-housing prototypes, in which typological
and morphological transformations are evidence of
socio-political change: from the provision of emer-
gency housing through 12-storey slab blocks in the
early 1960s under the Prime Minister, Lee Kuan
Yew, a provision intended to drive national modern-
isation, followed by the development of auton-
omous new towns until the 1970s through a
mixture of standardised towers and slab blocks, pro-
jected to house a growing middle class, to the con-
struction of urban precincts in the 1980s.
Coinciding with a change in political leadership in
1990, Goh Chok Tong introduced finally a ‘leisurisa-
tion’ and commercialisation of Singapore, which
changed the role of housing from an urban norm
to that of a spectacle and landmark.
Unlike Lee, Tarsha Finney in ‘The object and strat-
egy of the ground: architectural transformation in
New York City housing projects’, examines how
the operativity of type emerges from an historical
‘typological burden’, which she defines as a persist-
ing disciplinary research investigation and a process
of formal proposition that precedes the establishing
of meaning. Yet both authors agree that typology
has a ‘diagnostic’ and ‘projective’ function (when
type is consciously selected), and that disciplinary
knowledge is directly effected by formal transform-
ations occurring across multiple scales, which
mobilise architecture and the city, as well as the insti-
tutions and agencies involved in their government
and planning. Specifically, Finney suggests that
architecture’s limited capacity to realise change can
be partially overcome by considering disciplinary
experimentation in broader terms as always directed
towards urban transformation and the shaping of

urban subjects. This positing of a discursive relation-
ship between type and diagram is proposed in a
twofold manner: first, through a critical reading of
Kenneth Frampton’s article ‘Twin Parks as Typology’
(1973), and, second, through the typological exper-
iments motivated by the problem of the ground as a
strategic instrument of urban development and
reform. These are discussed in relation to the specific
setting of New York City and the general context of
a disciplinary enquiry.
The importance of architecture’s spatial reason-
ing and transformation of the urban also dominates
the discussion of ‘Cultural buildings’ genealogy of
originality: the individual, the unique and the singu-
lar’ by Pavlos Philippou. As does Finney, he pro-
poses typology as a continuation of an existing
disciplinary enquiry, one that often occurs in a
serial development. This development is character-
ised by repetition, but moments of rupture—the
individual, unique or singular—appear, which can
be understood, through Alan Colquhoun, as
moments when a ‘displacement of concepts’
takes place. Applying this comparative analysis to
the stereotypical cultural building of Bilbao’s Gug-
genheim, an urban problematic common to cul-
tural buildings emerges, which is concerned with
an urban iconography and scenography, and uses
a sequential articulation of the ground as a princi-
pal element of design and staging. According to
Philippou, the failure to question these urban con-
ventions and its concurrent compensation by an
emphasis on material and formal virtuosity prevents
organisational experimentation and, as a conse-
quence, realisation of new urban possibilities.
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However, all urban possibilities derive from an
architectural differentiation and disciplinary trans-
formation, as conveyed by other cases of cultural
buildings such as the Neue Nationalgalerie by
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Museum of Art of
São Paulo by Lina Bo Bardi and the National
Theatre by Denys Lasdun.
To read the effects of architecture at the urban
scale, or the whole through its parts, is familiar
from Neo-rationalism. In the Essay ‘Typology in the
context of three projects: San Sebastian, Lacua, Ara-
njuez’, Rafael Moneo gives a personal account of
Rossi’s influence on urban theories in the 1960s,
Rossi being the figurehead of the Tendenza’s
exploration of typology in the context of the city.
He analyses Rossi’s endeavour, in L’Architettura
della Città (1966), to create a ‘positive science’
linking architecture to urban design and planning
practices, and how these first notions of typology
and urban science are consolidated in the XV Trien-
nale di Milano of 1973 that, according to Rossi, was
‘a patient work which started from historic analysis,
extending to the city, topography and typology [ … ]
as the basis for architecture’.11 To Moneo, it was
only then that ‘typology was understood as an effec-
tive concept for establishing a general theory of
architecture beyond simple historicism’. Critical of
the ‘radical’ images of the Tendenza, Moneo then
reviews how, in his projects for San Sebastian,
Lacua and Aranjuez, ideas of type are instead
adapted from well-known structures and developed
through the design process. All three projects
emphasise typological change as resulting from a
diagrammatic thinking through existing typological
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Type versus typology
Introduction
Sam Jacoby
principles, in particular relationships between urban
block and housing arrangement organised by the
movements of inhabitants.
In a postscript, Moneo also reflects on how an art-
historical discussion of evolving type-forms,
especially George Kubler’s book The Shape of
Time, influenced a typological thinking by architects
in the 1960s. This art-historical framing, I believe,
was not unique to the mid-twentieth century, but
a continuation of the type discourse as introduced
from art history to architecture by Quatremère, and
also evident in subsequent studies of persisting artis-
tic motives by Gottfried Semper.12
This Issue of The Journal of Architecture is sup-
plemented by two book reviews. Pavlos Philippou
writes on Building Types and Built Forms (2014) by
Philip Steadman, who presented some of the
book’s rich graphical and historical analysis at the
Symposium. In his use of scientific and archaeological
methods, Steadman’s research offers an interesting
continuation of, yet also a radical departure from, dis-
cussions of type as they were presented at the Sym-
posium, and now in this special issue. In some ways
his research is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century
work by Durand or Semper, which explains formal
changes in buildings over time. The second
book review is of Jacques Lucan’s Composition,
Non-Composition: Architecture and Theory in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries by Maria
S. Giudici. This book is motivated, despite obvious
differences, by a question also found in Pai’s book
on the diagram: How to understand nineteenth-
century conventions of designing (an architectural
plan) in the twentieth century? Lucan sees a linear
development framed by changing ideas of
composition, whereas Pai argues for a new spatial
representation and conceptualisation that arises
with the functional diagram.
The ambitions of any symposium and special issue
of a journal are productively to exchange ideas and
positions on a shared set of questions. This was
clearly the case in the three generous discussions
that took place during the Symposium. Some of
the questions discussed in these conversations
were: What are the different diagrammatic relations
framed by type in architecture? Can type be rep-
resented (what is the role of drawing)? How does
type or the diagram obtain disciplinary agency?
How does a diagrammatic idea of type challenge tra-
ditional limits set by notions of the collective, the
individual, autonomy or convention? How do social
and spatial diagrams relate and intersect? Although
I hope that this issue provides some clarifications,
perhaps more importantly, I also hope that it
encourages further discussions.
Notes and references
1. ‘Type’ means: ‘That by which something is symbolized
or figured; anything having a symbolical signification; a
symbol, emblem; spec. in Theol. a person, object, or
event of Old Testament history, prefiguring some
person or thing revealed in the new dispensation; cor-
relative to antitype. in (the) type, in symbolic represen-
tation.’: (Def. 1. a.) Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn
(Oxford, Oxford University Press,1989).
2. Carlo Giulio Argan, ‘Sul concetto di tipologia architet-
tonica’, in, Karl Oettinger, Mohammed Rassem, eds,
Festsschrift für Hans Sedlmayr (Munich, Beck, 1962),
pp. 96–101; English translation, ‘On the Typology of

Architecture’, by Joseph Rykwert in Architectural
Design, 33 (1963), pp. 564–565; 565.
3. Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della città (Padua, Marsilio,
1966); English translation, The Architecture of the
City, by Diane Ghirardo, Joan Ockman, with an
introduction by Peter Eisenman, Oppositions Books
(Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1982), p. 41.
4. Rafael Moneo, ‘Aldo Rossi’, in Theoretical Anxiety and
Design Strategies: In the Works of Eight Contemporary
Architects (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2005), p.
105.
5. Micha Bandini, ‘Typology as a Form of Convention’, AA
Files, 6 (1984), pp. 73–82.
6. Vittorio Gregotti, ‘The Grounds of Typology’, Casa-
bella, 509–510 (1985), pp. 4–7; 4.
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7. See Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘Re-originating Diagrams’, in Peter
Eisenman: Feints, Silvio Cassarà, ed. (Milan, Skira,
2006), pp. 193–201.
8. Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architec-
ture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge,
Mass., The MIT Press, 2002), p. 252.
9. Ibid., pp. 55–6.
10. Ibid., p. 253.
11. Aldo Rossi, ‘Introduzione’, in Architettura Razionale,
XV Triennale di Milano. Sezione Internazionale di
Architettura (Milan, Franco Angeli Editore, 1973),
p. 18; transl., Rafael Moneo.
12. Semper had a particular interest in the cultural and tech-
nological motivations leading to the production of an
artefact. I therefore use ‘motive’ instead of ‘motif’.