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Here, Peter Carl substitutes the term ‘type’ for the typical, and ‘typology’ for typicality. In so doing he frees up the notion of type for contemporary design, liberating it from the strictures of its performance history and precedents that have often veered towards standardisation.

Peter Carl

The word ‘typical’ applies to phenomena ranging from the least to the most important. To describe something as ‘typical’ can mean that it is boringly repetitive, or that it is characteristic, or that it is ultimately typical (either general, like a ‘law’ of physics, or universal, like an ethical principle or a divinity). The word acknowledges that different things may have common elements, aspects, properties, behaviours, meanings, and so on; and it therefore invokes the similitudes that range from logical identity to set theory to varieties of analogy to metaphor to concept and symbol. In this rich and vast thematic fi eld, lying between ambiguity and continuity in difference, the varieties of typicality related to architecture have attracted novelists, artists, fi lm-makers, designers and thinkers. Within architecture since the Enlightenment, however, the somewhat narrower concept of typology has dominated, perhaps because of the importance of theory in this period.

In ancient Near Eastern texts, the frequency with which the prefi x bit- (house) applies to houses, palaces, temples and such settings as the New Year’s festival house (bit-akitu) suggests the importance of ‘dwelling’ as a metaphor of ordering. Alexandria seems to have discovered the procedure of composing with symbolic ‘types’ (domes, arches, colonnades, halls, exedrae) that permeated Roman imperial architecture and passed thence to Byzantine, Umayyad and Romanesque architecture, and was recovered again in the Italian

TYPE, FIELD,

CULTURE, PRAXIS

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Renaissance.1 Alexandria also seems to have been the source for a theoretical attitude (for example, euhemerism, mechanics) and its attendant perspectivism, therefore the background to Vitruvius, where one fi nds the designation genera (for example, for his types of houses, VI.III.1). Alberti treats architecture as a theme among many others pertaining to his culture; but with Serlio, writing about architecture becomes properly theoretical, striving to be as clear a demonstration as the Euclidean assumptions with which he begins.

Contemporary theory on typology in architecture seems to recognise four historical phases: 1) the 18th century, culminating in Quatremère de Quincy’s tent, cave and hut,2 bearing hallmarks of species identifi cation in zoology (for example, his contemporary Cuvier) and codifi ed in the design-procedures of JNL Durand;3 2) early Modernist ‘Functionalism’, particularly with regard to housing, ranging from effi ciency (ergonomics/Taylorism, industrial production) to poetics (Le Corbusier);4 3) the 1960s and 1970s reaction to this inheritance, largely oriented about Aldo Rossi, but bearing hallmarks of the classifi cations of Durand; 4) the recent present, with the advent of digital design techniques, notably parametric control of formal types.

In all of these, the main topic of interest has been the type and its variation. This coincides historically with the development of the human ‘subject’ or ‘agent’ in economic, psychological or social theory. Although all four historical phases of typology accompanied theories of the city, the nature of the relationship between types and their aggregation never attracted the interest that did typological variation.5 This, too, corresponds to the diffi culty the economic, psychological and social sciences have had in thematising the context(s) in which individual agents or subjects play out their lives. If the term ‘culture’ only became current with the Enlightenment (making a concept out of what arguably was being lost), the emphasis upon individual rights, politically, and upon the agent or subject, in all other fi elds, left the identity of ‘context’ to a range of concepts such as family, neighbourhood, class, socioeconomic category or sheer statistical description of trends and tendencies. Accordingly, as the architectural type prevails against the white of the theoretical page or against a grid like that of Durand (both versions of ‘space’), the subject or agent prevails against an equally fl at, abstract background.6 With the recent attunement to information as the basis of continuity, it seems that type has been inscribed in the effort to bring reality to a single horizon of representation, in which, ideally, all relations are explicit, even calculable (as in, for example, a

parametric fi eld).7 That is, ‘space’ as a fi eld has given way to a type of fi eld comprising entities that obey mathematical or logical (algorithmic) operations.8

Type Versus TypicalityTypology is the very embodiment of conceptual thinking: it isolates similarities (categories) from the fl ux of reality in order to make purifi ed clusters of these similarities suitable for manipulation (insertion back into reality). The natural home of a type is the taxonomy. Accordingly, there arises a tension between the conceptual fi eld for types and the concrete topographies which we inhabit – a tension which is customarily seen to be resolved through variation of the types. From a descriptive point of view, the most important aspect of architectural types is their heuristic value; they embody considerable experience or knowledge regarding sizes, construction, use-patterns, and so on. However, design too often reifi es this knowledge, closing off the true depth of typicality. For example, the type ‘bedroom’ tends to solicit a medium-sized room with a bed, side table, window, closet, and access to a WC; whereas the typical situations of sleep, dreams, sex, illness, death, open much more profound and rich possibilities of interpretation (evident, for example, in the sleeping terrace beneath the canopy of Le Corbusier’s Villa Shodhan, 1951).

Type, Stereotype and the Market – the Bedroom Planner from IKEAbelow: Ikea products and, in the corner, Bob from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a series which arranged people, things, settings, lifestyles in a semiotic system according to market categories, for broadcast as a soap opera for prime-time television.

Outdoor Bed in the Roofscape of Le Corbusier’s Villa Shodhan (1951)opposite: While acknowledging the custom of outdoor sleeping, the bed also draws on several themes in Le Corbusier’s iconography: the horizon and the archipelago, the ‘universe of our eyes’ (Iconostase A3), and the alchemical bed (Iconostase D3), and is part of a vertical sequence in which water is related to oculi.

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The more primordial aspects of a situation are more stable than the choice of words (a dining-table discussion can veer from affection to anger to silence to plate-throwing). In other words, if we are to transcend the sort of context in which types are simply reifi ed units/data which can be packed/arranged/disposed according to formal (explicit) criteria, we are obliged to acknowledge that any proper understanding of context exhibits the depth-structure of typicalities. It is precisely this depth-structure that is ‘fl attened’ to a single horizon of representation when architecture is reduced to form and space and then even further to information. It is now dogma within the AI community that there is no way that algorithmic code can create a dialogue from its own resources (that is, not prescripted);14 and of course dialogue is the heart of anything called social or political (public). This is a more technical (and negative) description of what Heidegger framed as ‘language is the house of Being’ – a formulation intended to grasp the orienting (ontologically) requirement of ‘dwelling’.15 Representations of cities by architects, planners or theorists rarely grasp typicality in these terms. The standard of what is possible remains the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses (in particular, the necessity of crime, disease, ignorance or partial understanding, wit, confl ict and so on, to the constant renewal in history of a civic ethos).

Complexity Versus RichnessThe progressive conversion of architecture to form/space to information, in which the concept of type has played a signifi cant role,16 may be seen as an effort to convert richness (the depth-structure) into complexity (formal manipulation of types).17 The fi rst operates implicitly, like metaphor, whereas the second operates explicitly like code or axiomatic geometry or logic. Acknowledging the history of abortive efforts since

More fundamentally, it is not obvious how to establish the criteria with regard to a type for dwelling – according to individual ergonomics, to bed and table, to the middle-class apartment or house, to ‘functions’ or decorum, to the market, to a building or urban block or city or region, to the primordial conditions of nature, to culture. Dwelling, properly understood, is more profound than the effi cient or attractive accommodation of a lifestyle – it comprises orientation in reality.

Once the question is put this way, it is immediately obvious that types are isolated fragments of a deeper and richer structure of typicalities.9 The principal difference between typology and typicality is that the former concentrates upon [architectural] objects, the latter upon human situations. We may be instructed here by the manner in which typicalities operate in language. By ‘language’ is not meant the structuralism of French linguistics – an effort to translate all of language into a grammar of messages (or ‘code’) – but rather language as a framework for understanding (both each other and, collectively, our possibilities in the world).10 Mutual understanding depends upon the element of recognition without which we would be compelled to invent language from scratch at each meeting. The element of recognition is carried by the typicalities, defi ned as those aspects common-to-all. What is common-to-all exerts a claim upon freedom; freedom depends upon what is common-to-all for its meaning (freedom would otherwise be alienation). Language does not occur by itself or in a void, but is the most important means by which human freedom is embedded in a deep structure of claims or dependencies (typicalities). As a framework for understanding, language disposes these typicalities in strata. Most immediate (and ephemeral) are common meanings (employing words, phrases, idioms, sequences of exchange, as in bartering or arguing a case in law), accents of sounds, as well as the specifi cally grammatical aspects of verbs, subjects, modifi ers. Even this is only the referential surface of the much deeper structure of dependencies.11 Beneath this lie the gestures which customarily or habitually accompany linguistic exchange (bodily orientation; for example, dialogue is customarily face-to-face). Beneath that lie the situations in which certain kinds of discourse typically happen; for example, across the dining-room table/across the boardroom table (often stereotyped in literature, fi lm or theatre). These situations are the receptacles of referential structures (claims) both synchronic and diachronic. All of this is susceptible to poetic transformation (creativity) within the limits of recognition.12 Against the run of philosophy (and by defi nition, theory) since the Enlightenment, recognition implies the universality of the one world of which we are all part, the ultimate dimension of typicality.13

If ‘context’ indeed operates like language, the stratifi cation of typicalities invokes a communication ‘up and down’ the strata.

… without a concrete language, there is no formal language – no logic, no mathematics, no geometry, no ‘form’, and certainly no capacity to use these analogically (for example, to convert any of it into ‘architecture’).

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Leibniz to ‘translate’ human language into formal language, and therefore the lack of need to worry about this problem at a primary level, we may ask about the nature of the dialogue between concrete richness and formal complexity (that is, between a designer or user and form or code), which is the most common manifestation.

The fi rst and most fundamental aspect of this reciprocity is that it never happens the other way around; without a concrete language, there is no formal language – no logic, no mathematics, no geometry, no ‘form’, and certainly no capacity to use these analogically (for example, to convert any of it into ‘architecture’).18 Again, a concrete language is not intrinsic to speakers or writers; language as a framework for understanding needs the whole cultural ecology (and its history) in which humans dwell, from nature to cities (the conditions for freedom). Secondly, not only does concrete language enable analogical treatment of formal languages, formal languages positively require analogical conversion/translation in order to qualify as architecture. Everything needed for this purpose must be added to ‘form’ – materials (and their properties), use, scale, location – before ‘meaning’ can be broached. Similarly, the chief virtue of an architectural type – its encapsulation of experience – needs to be carried ‘in the head’ while manipulating the type.19 Finally, the phenomenon referred to above as ‘fl attening’ arises from any attempt to ‘translate’ the concrete order into a formal order – that is, to convert the ‘depth’ of rich intensity into the ‘fl atness’ of formal extensity.20 The promise of simulation (end-to-end control, analysis) is defeated by the practicalities of extensity. Russell Smith’s user’s guide to his Open [Source] Dynamic Engine (from 2001) allows one to appreciate the complexity of code required to establish a digital simulation of so-called physics; that is, a digital context in which ‘gravity’

appears to affect objects, such as a bouncing ball.21 This context is essentially a Galilean/Newtonian ‘laboratory’, a conceptual space wholly devoted to the physical phenomena of interest (ballistics, collision-detection, destruction). All other relations to ‘reality’ are contingent (one is free to endow a shape with the ballistic and collision properties of a golf ball, but, when imported into a game or animation, to render the shape as a bear, adding at every collision a sound clip of a wasp bouncing off a window). The example can be generalised: in such a regime, all shapes have the status of type; the type is embedded in a system; the capacity for any sort of system of this kind (layered, stochastic) to accommodate the full depth of reality (or dwelling) invokes such vast code as to defeat reasonable analysis or even computation. Perhaps possible in principle, it is the complexity which inhibits deploying a parametric layering exhaustive enough to generate a relatively straightforward topography such as that of the insulae at Pompeii (whose main constituent is the type or genera of the Roman house).

The last century of ‘housing’ – characteristically a patterned distribution of units/types with access – would seem to indicate that the converse is also the case; that type invokes system. Such topographies are a species of simulation, a regime dominated by transparency of connectivity and control, normally carried by the ordering type of the ‘geometric system’ (also the underlying continuity of ‘network’), in which (formal) variation of type is the principal vehicle of meaning. Neither dwelling nor cities are systems, or systems of systems (acknowledging the importance of those aspects which work best as systems – plumbing, energy distribution, traffi c).22 The more the context for type is a system, the less possible is dwelling. The worry is that this motive has come to dominate architectural design and the making of urban contexts.

The structure of typicality at the scale of a room: Reconstruction of a Shrine from Level VI of Catal Hoyuk, Turkey, c 6th Millennium BC

Nature is most typical, most common to all, and archaic cultures characteristically interpret the exchange with human culture in terms of dwelling (house/temple), as here. The shrines are distinguishable from the dwellings only by the presence of the horned stanchions, buchrania, etc, which develop carefully placed and oriented settings within that of the dwelling.

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Type Versus HistoryThe affi liation of type with concept has allowed it to fl ourish as part of grander type-like concepts such as epochs, historical periods, styles and Zeitgeist. Here, in the impossibility of making history an object of science (hoping to replace symbolic interpretation with immanent demonstration) or of planning, we discern the highest aspiration and dilemma of typological thinking.23 Whether striving to recover the civic qualities of medieval European towns or to invent new topographies capable of resisting the sheer accumulation characteristic of the giant cities of global capitalism, typology would seek to recover the meaning of civic life through the formal variation of types.24 Attempting to derive a context from types inevitably fi nds itself in the stark schematism of Ledoux’s utopia of Chaux. His programme of salvation is characteristic of the genre of arranging people in space so that the spatial order might magically stand for, or even promote, civic or ontological order (the so-called Ideal City, dating from Vitruvius: city reduced to perfected type). Exemplifying the correlation of type/fi eld with subject/space, Chaux proposes a reciprocity between the neo-Masonic theatre-factory of the central circle and types of people (woodcutter, river manager and so on) embodied in the ‘houses’ which populate the surrounding English Garden – or, more accurately, which populate Ledoux’s didactic text as a relentless taxonomy of plans, sections, elevations, perspectives.25 Obeying Ledoux’s quixotic effort to reconcile caractère with formal variation (architecture parlante), these houses are ‘little monuments’. This attachment to the monument shows the tendency for types to adhere to the conceptual clarity necessary for the gnostic-utopian purpose of trying to control history, of trying to make a project of meaning or culture.26

The motif of the little monument was central to Rossi’s early architecture, thereby making it diffi cult to reconcile with the segments of his Architettura della città27 which argued for

urban continuity. The use of dramatic shadows in Rossi’s drawings was not for the purpose of articulating profi les, but rather to juxtapose the explicitly abstract/atemporal types with a sign for temporality/history. He created images composed entirely of haunted monuments/concepts (la cittá analoga), equally at home in architectural treatises from Scamozzi to Durand as well as in the mimetic art of painting. That is, he superimposed the conceptual fi eld of types upon the pictorial fi eld inherited from late Romantic perspectivism. His drawings and sketches took advantage of the enigma of familiarity central to pittura metafi sica (notably de Chirico and Morandi).28 De Chirico had inverted the pompous self-assurance of fi n de siècle European cities29 fi rstly through simply repeating the technique by which these comprehensive programmes of didactic goodness were produced – a fi eld of moral types obeying the laws of perspective (culture as picture). Secondly, however, he distressed the perspective towards an indeterminate projective space, altered the customary relations of scale, emphasised the emptiness between framing elements and (limp) monuments, and made fi gural the shadows created by the low, transitional light (of history). By means such as these, and with Nietzsche in his ear, de Chirico exposed the motives behind the stultifying project of earnest goodness as the response to anxiety, nervous wit or melancholia. Rossi embraced both the procedure and its negation (perhaps inspired by Adorno’s negative dialectic), and thereby exposed the ghost in the prevailing machinery of goodness through drawings and buildings whose austerity ironically passed for modesty of intentions and recovery of meaning.30

In other words, there is a fundamental similarity between the conceptual fi eld and the perspectival disposition of didactic monuments,31 and a fundamental discontinuity between both and the concrete, situational topography of actual cities. It was in perspective representation that we discovered ‘things as such’, whereby all phenomena became ‘things’, types, concepts,

The structure of typicality at the scale of a town: Fondamenta Bonini, VeniceAlthough progressively becoming a nostalgic museum-city, Venice is among the examples of a topography developed according to sequences of interiors marked by public involvement. Everything including the Church of the Gesuati, the buildings, rooms, doors, windows, the paving and edging of the Fondamenta and the mooring poles make up a hierarchical medley of typical situations (all, as it were, ‘islands’ in the sea). It remains to be demonstrated how such a hierarchical topography of interiors can be developed vertically.

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credible only when ‘placed’ within a milieu with the consistency of geometry, but whose own status as a fragile hypothesis could be saved by a frame. On this basis, a type is far less determined by any intrinsic properties than by the mode of isolation that is the context for its use (a background for the ‘shading’ which makes things ‘real’). Architectural design has too often become the securing and constant reaffi rmation of this fi eld, assigning it to concrete settings in actual cities (to such an extent that a properly situational topography is now mostly restricted to the historical cores of vast urban regions). Throughout the Enlightenment, from the encyclopaedia and museum to fragment/fi eld to the grey of the CAD screen, this background – prior to any concept – has retained its essential characteristic as the theatre-laboratory for design, for analysis, for making a project of meaning (references, beauty, health, effi ciency, monetary value). The apparatus of codes and techniques in which types such as high-rise offi ces or housing are embalmed further inhibits a more nuanced, more creative interpretation responding to the depth-structure of typicalities.

Seeking to fulfi l the happy ending always promised by theory, the heuristic value of types succumbs to their use as instruments of salvation (from everything which does not participate in the perfection of the concept, or of form). Typology is a leading concept within an architectural procedure comprising the orchestration of concepts, striving to confl ate formal coherence and moral perfection.32 The procedure inevitably supports the impression that history is not the basis for continuity (therefore ethics), but rather for the familiar choice between death/decay and revolution/newness.

Topography of Praxis The alternative to a fi eld of types (or agents/subjects) is the structure of involvements with people and things that comprises urban praxis (situations). Out of urban praxis – actions and

refl ections – grows everything that constitutes ‘culture’ or ‘city’, and certainly anything related to ethics or morals (neither of which, along with politics, can be inscribed in a system). Accordingly we may be more critical regarding the standard generalisations of city – form/morphology, space, zones, abstract machine, network; and we may speak of the city as a topography of praxis. In this we follow Alva Noë in acknowledging that ‘consciousness’ is far less a property of brain, or ‘mind’ (of agents/subjects), than it is of the urban praxis/culture in which we are always already involved.33 Typicalities are never abstract forms, processes or relationships, but are rather embedded within constituencies – even the isosceles triangle has a specifi c history, people and culture attached to it.34 So much more is the case with habits, customs, language and so on. We have seen that such structures are deeply resistant to modelling or simulation – it is even doubtful that one could properly model the processes and situations involving only food.35

It is a mark of human fi nitude that we have only representation to mediate between historical situations and universal conditions. If a city is our most concrete receptacle of these universal conditions, and if we are not to fi nd ourselves in the confl ict between conceptual fi elds and the urban topography of praxis, it would seem best to treat the knowledge or experience embodied in a well-formulated type somewhat like the Rhetorical topos – a commonplace that operates like a question, soliciting debate and commitment to a theme or topic.36 In this manner, the type remains open to the deep context on which it depends for meaning (that is, it migrates towards the structure of typicalities), and therefore resists incorporation in a system. The centre of gravity of what is typical is praxis, the depth of whose contexts manifest themselves as architectural and topographic horizons. 1

Typicalities are never abstract forms, processes or relationships, but are rather embedded within constituencies – even the isosceles triangle has a specifi c history, people and culture attached to it.

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Notes1. According to J McKenzie, The Art and Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt 300 BC – AD 700, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2007, chapters 9, 12–14.2. Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne: considérée dans son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture grecque, Paris, 1803, p 239.3. JNL Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique, Paris, 1802–5.4. Le Corbusier embodied both approaches. On Taylorism, see M McLeod, ‘”Architecture or Revolution”, Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change’, Art Journal, Summer 1983, pp 132–46. On the poetics of his apartment, see P Carl, ‘The Godless Temple – Organon of the Infi nite’, Journal of Architecture, Vol 10, 2005, pp 2–28.5. Anthony Vidler’s brief introduction to Oppositions 6 (1976), ‘The Third Typology’ was more suggestive of the possibilities than were the actual design proposals of the period. If the aggregation of apartment types in the Unite d’Habitation allowed speculations on a vertical city that was in fact a building, the urban blocks as worked out for the Internationales Bau Ausstellung (IBA) proposals in Berlin were little more than horizontal buildings of this kind, with hollow centres. 6. Exemplary in this respect is P Bourdieu’s diagram of the ‘social positions’ of Paris of the 1970s (Pierre

Bourdieu, La Distinction. Critique sociale de jugement, Paris, 1979, fi g 5). It comprises a Cartesian plot with the ratio of cultural and economic capital on the x-axis, capital volume on the y-axis, and types of Parisians distributed across the resulting fi eld (‘space’). 7. In physics, the shift from treating matter and energy to information and energy (Wheeler’s ‘it from bit’) was prompted by Claude Shannon’s famous paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, 1948, which, though ‘in no way necessary for [his] present theory’ (p 11), showed that information exhibited entropy, according to a formula like that of Boltzmann. 8. S Kwinter’s article of 1986 anticipated the introduction into architecture of this form of fi eld – calculable, rather than spatial (‘La Cittá Nuova: Modernity and Continuity’, ZONE 1/2: The Contemporary City, Zone Books (New York), 1986).9. This distinction was fi rst drawn by D Vesley 30 years ago. See now his Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004, chapters 2 and 8, and particularly the role of what he terms ‘paradigmatic situation’.10. Nor, therefore, is meant the ‘language of architecture’ as any sort of formal system. S Lavin argues that the 18th-century reformulation of hieroglyphs is the principal vehicle by which Quatremère registers ‘type’ as a constituent of his concept of architecture as a

Typology as System: Kowloon, Hong KongThe lower level of buildings, in the region of 10 to 12 storeys, was the average building height in Kowloon prior to the explosion in the housing market. No amount of formal variation could save the subsequent industrial multiplication of apartment types into towers often only one apartment deep.

[social] language: ‘Type and its meaning were impressed on the book of architecture in a language “of form and line”’. See S Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992, p 95. The third phase of architectural typology was strongly infl uenced by the debates surrounding structuralism and linguistics – at the time, one often heard of a ‘grammar of types’.11. This structure, the moments of commonality-within-difference (continuity), gives rise to geometry in its Platonic–Pythagorean form, whose connection with logos has been obscured since Descartes’ mathematisation of geometry. The arythmos of the logos is treated by H-G Gadamer in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1980. Still the best account of the structure of embodiment is that of M Merleau-Ponty, La Phenomenologie de la perception, Gallimard (Paris), 1949. 12. With respect to what is said below, the diffi culty/reward of understanding Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) differs from that of understanding highly technical language as richness differs from complexity; the highly referential language of the former contrasts with the highly specifi c terminology and formulations of the latter.13. It is important to distinguish universality from generality. This ambiguity dates from Aristotle’s double use of katholou in the Metaphysics (where it refers to

While losing the subtle differentiation of activities as seen at mid-century, the urban topography of Kowloon seems robust enough to absorb the new densities. However, this sort of topography did not guide the expansion of Hong Kong, which favoured the usual parameters for systematic distribution in ‘space’ of 40-storey walls of apartment types.

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the ultimate conditions of Being, universal) and in the Organon (where it refers, for example, to all triangles, the general).14. Issues ignored here include what might be the identity of entities discoursing in these terms, what they might ‘discuss’. The Turing Test, by placing the whole burden upon the human half (basically, by reducing the human to a Cartesian sceptic), obscures the depth of reality needed for anything like language as used by humans (and, I would suggest, by animals; is there explicit or implicit continuity between language and an ecology understood genetically?). What has happened in practice is more likely to be the case – the adaptability on the part of humans to the binary milieu of computing as it is currently confi gured (nothing in between it works/it doesn’t) is eased/blurred by the referential/analogical richness of what is displayed on screens.15. M Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in A Hofstadter, trans, Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row (New York), 1971.16. For example, the ‘primitives’ that come with every CAD package are types of this kind, as are the routines/algorithms by which they are made to interact (for example, Booleans, sweeps).17.According to the neurophysiologist Colin Blakemore (interview on Radio 4, 1992): ‘Complexity is like the molecular structure of the Himalayas, richness is like the human brain or language.’ 18. See E Husserl, ‘The Origins of Geometry’, Appendix VI of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1970, pp 353–78. The contrary is claimed by the theory of ‘emergence’, which, however, seems to be more interested in the systematic mathematics which lead to emergence than with the quite different properties of what has emerged (when one arrives at the level of ant colonies, for example).19. The leading examples often used to justify a typological ‘approach’, medieval Italian towns were not the product of theory; rather theory seeks to account for what is apparently ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’, ‘organic’. The experience which types carry, the basis of their heuristic value, is transmitted differently under such conditions. They are not forms set within ‘knowledge’ as such, but are part of a more elaborate civic praxis involving guilds and their social, political and symbolic cycles, how the modes of fabrication and decorum promote certain sizes, materials, iconography, how all of this reconciles civic confl ict with the Christian year, the cycles of season, the possibilities of salvation at the end of time, and so forth. This civic praxis is one

version of interpretation according to the depth-structure of typicalities, which is later fl attened to the theoretical concept of type.20. To its adherents, of course, this is a positive desideratum. See, for example, GL Legendre’s paean to ‘surface’ as against ‘depth’ in the opening remarks of his ijp: the book of surfaces, Architectural Association Publications (London), 2003. Manuel De Landa’s advocacy of reality as a version of Foucault’s ‘abstract machine’ (A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, Zone Books (New York), 1997) follows M Castell’s ‘network society’ (M Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Wiley/Blackwell (Oxford), 1996), though note the useful correctives to digital ‘transcendence’ at the beginning of S Graham, ‘Strategies for Networked Cities’, in L Albrechts and S Mandelbaum, The Network Society: A New Context for Planning?, Routledge (Oxford), 2005, pp 95 ff.21. www.ode.org/ode-latest-userguide.html.22. Still harbouring the early Modernist aspiration to be the means of empowerment of ‘the people’, housing has never escaped its preoccupation with provision for great numbers – a phenomenon of mass culture. However, if wealth enables emancipation from the regime of ‘housing’, it is curious that the results are usually restricted to variations of the type of middle-class dwelling (more space, more rooms, better materials, unusual forms). 23. This has its origins in the Romantic struggle with the notion of the philosophical system, in which the supposed counterform of nature and the arts – poesie – was swiftly absorbed into the conceptual framework of aesthetics and the fi ne arts: see, for example, FWJ Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans DW Stott, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1989.24. The preoccupation with type has never successfully been able to redeem its formalism through the occasional appeal to biblical hermeneutics, to the Platonic idea, to the Idealist idea, to Jungian archetypes. Anthony Vidler’s ‘The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the Academic Ideal, 1750–1830’, for example, distinguishes the instrumental hut of Laugier from the symbolic Temple of Solomon (see Oppositions 8, 1977, pp 95–115).25. Of course, the English Garden may also be read as a didactic text of this kind. CN Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation, Paris, 1804.26. On this, see E Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Chicago University Press (Chicago, IL), 1968.27. A Rossi, Architettura della città, Marsilio (Padua), 1966. 28. The obviously silly mumblings about ‘fascism’

with respect to Rossi’s projects were interesting only for having this element of familiarity in common. With respect to commemorative monuments and familiarity, see DL Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France, Chicago University Press (Chicago, IL), 1999. This is a sensitive point, since it touches on the moment when recognition in language or understanding is balanced between creative interpretation and the movement from persuasion to propaganda to coercion. 29. Wonderfully characterised in his Hebdomeros, Peter Owen Ltd (New York), 1992.30. D Leatherbarrow, drawing on Rossi’s Scientifi c Autobiography (1981), argues for the role of memory in Rossi’s concept of type. I am grateful to him for a copy of his unpublished chapter, ‘Buildings Remember’, in Building Time, forthcoming. 31. Even if the imagery and motives seem to lie at opposite sides of the architectural debate of the period, Rossi’s typological thought is not intrinsically different from the intentionally empty formal variation of types in Tschumi’s Park de la Villette (1987) scheme. Rossi emphasised the pictorial fi eld, Tschumi emphasised the conceptual fi eld. Both only acknowledged what is already present in Durand.32. Le Corbusier never gave up trying to reconcile morality, proportions and standardised manufacturing, from his early treatment of the ‘standard’ to the pun on droiture (‘rectitude’, combining the right angle with legal rights), towards the end of his career.33. A Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, Hill & Wang (New York), 2009, a work which augments with the latest research the more philosophically profound M Merleau-Ponty, La phenomenologie de la perception, op cit.34. For which reason, I usually refer to the order of typicalities as ‘institutional order’. There are at least three levels of institution in this sense: the formal institution (for example, parliaments, post offi ces), the informal institution (modes of association in pubs, factories), and the most fundamental stratum of language (customs and so on).35. See C Steel, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, Chatto & Windus (London), 2008, and LR Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Human Nature, Chicago University Press (Chicago, IL), 1999.36. Le Corbusier’s Objets à réaction poétique are examples of this form of interpretation.

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