Typology and urbanism: Introduction

Every human settlement, from wilderness to metropolis, contains structures standing out in their singularity in that place. Others in the same locale recede from individual prominence. The latter do so either by being diffident in their architectural expression or by being essentially like others in the vicinity. Sorting experience into such patterns of visual prominence — landmark or background structures, expressive or muted architecture — is something people do instinctively in order to be able to know where they are and move around in a place. Another human instinct is to find or make places suitable to the various activities of life. Because many activities, both everyday ones and those of high ritual, are repetitive, there is a tendency for the places found or made for them to be similar. Both out of use-specificity and out of repeated encounters, another set of patterns emerge which render a given place, at a given time, more easily usable and legible. Familiarity breeds meaning. an ordered range of familiar types The needs for navigability and usable legibility, addressed by the proclivity to discern constants and impose repetitive patterns, produces an ordered range of familiar kinds of structures characteristic of a place and period. Each kind of building is called a type, and possesses a more or less reliably predictable set of sociofunctional and organizational norms. The overall assembly of such building kinds is called a typology, literally a reasoning-out of types. The habit of typological thinking may well be active as well as passive, involving not only recognition of existing types, but their creation and transformation. That said, while individuals may certainly propose new or altered types, true acquisition of that status requires collective custom and repetitive encounters. Within every type, and within every typology, there is always tension induced by time and change. At one extreme, can a given type be so geometrically universal and flexibly functional that it can be of use, and legible, to all peoples at all times? Or, on the other hand, is what seems to be a type in practice actually so closely tailored to one way of doing things, at one moment in one place, that it quickly becomes unusable and inscrutable?  Such questions are inherent in the very idea of type. Indeed, the history of typological theory is really a surrogate for the history of philosophical discussion of the nature of reality, time, and change, from Aristotle versus Plato forward. But is not necessary to engage theory or philosophy to use types and typology as powerful tools for understanding and making architecture and, even more importantly, good, resilient urbanism. The concept of type in its most important essential means this; traditional human settlements and their components embody a hammered-out cultural consensus. Not only are they the products of collective experience and judgment, they also serve to preserve and transmit them. In a double sense, types hold a place in collective memory. They enable communal experience to be passed along more efficiently — even while being subject to continued transformation. It is critical for urbanists to understand the typology existing in a given place, but to use it not only knowledgeably and sympathetically but critically. Types should and do transform over time under hard use, and meanings change, but as a result of consensus reformulation, not momentary swerving. There are three primary determining characteristics of a type. They are: function (always understood as including multiple sorts of uses), disposition (how a building is placed on its lot, and how the lot connects with other lots), and configuration (the three-dimensional organization of a building, its habitual secondary components and materials). revival of typological practice Revived in the 1950s and 1960s in reaction against the illegibility and anti-urbanism of orthodox “functionalist” Modernism, American typological practice eventually focused excessively on the formal character of individual types. Modernism, as a generalization, erred in its narrow understanding of the functional, the first characteristic of a type; Postmodernism, as a generalization, erred in its overemphasis on the configuration of the individual structure, the third characteristic of a type. A new revival of typological practice must include all three primary determining characteristics, especially the doubly neglected second characteristic, disposition. Disposition determines both the location of type components on a lot and the “valence,” the kinds and intensity of connections, which set a given type’s ability to cohere with other types to make neighborhoods and cities. The first focus, therefore, for a renewed, resilient, typological practice should be on the disposition of types. These enable typology to produce urbanism. Subsequent Technical Page installments will discuss typology as a practice, and individual types in their peculiarities and usefulness. It will start with the five possible yards (edge, side, rear, court, specialized) into which type dispositions may be classified. Copyright © 2006 Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell. Libraries, universities, institutions, and businesses may not circulate, hire, print, use as a teaching aid, or reproduce this article and/or images without the prior written permission of the authors.