In his seminal essay “On Typology,” Rafael Moneo argued that to talk about type in architecture is to talk about “the nature of architectural work itself.”⁠ Indeed, when conceiving architecture it is almost impossible not to start from an existing type, no matter how strange or peculiar a building might seem. Once reduced to a type, even architectures that look very different from each other reveal some fundamental similarity. A case in point is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank O. Gehry. When this building was completed in 1997, it looked like something radically new, an unprecedented architecture whose form had never been seen before. Yet, when observing the plan of such an apparently unique building, it is possible to recognize the type of the museum as it emerged in the nineteenth century: a rotunda/foyer that gives access to a series of galleries organized as enfilades of rooms. Seen as type, Gehry’s Guggenheim is not so different from Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin. These museums could not be more different in terms of epoch, style, material, etc. And yet, when we look at them as instances of an architectural type, we realize how two seemingly different buildings share a common denominator. Type is thus a way to understand not only the essence of architecture, but what a building may share with other buildings.

What is a type? Perhaps it is still useful to revisit the first definition of this concept given by Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy in his influential Dictionaire d’architecture, published in 1825.⁠ For Quatremère, a type is not a model or an image to be mechanically copied, but the deep structure of things—how their form is shaped by custom, use, and need. Quatremère emphasized how everything is precise in the model, and vague in the type.⁠ For this reason, reading and designing architecture typologically can be frustrating because what is at stake seems ineffable, and often the only possibility to visualize a type is a schematic drawing which presents architecture as devoid of its material concreteness, its materiality. Moreover, type may be understood as a ghost, a chimera, because no specific building is a type, but the latter can only emerge by comparing different buildings. Type is a concept which describes classes, not specific entities. As such, a type is neither a spatial diagram nor an average of a serial list. Type is the act of thinking through architecture in groups of buildings. Although type is a recent concept that emerged only in the nineteenth century, the process of thinking and building architecture typologically goes back to time immemorial. From the prehistoric era, built structures such as houses and temples belonging to specific times and places were created according to established types which are easily recognizable at first sight. Although the term type refers to the essential structure of an architecture, this essence is never timeless but always historically specific because types always depend on customs and needs.

TYPE: FROM RITUAL TO PROPERTY

It is possible to argue that the typological essence of architecture originates from an understanding of space thgrough ritual. A ritual is a set of actions that follow a prescribed temporal and spatial order and are repeated in time. Ritualization of space has been the most important way in which humans have given a specific temporal and spatial structure to their life. This is visible in the architecture of sacred spaces whose form is built around ritual action. However, in many ancient cultures, even the most quotidian gestures, such as entering a house, welcoming guests, or eating, were ritualized activities that assigned specific meanings to spaces. It is even possible to argue that, much like that of temples, the architecture of ancient habitations was built in response to ritual activity.⁠ The most obvious example of this is the megaron, a type of house built in the Near East and Archaic Greece that consists of a one-room habitation. What characterizes the architecture of the megaron is centrality of the hearth, a centrality emphasized also by its alignment with the entrance. The axis formed by the door and the hearth magnified the act of entering and gathering at the center as the most important ritual of the house. In this way, the house became not just a shelter, but rather a symbolic compass that gave inhabited space a strong sense of orientation. Another example of how ritual informed domestic types is the ’Ubaid tripartite house. In this type, a central hall is flanked by smaller rooms on both sides. The hall was the “ceremonial” space of the house in which meals were consumed and guests were welcomed, while the smaller rooms were for storage, food processing, and sleeping. This ritual organization of the house defined not only the physical structure but also the gender roles within the household, as the main central space represented the authority of the (male) head of the house.⁠ Here we see how type allows the understanding of how several things come together into one apparatus: ritualization, physical structure, and even the relationships of those that build and inhabit architecture.

Besides ritual, there is also another aspect that informs type: land use—more specifically, property. Although private property as legal title became widespread only in modern times, the urge to consolidate the possession of space through physical boundaries, such as walls or fences, is present in many ancient communities, especially those that inhabited dense settlements. In these settlements, enclosing walls became a device for homeowners to turn the house into an inward-looking mechanism organised around a courtyard; this allowed them to claim it as exclusive possession against neighboring or competing households.

Another type whose formation was conditioned by property is the townhouse. This type emerged in the Europe of the Middle Ages, when cities were booming and rulers decided to parcel land into regular plots in order to accommodate residents in an orderly manner.⁠ In a way, the townhouse was the vertical extrusion of the land parcel and consisted of a multistory building framed by two parallel party walls. These walls were both the loadbearing structure and the property lines of the houses. The strict adherence of the townhouse to the cadastral logic of the city secularized the house, ejecting ritual as the driving force of domestic space. With the townhouse, the house became a sequence of floors that could accommodate any function. Its main goal was economic: the maximization of space within the limits of the given parcel and the allowed height. It is interesting to note that in the early stages of their history, neighbouring townhouses would be built as self-standing structures in order to not share party walls and keep their respective properties separated. All the examples described so far show how architectural types do not emerge from a natural evolution or from some universal and timeless principle: architectural types are always the outcome of politics. Ultimately, they are devices that spatialize the way people relate to each other.

THE BIRTH OF TYPOLOGICAL DESIGN

As we have seen, the concept of type is not limited to domestic space. Yet, the emergence of type as a design tool was perhaps prompted by the rise of modern forms of housing. At the start of the modern era, in the shadow of early industrialization and colonialism, increased attention to domestic space was triggered by the way institutions of power governed people by extending their control into the most quotidian conditions of life. The economic growth of cities, especially in Europe, urged authorities to regulate their development in order to facilitate trade and avoid conflicts. In this context, the consolidation of property rights and the commodification of domestic space made the home into a rentable or purchasable commodity—a process which prompted the standardization of houses into housing.

I argue that it is the birth of housing that solicited an approach to the design of architecture that it is possible to define as “typological design.” This design is concerned not so much with the visible form of a building but, rather, with its spatial organization. Before being applied to housing on a large scale, it was the object of much experimentation in residential architecture dedicated to wealthy patrons. Indeed, the problem of interior organization was strongly felt with the building of upperclass houses, such as palaces, whose careful design instigated the emergence of professional architects as we know them today. Looking at the history of modern domestic space, it is possible to detect a tendency in which tropes like room distribution and privacy first emerge within upper class households and then percolated into the houses of the lower classes. This is why the design of palazzos and villas became the very first testing ground of typological design. Among the earliest graphic evidence of typological design are Francesco di Giorgio’s studies of plans for palaces, which he referred to as “stribuzioni di stanze” (distribution of rooms). Drawn with simple lines, di Giorgio’s schematic plans represent architecture not so much as physical structure, but rather, as diagrams in which the main issue at stake is how rooms are distributed and named according to their role in the household. Such strong attention towards household organization was inspired by the rediscovery during the Renaissance of treatises on domestic life such as Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, in which the Greek philosopher described household management as a carefully choreographed dance⁠. With the emergence of the domestic interior as design problem, the architect was confronted with problems that were no longer related to what things look like, but rather, how they are organized. Di Giorgio’s diagrams therefore show how typological design occupies an ambiguous role within the discipline of architecture. By addressing the deep organization of buildings, typological design prioritizes organization over appearance.

Commitment to this approach required a certain “architectural silence” in terms of formal expression. In this sense, a crucial episode in the emergence of typological design is Sebastiano Serlio’s unpublished but hugely influential manuscript for Book Six of his Seven Books on Architecture: On Habitations For All Kinds of Men (circa 1550), in which Serlio proposed models for houses for a diversified range of classes of people from the poorest to the richest, from the poor peasant to the prince. Such an inclusive approach is striking not only because before Serlio no one had made designs for poor or even for average households, but also because such inclusivity implies the acceptance and the normalization of a society firmly divided into classes as it was emerging at the dawn of capitalism. His models, especially the houses for peasants, merchants, artisans, and what he calls “citizens” (lawyers, notaries) are not inventions or reinterpretations of ancient precedents, but rationalizations of existing trends in building homes. What Serlio does in his book is transform what for millennia had been the outcome of a self-initiated practice of building—house construction—into a project susceptible to being controlled by the state or by the market. A very important aspect of Serlio’s Book Six is that all the houses were drawn in rigorous orthogonal plans and elevations, a representational technique that reinforced the abstraction of buildings as types. A tendency towards abstraction is also at work in the design of the elevations which for the most part consist in anonymous façades whose only feature are simple openings and extremely simplified frames and molding. Gone is the virtuosity of the great Renaissance masters such as Donato Bramante or Baldassarre Peruzzi: Serlio’s architecture is formulaic and focused only in the rationalization of building form in order to advance the first comprehensive and systematic contribution to what we can call the “housing project.” Yet it is important to mention that Serlio’s attempt to systematize the architecture of domestic space was not an isolated attempt, but it was probably inspired by what is arguably the first episode in the history of social housing: the building of affordable housing in Venice starting from the fifteenth century. Because of its highly constrained land use and its strong tradition of welfare towards the lower classes, the Republic of Venice was among the earliest cities to directly invest in the construction of affordable housing in the form of multistory apartment blocks. These housing projects were “philanthropic” initiatives in support of poor or destitute dwellers and were financed by the state or delegated to private parties like religious congregations or patrician donors. However, affordable houses were also built more speculatively in order to offer a convenient accommodation for middle class tenants or homeowners.⁠ The architects of such housing complexes were local craftsmen known as proti who had experience in both the design and construction of architecture.

It is interesting to note that, at a certain point, even reputed architects like Jacopo Sansovino—the most prominent architect of sixteenth-century Venice—were involved in these “anonymous” housing projects. In his close-reading of Sansovino’s Case Moro, one of these speculative and anonymous housing projects, Manfredo Tafuri has highlighted how the Tuscan architect had to renounce to any recourse to erudite architectural precedent.⁠ Case Moro consists of a row of houses made of different types. At the center there are two-story houses for more modest dwellers while at the two sides there are higher buildings with apartments for more well-off residents. Sansovino resolved the whole complex by repeating the same module but diversifying the arrangement of rooms according to the status of each type of apartment. Sansovino conceived of the facades as the result of internal distribution, and Tafuri noted how the architect used the exposed fireplace chimneys as a sort of substitute for columns, in order to give a sense of rhythm and decorum to a rather anonymous building.⁠

Here we see how a gifted architect, accustomed to the erudition of classical architecture, had no problem with committing himself to an exercise in architecture anonymity. With its clever and simple design, the project for Case Moro was driven by the strict economy of construction and the most convenient distribution of housing units. In commenting on Sansovino’s involvement in such projects, Tafuri spoke of an architectural silence in which architecture is reduced to “pure types” almost devoid of any pretense to (architectural) uniqueness.⁠

However, it would be a mistake to file this approach within the popular folder of “vernacular architecture” or “architecture without architects,” because these projects were anything but spontaneous. Behind their aura of anonymity and of ordinariness, the project of affordable housing in Venice between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries was the product of a highly organized balance between public and private interests. What emerged in projects such as Sansovino’s Case Moro was a growing consideration of factors such as property relations and the specialization of rooms in terms of served and servant spaces. Repetition and standardization are thus not just a matter of economy of means but also the attempt to create frictionless cohabitation in increasingly dense and commodified metropolises.

TYPOLOGICAL DESIGN AND THE MODERN PROJECT

If typological design imposes on architects a sort of formal silence, those committed to it have often been missed by the radar of architectural historiography. In this respect, there are two outstanding cases: the American architect Henry Roberts and the German architect and planner Alexander Klein. Roberts, who practiced in Victorian England, was especially active in the project of housing for the working class. Roberts’s efforts coincided with the rise of class struggle in England as the political corollary to the industrial revolution. Long before the state would commit itself to the production of housing for workers, the most advanced capitalists understood that class struggle could be tamed by educating workers in the virtues of domesticity. Some of these capitalists turned themselves into reformers and initiated the formation of philanthropic societies whose goal was to support both the building of model homes for workers and the development of research about the best economic means to provide affordable houses and make some profit from them.⁠Roberts engaged with both building and research and was able to publish a comprehensive treatise on workers’ housing in 1851, in which both realized and unrealized projects were presented in a dry and comprehensible graphic style in which plan and elevation were the most important information.⁠ In his lodging for unmarried workers, Roberts developed very simple types based on the open dormitory or small rooms served by a corridor. However, relatively quickly Roberts became skeptical of lodgings. He realized that this type of housing needed a lot of maintenance, did not generate much profit, and discouraged workers from getting married and owning a house, which was understood by Roberts and his philanthropist patrons as the best way to tame and control the working class. At this point, Roberts focused on model homes for families.

His most notable built project is the “House for Families” on Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, London. This building was meant to accommodate fifty apartments for families, each comprising one or two bedrooms and a living room. Each apartment was equipped with a scullery and a water closet, an unprecedented luxury at that time. A salient typological aspect of the project was circulation. Although the apartments did not share any domestic facility, they were accessible via an open gallery, which Roberts and his clients understood as a necessary inconvenience since their goal was to eliminate any communal space in order to reinforce the independence of each nuclear family. This goal was fully achieved in another model home, the “House for Four Families,” the prototype of which Roberts was able to build at the 1851 Universal Exhibition, just in front of the Crystal Palace. In these model homes, circulation is reduced to a vertical core while bedrooms are specialized for parents and siblings. Unlike the Streatham Street experiment, here Roberts was able to adapt the architecture of the apartment to the ideal petit-bourgeois nuclear family (parents plus two children), and it is not by chance that this solution proved to be extremely influential in consolidating the layout of the typical apartment family which it is possible to trace in countless housing projects of the last century. Interpreted in these terms, Roberts’s designs are eminently the solution of a typological problem: how to structure the apartment around the subjectivity of the nuclear family and reduce to the minimum necessary any shared space in between.

It is not an exaggeration to claim that Roberts’s typological design was both political, as he was de facto enforcing an ideological representation of domestic life that was unfamiliar to many workers at that time, and biopolitical, because his model home was meant to be a concrete infrastructure designed for the reproduction (and control) of life in the most efficient way. In her feminist critique of the concept of type, Maria Shéhérazade Giudici has argued that Roberts’s Model House for Four Families represents the most precise architectural resolution of the heteronormative nuclear family and, as such, it would become a reference for many modern housing projects in which, behind the generous provision of affordable homes, Western liberal democracies were also eager to naturalize family values as the cornerstone of society.⁠ Giudici’s critique is an important reminder about how architectural types are often stealth tactics in which either the state or the market can render, through the apparent neutrality of domestic space, social relationships normal or even natural. It is for this reason that typological design can also be a strategy for opening up the discussion on how house layouts are produced and with what spatial or political goal.

This is the case for the Ukrainian/German architect Alexander Klein, whose work was largely dedicated to the improvement of affordable housing. In his approach to housing, Klein adopted a strategy that embodies at best typological design and that consisted of what he called “graphical method.” This method was based on a series of diagrams through which he sought a systematic evaluation of existing housing floorplans in order to propose improved alternatives. This method is best exemplified in a series of diagrams through which he analyzed the apartment floor plans of Heinz Lassen’s Ceciliengärten housing complex in Berlin (1926) and compared them to his own counterproject. The diagrams deconstruct the two floor plans into six layers, such as pathways, traffic areas, free areas, etc. which were interpreted by Klein as criteria for evaluation. One of the most interesting diagrams proposed by Klein was a portion of the horizontal section of the house made at eye level. Basically, this diagram shows a simplified plan that focuses exclusively on the rooms as mere volumes of space. For Klein, this diagram of space seems to have been the most important because it reduced the house to its spatial essence: a sequence of compounded empty spaces. For Klein, the improvement of housing consisted not in making housing more bespoke to specific functions, but in ameliorating proportions and connections between rooms. For example, Klein abhorred corridors which he saw as unnecessary wastes of space, and his floor plans show his efforts at regularization and symmetry. Christophe Lueder has demonstrated how the critique of Klein’s typological design as coercive, advanced by architect and historian Robin Evans in his seminal essay on domestic space “Figures, Doors and Passages,” is mistaken, because Klein’s intention was the simplification of the domestic interior in order to ease, not dictate, the movement of the occupants.⁠

Klein’s focus on the typological organization of the house made him less concerned with issues of style. Indeed, his projects, such as the Housing Estate at Bad Dürrenberg near Leipzig, completed in 1930, are difficult to pin as either traditionalist or modernist architecture. Like Sansovino’s Case Moro, Klein’s housing is formally silent; it does not embrace a recognizable style or language, to the point that from the exterior Klein’s housing projects seem architecturally negligible, banal. Yet, as in the case of Sansovino, Klein’s design effort was focused on the clear organization of the house interior and in supporting the resident’s “good life” vis-à-vis the economic constraints of affordable housing. Unlike Roberts, whose main goal was to optimize domestic space in order to enforce a specific mode of dwelling and secure margins of profit for those who invested in affordable housing, Klein’s projects are instead an attempt to ameliorate affordable housing by making space more generous and easy to use.

Lueder has noted how Klein’s approach was developed further by the German architect Myra Warhaftig who, in her projects, developed a critical approach to the way in which the sexual division of labor was naturalized in the typical housing floor plan. Applying Klein’s “graphic method” to her design for a social housing block in Dessauer Strasse in Berlin (1987), Warhaftig proposed an original floor plan in which living room and kitchen are united in order to form a generous space that dissolves corridors and promote conviviality rather than segregation.⁠ As in the case of Klein’s floorplan, the attempt in this project is to simplify the floorplan rather than to fragment it into hyperspecialized domains. To a certain extent, Klein’s optimization of the floorplans accepted the gender and class nature of workers’ housing; however, his method opened up typological design to reform, experimentation, and even critique, as in the case of Warhaftig’s version.

DESIGN CRITIQUE

Klein’s graphic method exemplifies one of the most important aspects of typological design, which is the strong contiguity between analysis and design. This approach seems to suggest that to propose something depends entirely on the critical assessment of what already exists. The dry and abstract diagrams of Klein’s analysis implied not antagonism but the will to understand the examples selected for analysis. Such a thoughtful and sober approach seems out place within the contemporary neoliberal ethos in which originality and bold concepts are prized over anything else. Against the urge to invent new forms or a new style for architecture, typological design is deliberately derivative, it makes clear, even explicit, its precedents and sources. In his seminal book on architectural typology The Variations of Identity (1987), Carlos Marti Aris argued that true architectural invention consists of “betraying” an existing type. Betrayal in this case implies that what exists is slightly modified in a strategic way, so that it becomes something completely different.

Type is the nexus of all the factors that contribute to the production of architecture: norms, budget, class, gender, space. Paradoxically, type is both what refers to the “essence of architecture,” but it is also the acknowledgment of how architecture is inexorably entangled in a complex web of political and economic forces. In his book Theories and History of architecture (1968), Manfredo Tafuri referred to the possibility of what he called “typological critique.”⁠ For Tafuri, architectural typology had the potential to become a fertile ground for historical critique as long as typological analysis acknowledged the historicity of types. Tafuri warned about the study of typology as mere technical datum of architecture, because in this way, the historian (and the architect) would remain blind towards the questioning of the ideological roots of architecture itself as discipline.⁠ As was argued before, there is nothing timeless or technical about architectural types: their structural formation is always contingent on power relationships. Architects alone cannot manipulate the forces that produce types. However, with their expertise in typological design they can support collective efforts towards the transformation and reform of domestic space. The architectural silence of the architects engaged in typological design is not an act of withdrawal but the attempt to reflect more deeply on the way architecture is produced. Facing the urgencies of today, such as climate change and steep social asimmetries, a radical reform of the built environment is needed more than ever. In terms of architecture, such reform needs architects to be skilled at listening, cooperating, and evaluating what exists, rather than shouting their own individual position or style. To paraphrase Karl Kraus’s famous aphorism, “Let’s invite who has something to say to step forward and be silent.”

First published in:

Jeffrey Huang, Dieter Dietz, Laura Trazic, Korinna Zinovia Weber eds., Transcalar Prospect in Climat Crisis. Architectural Research in Re/Action (Zurich: Lars Muller, 2024).  

AUTHOR

Pier Vittorio Aureli is co-founder of Dogma and teaches at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His latest book is Architecture and Abstraction (2023).