This paper explores the replication of Jerusalem’s sacred architecture in Medieval Europe. It studies the concept of analogy in order to define the spatial translation of Jerusalem into “analogous” shrines built for pilgrims unable to visit the city itself. These analogous shrines follow a typological structure that originated in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where a basilica (an axial structure built for hierarchical congregations) and a rotunda (a centrifugal space dedicated to private contemplation) were juxtaposed to facilitate the idiosyncratic rituals of the Jerusalem liturgy.

Following Carlos Marti Aris’ definition of type as a “principle of organisation by which a series of elements, governed by a specific relationship, acquire a certain structure,” this paper argues that the coupling of a basilica and rotunda forms an archetype that can be identified in Christian architecture of the Middle Ages. While these structures differ from each other in their materiality, style, and scale – reflecting the political and cultural motivations of their patrons – they are united by their adherence to a particular type that is situated “at the level of the form’s deep structure.” Using typological knowledge, this paper traces the evolution of sacred architecture by contrasting the historical variations that change over time with the essential similarities that remain the same through the ages and can, in fact, connect seemingly dissimilar buildings.

By studying Jerusalem’s analogies, this paper attempts to locate the essential, structural similarity between them, and thus anchor their fixed coordinates in the typological origin of Christian architecture and ritual.

Beyond monastic tradition, rules, statutes, and codesregulating conduct and behaviors gave origin to university colleges and the figure of the student. Starting from the Middle Ages, plans for education were introduced by reformers, moralists, and educators of different times to re-formulate pedagogical agendas.

Key moments in the history of western education are the rise of university colleges, like those in Paris and Oxford; their territorial spread in scholastic Europe from the 13th century; the investment of patrons in building the so-called sapienza; and the hegemony of the Jesuit’s educational project. For centuries the collegium was associated with the form of the courtyard within the city. However, in the 19th century, the invention of the ‘American campus’ – as a result of the liberal reforms of Thomas Jefferson – brought to the gradual disappearance of the college.

Focusing on these paradigmatic examples, this presentation will discuss the relationship between statutes, pedagogical rules, and architectural form, from the origins of the college to the rise of the idyllic campus. The latter, a new radical paradigm, was purposely built to escape the city and to re-question the traditions of ‘monastic’ rules. In these examples, rules, statutes, and the academic program of the college founders influenced the typological configuration of buildings. The composition of corridors, courtyards, halls and rooms varied depending on the different needs for privacy, communal life, and educational ideology.

Between the 17th and 18th centuries in a remote area along the basins of Uruguay and the Paraná rivers, a very peculiar form of settlement arose: the Jesuit reduction. In a region characterised by violent conflicts between the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns, the indigenous population, and the Bandeirantes militia, the Jesuits were called to provide order.

This project implied both the spiritual mission of evangelization and the material reduction to a territorial organisation. Establishing a network of thirty settlements with minimal variations and gathering at its height more than 140,000 Guarani and just about 60 Jesuit priests, the reduction was not just a village but the embodiment of a specific form of life. Arranged in a precise scheme, the generic and repetitive architectural elements of the reduction established a common ground where the conversion, with all its individual and political struggles, could be negotiated through religious and civic liturgies of coexistence. As such, the Jesuit reduction operated as an archetype, a paradigmatic form that makes present and explicit a set of rules and uses. Rather than as a type, an abstraction that implicitly imposes norms and behaviours.

Terms like playful, innocent, light, free, and sincere have often been used to characterise the work of the most famous Japanese architects of the 21st century. As evidenced in projects like EPFL's own Rolex Learning Centre, works from SANAA and contemporaries have become crucial to architectural practice and cultural institutions beyond Japan. In contrast to a playful lightness, the uncanny works of these architects also cast a dark shadow back into Japan’s history and its tethering to Western modernity since the mid-19th century. In 1970s Japan, several architects including Hiromi Fujii and Takefumi Aida, as well as the young Itō, later referred to as the New Wave, proposed and built a series of houses that were radically blank. In their composition (or lack thereof), houses like Fujii’s E-2 or Todoroki and Aida’s Annihilation House, not to mention Toyo Ito’s own early projects like U-House rejected Japanese and Western historical ritual and cultural associations and rejected modern architectural entanglements with the alliance between progress, technology, and production. The term non-typological architecture is proposed here to read and theorise practice and context through a set of examples that tend, in a way that is self-evident, towards blank containers of empty space.

If typology allows classification, it is – for architects – a tool that allows us to operate in the complexity of a project thanks to a repertoire classifying the resolutions by “family” from which we can draw. In a way, typology organizes our field of knowledge and constitutes the cultural base on which he can rely.

In the field of housing design, the typology constitutes a repertoire of principles that primarily govern the combinatorial game, specific to the collective dimension of housing projects. Typology also negotiates the close relationships between housing and the city, because typology establishes – through the criteria it designates as ”primary” – consequences on both sides.

Unfortunately, for some decades, capitalist mechanisms have set in stone the most profitable and optimized typologies and – making them more effective and economical – have limited the freedom of architects to navigate freely in this repertoire. The norms, rules and regulations based on these principles have definitively fossilized these types and produced new fixed standards that limit the exploratory character of typological research.

This leaves little room for architects to play and prevents us from making the qualities of the habitat evolve at the pace of society's changes, but above all from doing our own work as designers by confining us to questions of façade cosmetics, for example. Therefore, how can the architect break from the rules on which these standards are based?

Alongside the manifest ideological modernity and its visions of a new architecture, a new city, and a new human being, there are the real modern cities. Built, not discussed. Their architecture is modern vernacular: the buildings are based on types, i.e. optimised solutions for standard problems, which, depending on the city, take into account very different external conditions. Thus, Hong Kong differs from Athens, Buenos Aries from Rome by their typical building fabric, the grey, everyday mass architecture.

Type, as a theory and heuristic device, originated in the context of the Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe. It has been discussed ever since, from Quatremère de Quincy to Aldo Rossi, within this intellectual and historical framework. This presentation proposes the possibility of reframing the concept of type from an Eastern perspective and recasting the instrumentality and efficacy of dominant types as a common framework in an emerging multi-polar world.

From 1960 until 1967, Giuseppe Campos Venuti was chief of the urban planning department of the city of Bologna. During his leadership, he put in place a series of urban reforms – known as Urbanistica Riformista – that focused on countering land speculation which resulted from the quick expansion of the city. The core of the project was the 1973 plan for the historical centre of Bologna – drawn by Pier Luigi Cervellati – which understands the concept of typology as the means to put in place a revolution in the approach to urban development.

This essay investigates the Bolognese case study on the one hand as a post-Fordist approach to city planning that characterises the 1960s politics of the Bolognese administration led by the Italian Communist Party and, on the other hand, as a revolutionary application of Aldo Rossi’s theories on typology. The plan aimed at shaping “an old city for a new society” understanding the city centre as an urban artifact itself, whose form needs to be preserved as an instance of collective memory but whose functions have to adapt to the new society; in doing so, the typological approach represented at the same time the analytical tool and the starting point to avoid the superimposition of a new type that would have forced a shift in the way of inhabiting the city.

In the hundred years between the beginnings of the Encyclopédie and the reign of Napoleon III, France was not only the theatre of political and technological revolutions: it was also the stage for a radical reinvention of social relationships, down to the most intimate scale. Polarised between care and desire, familial responsibility and individual indulgence, domestic space was rearticulated through the art of distribution at a time when love escaped the domain of religion, only to be captured by the state apparatus as reproductive control. The evolution of the main spaces of an appartement – salon, bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchen – thus follows a linear trajectory that parallels the naturalisation of a nuclear family founded on conjugal love, which is to say unpaid reproductive labour. However, in France, between the 1700s and 1800s, a host of other, seemingly secondary spaces appear and disappear in an environment of constant typological experimentation. ‘Inessential’ elements such as boudoirs, studies, cabinets, nurseries, and habitable closets thus became the index of the frictions that emerged in the attempt to construct the modern family. Play, nurturing, self-care, pleasure, solitude, study: the modern apartment had to let go of many existential categories in order to offer a standardised idea of what is home, and what love has got to do with it. Reconsidering the options that typological Darwinism has discarded might well be a starting point to challenge the playbook of capitalist gendered domesticity.

In 1893 the notion of “space” entered the realm of architectural theory in the writings contained in a book titled “Das Wesen von architektonischen Schöpfung” (The Essence of Architectural Creation) published by art historian August Schmarsow. Only a few years later, in 1897, German physicist Georg von Arco used the material infrastructure of the bell tower of the Hailandskirche in Potsdam – designed by Schinkel’s disciple Friedrich Ludwig Persius – as an antenna to produce the first successful radio transmission of sounds through free space. Coincidentally or not, the moment when the immaterial idea of space began to dominate the architectural discourse, that very entity, space, began to be populated by electromagnetic waves giving ground for a new form of production to emerge: the so-called culture industry.

In my presentation, I will discuss the political and technological origins of that very industry by analysing the architectural dimension of its material infrastructure. The culture industry gave birth to, but it was also formed by, one of the most influential – yet overlooked – building typologies of the 20th century: the broadcasting house. By looking at the entangled relationship between form and electronic technical media not only did a new type of building emerge, but arguably a whole new idea of how to think typologically in the age of the remote transmission of information.

The Marshall Plan, officially operated from 1948 to 1952 for reconstruction and development in Europe and non-European countries such as Turkey and Switzerland, marks the Cold War economic-political and foreign policy of the US. Referred by its bureaucrats as “the democratic way of self-help and cooperation”, the Marshall Plan publicized notions such as mutual aid, self-help, cooperation, democracy, and freedom to build the Western Bloc against the so-called “Soviet threat”.

Devoting specific attention to labour affairs to prevent strikes and communist tendencies, the US engaged in workers’ housing production in Marshall Plan countries through financial and technical assistance programs. Introducing the notion of “free labor” towards “non-communism” and exporting the New Deal manner of housing through labour advisers and housing experts, the US assisted labour unions in founding housing cooperatives. Be detached, twin or row in form, a house with a garden offered an archetype for the “good life” of the “free labor”. Promoting a pre-industrial community and nuclear family life in an industrial setting for wage workers, the US instrumentalised workers’ housing as a subtle mechanism for postwar Americanization. This presentation attempts to portray the Marshall Plan’s workers’ housing program put into practice in France and Turkey in a strongly similar layout. It argues that the reincarnation of the garden suburb as a self-built, single-family housing against the state-led multi-family housing of the interwar Europe and postwar USSR led to a paradigmatic shift in housing development as well as design, construction, and domestic life.

Casting an authorship to workers in not only land provision but also construction, this housing model pioneered the current real-estate development, as it channelled inhabitants into informal systems of capital and property development through construction. The presentation discusses this postwar typology of house with a garden referring to housing for miners, textile workers, heavy industry workers and for construction workers built by the US-assisted labour union activity in France and Turkey.

Historically speaking, the notion of the type was reintroduced to the larger architectural discourse as a direct consequence of the crisis of the Modern. The task of revisiting the forms of the past also dictated the return of architectural methods that had long been considered obsolete by the propagators of the great rupture. But type was not alone in this mission. It coexisted with the introduction of another -less popular and equally difficult in definition- term; that of the pattern. Although pattern and type have different etymological roots, they also share a lot in common. Interestingly, they both appear in studies that exceed the disciplinary limits of architecture, often in a manner that makes it difficult to clearly separate their respective meanings. But in architecture, it is probably easier to grasp them, not by their definition, but by the function they have been summoned to fulfill. The current contribution will try to go through the aforementioned, in a rather investigative manner, highlighting the commonalities and the contradictions found between the two terms.

Finally, with the help of specific historical examples, the presentation will examine the possibility of a shift in their relationship within the context of "The Fifth Typology". Instead of continuing to regard them as two contradictory notions, it is perhaps nowadays better to ask how both could function complementary to each other.

In his seminal article “On Typology”, Rafael Moneo asserts that the emergence of a new type should be considered a tangible signifier of changed architectural and historical circumstances. In response to this statement, the paper argues that the Fugger foundation in Augsburg should be held up as a case in point of typological innovation. Built in 1523 by the Fugger family and often regarded as one of the first examples of social housing in Europe, the Fuggerei was established to accommodate the so-called “Hausarme”, or shamefaced, ‘house’ poor, in two-storey, dual-occupancy row houses within a walled compound. In the context of early capitalist development, the new religious ethos of the Reformation, and the rise of the High Middle Ages bourgeoisie, the Fuggerei’s architectural framework signals a departure from the previously established housing types for the poor to provide a new solution to a new, contingent problem: its deserving, ‘house’ poor inhabitants. Both the modern approach to architectural standardisation and repetition, and the structural promotion of familial privacy will be discussed in this study as progressive devices for the education of its dwellers to the new work-life values of the European Renaissance. By comparing the Fuggerei to other architectural precedents in Europe, while tracing this case study’s typological genealogy, this paper attempts to demonstrate the foundation’s novel architectural approach and its unique attitude towards its tenants.

It is a generally accepted idea that typology is an essential element in the disciplinary dimension of architecture. The concept of typology, in its most common definition, is sufficiently malleable to cover a wide range of uses, but it is also this vagueness that favours misunderstandings in the use of the terms that make up the typological lexicon. On the one hand, typology is used to organise knowledge and create processes of classification of a variety of artifacts, promoting a sense of unity across histories and geographies; on the other hand, typology can also be used to define, implicitly or explicitly, the processes of reasoning involved in the conception and design of those same artifacts. In relation to this second dimension – an operative typological reasoning – this paper will examine the work of the French duo Lacaton & Vassal and propose a reading through the prism of type. Through a careful engagement with the discourse that characterises their work, and through an analysis of three early projects, the presentation will argue that it is possible to identify an action of typological transfer that has profoundly influenced the way the practice conceives architecture. This action is not new and precedents can be found since the 19th century. Finally, in order to contribute to the debate on the typological lexicon and to explore the holistic dimension of Lacaton & Vassal's typological transfer, type can overcome the limits of spatial structure, functional labelling or typal image. If typology is an essential element, it is necessary to re-examine the notion of type in order to understand its usefulness in the face of contemporary challenges and, ultimately, to take a position on Rafael Moneo's question: "Does it make sense to speak about type today?"

Understanding the historical and overlapping complexities related to the queer subject, the single bed, and the emergence of the rooming house, helps frame larger theoretical questions about the neglected, yet contradicting by nature, category of queer domesticity. During the twentieth century, when wage labor and the expansion of capitalism overturned the self-sufficient household production system, a way was paved for individuals who sought to pursue a life of their own. With the wider industrialisation and modernisation processes, the rise of labour and housing demands, the 1900s rooming house manifested as a key component in this transitioning narrative. Traditionally, this structure of single room dwellings, purposely built by the turn of the century for the working class, was an establishment comprised solely of bedrooms, deprived of any amenities and services. As claimed by the BBC documentary Loneliness, broadcasted in 1957, the number of men living alone in single room dwellings had doubled since the 1930s. Surprisingly, it was in this same broadcast that homosexuality was mentioned for the first time by a national radio station. Besides being stigmatized and slandered in tabloids for their ‘grim’ rooms and their lives of ‘squalor’, homosexuals were presented as deviant, accused of taking advantage of this radical invention, to be “disguised, of course, as single men”. Opposed and criticized by religious, conservative, middle-class reformers for challenging the nuclear family and traditional domestic settings, the rooming house, neither a hotel nor a house, but a category of the residential hotel, is often introduced by contemporary scholars as a fundamental type without any connection to its historical origin. What role did the bed play in the formation of the queer subject, within the context of single room dwellings? What contribution can this make to the discussion for a Fifth Typology, by focusing on a seemingly ahistorical, and figuratively abstract form of habitation, the rooming house?

Times of crisis lead employers to pay workers with food supply. Social reformers, echoing the concept of ‘inner colonization’, organized the residual forces of new industrial workers to ensure their security, by means of institutions, such as collective insurances, savings banks and consumer associations. By stimulating their voluntary engagement and self-control, the gathered profit could punctually be returned as a refund or invested in education and materialize a slow emancipation.

In 1919, the Union of Swiss Cooperatives commissioned Hannes Meyer with a settlement near Basel, where their headquarters was based. A response to the dramatic lack of housing, it also represented a symbolic act of its increased membership and power, following the First World War. Freidorf was conceived by Hannes Meyer as an ideal city, embodying all the contradictions that were at the core of the cooperative principles, driven by a structural observation of its elements as parts of a whole.

The research examines the entanglement of urban rationalities and industrial biopolitics in constructing company towns' identities and spatialities, providing different housing typologies for its workers. An epitome of spatial production under industrial power in the 20th century, these cities were usually founded by a single enterprise through pioneering social and economical methods in previously uncolonized terrains. The enterprise operated as employers and landlords, security enforcers, promoters of social harmony, and providers of housing, services, and goods for workers’ consumption to enhance the living conditions and health of production sites and their surroundings. This phenomenon was also prevalent in Northern Italy, where social, historical, and economic conditions favored the emergence of various company town models, as in the cases of Metanopoli, Ivrea or Crespi D’Adda. Although less documented, the city of Dalmine (located in the province of Bergamo, Italy) represents another relevant archetype of the Italian company town. The presentation will showcase three different housing typologies built between 1906 – 1961 in the company town of Dalmine and discuss the extent to which industry politics shaped the city's living conditions. Through the intersection of historical, business archival, and urban research, my work dialogues with the unearthing traces that reflect the industry's power in Dalminese territory. These traces are the political projects managed by the industry and the series of infrastructures affirming the company town as a typological question. As a growing machine working in favor of regulating the use of urban space in the name of profit, this rationale transformed the peasant man into a new modern subject with new behaviors, rhythms, and moral ideals, reproducing discipline inside and outside the factory. For instance, the agenda of company towns corroborated this process, by developing that mentality, using labor power as the vital energy to construct an empire.

In the collective imagination, the villa is a manifesto of ‘the good life’ (Abalos, 2016) and probably the most archaic building still surviving today. Since the first appearance of the term, the villa has evolved into a more comprehensive notion referring to a bourgeois, luxurious and detached house outside of the city, often immersed in nature.

However, a closer typological examination of this building, reveals a contradiction. The various forms in which the villa exemplified itself throughout history show in fact a non-homogeneity motivated mainly by the fact that architects and designers have always used villas as their laboratories for stylistic experimentation, which would prompt us to define this building as a non-type.

On the other hand, however, the word ‘villa’ is strongly related to a precise ideology of the ‘escape from the city’, which could make this building fit into the very notion of type, or at least make it a model for a very specific idea of domesticity. The Fifth Typology presentation will therefore be instrumental in looking into the notion of type and model in relation to the villa intended as a holiday residence, in the context of post-war Italy. This presentation wishes to explore the difficult theoretical task of defining what a villa really is, by means of a comparative analysis of three holiday residences built in Italy in the post-war period: Villa Balmain by Leonardo Ricci, Villa La Saracena by Luigi Moretti and Villa Arosio by Vico Magistretti. The contribution wishes to ultimately answer the question of whether the irreducibility and tenacity of the villa ideology are sufficient elements to classify this building as a type.

The presentation aims at assessing the typo-morphological reading as an approach to critically observe the contemporary transformation in European cities. The object of observation, being territories where the spaces of production have strongly marked their history, have shaped the construction of the city and still represent today a present feature of the territory. This presentation focuses on the case-study of the Est Ensemble, a policy unit formed in 2010 through the annex of nine municipalities of the Grand Paris. Known as the “Fabrique du Grand Paris” this territory is currently undergoing deep spatial transformations guided by the principles of the ecological and socio-economic Transition.

As a matter of fact, the forces which are shaping the contemporary European city are today progressively linked to the Transition. Principles of ecology and social inclusion among others are contributing to define the outline of official policy directives, such as the European Green Deal. Nevertheless, within the wide and still partially undefined Transition many and contrasting political directions, policies and spatial outcomes take place. In this context, a critical observation of current transformations becomes crucial as there are different paradigms through which the Transition can be addressed, ranging from the so-called technical fix to the principles of political ecology.

The proposed methodology conceives the type as a portion of the urban fabric, an aggregation. A series of samples will be analyzed according to their morphology and patterns of spaces of production within the Est Ensemble. Synthesising the process of construction of the aggregation, signs of permanence and persistence will be conceived as a tool to read the values of a culture of living – or in this case, a culture of producing. Building on this analysis, how could the typo-morphological reading be a tool to shed light on the less evident forces which are guiding spatial transformation? To uncover the link between policymaking and its spatial intention? And finally, to unravel the spatial dimension of the predominant Transition paradigm?

Type and Elementary Structure: The Anthropological TurnJolanda Devalle

As Vidler suggests, the Third Typology’s radical proposition was to identify the nature of architectural elements as neither scientific nor technical but essentially architectural. For Martí Arís, this ‘essence’ of architecture is rooted in form-making, the act of giving intellectual order to matter. Architecture, he proposes, is born when an activity becomes a ritual. Staunchly structuralist in their approach, the purveyors of the Third Typology did not elaborate further on this processual dimension, focusing instead on the search for underlying ‘elementary structures’ as posited by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

In parallel, the link between built form and ritual became a topic of study in the discipline of anthropology. Starting from the mid-1970s, the structuralist paradigm came unstuck and a new interest in everyday practices and material culture led to a body of ethnographic research on ‘the house’. Among these studies, the house is understood as an ordering principle, however, scholars highlight how the orders produced are many and unfixed, constantly defined, and redefined through social processes over time.

In examining this body of research, this contribution will argue that houses cannot be reduced to a static ‘text’ or a neatly delineated object of investigation. In this light, the Fifth Typology could be a framework that moves beyond the limiting abstraction implicit in type to integrate the processual and dynamic dimensions of architecture.

Symposium Abstracts