Output details

Type, Field, Culture, Praxis

This article is a sole-authored commissioned chapter, approx. 5000 words for Architectural Design Issue 'Typological Urbanism'.

The methodology is phenomenological hermeneutics - a philosophical argument against the several instrumental uses of type and typology in architecture, using examples from the Ancient Near East to contemporary parametric design

The essay seeks to do the opposite of what the editor inserted as an introductory paragraph to the article. The editor's error inadvertently demonstrates the need for the article. The argument extracts ‘type’ from its purely instrumental role as a species of model or paradigm for design (which it attained between Quatremère de Quincy and Durand) and to open it, through the concept of typicality, to its wider meanings in other arts and to its deeper ethical meanings, as common-to-all (the topic of my contribution to the Biennale reader, Output 2).

The International AD Special Issues are widely disseminated among architects, researchers and students of architecture. As the main dissenting voice in an issue devoted mostly to the instrumental possibilities of “type”, the essay has enjoyed a prominence among researchers and architecture students. The article was cited in H. Steiner, "The Earth does not Move and the Ground of the City", in the Journal of Comparative Cultural Studies in Architecture 6/2012 - pp 46-55, and by Sam Jacoby in his PhD Dissertation at the TU, Berlin, The Reasoning of Architecture: Type and the Problem of Historicity, June 2013, on-line publication.