1ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011PROFILE NO 209GUEST-EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER CM LEE & SAM JACOBY

TYPOLOGICAL URBANISM

2 ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNFORTHCOMING 2 TITLES

The announcement of Rio de Janeiro as the 2016 Olympic host city has placed Latin America on the worlds stage. Now, for the fi rst time since the mid-20th century when Modernist urban design was undertaken on an epic scale, Latin America is the centre of international attention and architectural pilgrimage. Though mass migrations from the countryside and the erection of informal settlements in the late 20th century left cities socially and spatially divided, Latin America is now once again set to go through major change. Since the millennium, resourceful governments and practices have developed innovative approaches to urban design and development less to do with utopian and totalitarian schemes and more to do with urban acupuncture, working within, rather than opposing, informality to stitch together disparate parts of the city. Once a blind spot in cities representation, informality is now considered an asset to be understood and incorporated. With more than 50 per cent of the worlds population living in cities for the fi rst time in human history, and an increasing amount in slums, Latin Americas solutions to urban problems represent the vanguard in mitigating strong social and spatial divisions in cities across the globe.

Contributors include: Saskia Sassen, Hernando de Soto, Ricky Burdett and the former mayor of Bogot, Enrique Pealosa.

Featured architects: Teddy Cruz, Caracas Think-Tank, Jorge Jauregui, Alejandro Echeverri, MMBB and Alejandro Aravena.

Covers large-scale urban case studies, such as the revitalisation of Bogot and Medellin.

MAY/JUNE 2011 PROFILE NO 211LATIN AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADSGUEST-EDITOR MARIANA LEGUA

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MARCH/APRIL 2011 PROFILE NO 210PROTOCELL ARCHTECTUREGUEST-EDITED BY NEIL SPILLER AND RACHEL ARMSTRONG

Throughout the ages, architects have attempted to capture the essence of living systems as design inspiration. However, practitioners of the built environment have had to deal with a fundamental split between the artifi cial urban landscape and nature owing to a technological gap that means architects have been unable to make effective use of biological systems in urban environments. This issue of 2 shows for the fi rst time that contemporary architects can create and construct architectures that are bottom-up, synthetically biological, green and have no recourse to shallow biomimickry. Synthetic biology will have as much impact on architecture as cyberspace has had and probably more. Key to these amazing architectural innovations is the protocell.

Contributors include: Martin Hanczyc, Lee Cronin and Mark Morris.

Architects include: Nic Clear, IwamotoScott, Paul Preissner, Omar Khan, Dan Slavinsky, Philip Beesley and Neri Oxman.

Topics include: new smart biological materials, surrealism, ruins, alchemy, emergence, carbon capture, urbanism and sustainability, architectural ecologies, ethics and politics.

Over the last 15 years, contemporary architecture has been profoundly altered by the advent of computation and information technology. The ubiquitous dissemination of design software and numerical fabrication machinery have re-actualised the traditional role of geometry in architecture and opened it up to the wondrous possibilities afforded by topology, non-Euclidean geometry, parametric surface design and other areas of mathematics. From the technical aspects of scripting code to the biomorphic paradigms of form and its associations with genetics, the impact of computation on the discipline has been widely documented. What is less clear, and has largely escaped scrutiny so far, is the role mathematics itself has played in this revolution. Hence the time has come for designers, computational designers and engineers to tease the mathematics out of their respective works, not to merely show how it is done a hard and futile challenge for the audience but to refl ect on the roots of the process and the way it shapes practices and intellectual agendas, while helping defi ne new directions. This issue of 2 asks: Where do we stand today? What is up with mathematics in design? Who is doing the most interesting work? The impact of mathematics on contemporary creativity is effectively explored on its own terms.

Contributors include: Mark Burry, Bernard Cache, Philippe Morel, Antoine Picon, Dennis Shelden, Fabien Scheurer and Michael Weinstock.

JULY/AUGUST 2011 PROFILE NO 212THE MATHEMATICS OF SPACEGUEST-EDITED BY GEORGE L LEGENDRE

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1ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

TYPOLOGICAL URBANISM PROJECTIVE CITIES

GUEST-EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER CM LEE AND SAM JACOBY

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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNVOL 81, NO 1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011ISSN 0003-8504

PROFILE NO 209ISBN 978-0470-747209

2GUEST-EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER CM LEE AND SAM JACOBY

TYPOLOGICAL URBANISM: PROJECTIVE CITIES

IN THIS ISSUE 1ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

EDITORIALHelen Castle

ABOUT THE GUEST-EDITORSChristopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby

SPOTLIGHT Visual highlights of the issue

INTRODUCTION Typological Urbanism and

the Idea of the CityChristopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby

The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and TypologiesMarina Lathouri

A persistent architectural category, type is traced back by Lathouri to the 18th century.

EDITORIAL BOARDWill AlsopDenise BrattonPaul BrislinMark BurryAndr ChaszarNigel CoatesPeter CookTeddy CruzMax FordhamMassimiliano FuksasEdwin HeathcoteMichael HenselAnthony HuntCharles JencksBob MaxwellJayne MerkelPeter MurrayMark RobbinsDeborah SauntLeon van SchaikPatrik SchumacherNeil SpillerMichael WeinstockKen YeangAlejandro Zaera-Polo

3 Type? What Type? Further Refl ections on the Extended ThresholdMichael Hensel

Typological Instruments: Connecting Architecture and UrbanismCaroline Bos & Ben van Berkel/UNStudio

City as Political Form: Four Archetypes of Urban TransformationPier Vittorio Aureli

Type, Field, Culture, PraxisPeter Carl

Brasilias Superquadra: Prototypical Design and the Project of the City Martino Tattara

Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan Competition, SingaporeToyo Ito & Associates, Architects

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, JapanKazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA

The Metropolis as Integral Substancel AUC Architects and Urbanists (Franois Decoster, Caroline Poulin, Djamel Klouche)

A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of the Post-Fordist CityDOGMA (Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara)

Xian Horticultural Masterplan, Xian, ChinaSerie Architects

COUNTERPOINT Transcending Type: Designing

for Urban ComplexityDavid Grahame Shane

Penang Tropical City, Penang, Malaysia

OMAJoo Bravo da Costa

As epitomised by OMAs project for Penang, the magnitude of urbanisation in East Asia requires an innovative approach to type.

41ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011PROFILE NO 209

Editorial Offi cesJohn Wiley & Sons John StreetLondon WC1 N2BS

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Managing Editor (Freelance)Caroline Ellerby

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Design and PrepressArtmedia, London

Art Direction and DesignCHK Design:Christian Ksters Hannah Dumphy

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Front cover: Udayan Mazumdar, Ground Zero, Mumbai, India, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Sam Jacoby and Christopher CM Lee), Architectural Association, London, 2008. Diploma Unit 6, AA School and Udayan MazumdarInside front cover: Concept CHK Design

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5EDITORIALHelen Castle

Just as grammar in recent years has been revived in the classroom, the resurgence of type in architecture indicates a desire for syntax or underlying order. Type provides what Caroline Bos and Ben van Berkel refer to as a legacy of rationality. It has the potential to endow architecture with coherency, logic and structure. In a city context, moreover, it bestows the possibility of order to often complex and unstructured urban situations. For guest-editors Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby, it is reason, but with a defi nite objective.

This issue of 2 comes out of a desire on the guest-editors part to promote architects ability to assert themselves in the city and an understanding that if architects in the future are going to be anything more than dressers of buildings, responsible for exterior whooshes and folds, then they need to approach their subject with the required disciplinary knowledge. Chris Lees and Sam Jacobys preoccupation with type comes out of extensive research, teaching and practice. Both are unit masters at the Architectural Association in London and Sam Jacoby is currently completing a doctorate on the subject; Chris Lee is also co-director, with Kapil Gupta, of award-winning offi ce Serie Architects, a relatively small but incredibly agile and infl uential practice that has gained international renown for its projects spread across Xian, Hangzhou, Beijing, Chengdu, London, Bratislava and Mumbai. For Serie Architects, the notion of type as operative theory is generic enough to overcome differences and specifi c enough to engage and index the cultural, social and political nuances of its host.1 It has the potential to anchor international practice in a way that is both universal and local, providing architectural solutions to urban problems.

The desire for underlying order and reason for anchorage certainly befi ts the times in which architects are as much at sea in the economic downturn in the West as the tantalisingly large-scale architectural opportunities that Asia and the Middle East have to offer. As the guest-editors state at the end of their introduction, type is as much about why do as how to. Type requires architects to look beneath the surface to fi nd the commonalities and similarities between built form the essence of buildings if you like. Metaphysical in scope, it presses on architecture far-reaching but necessary questions, such as What is architecture? If, as Michael Hensel suggests in his article, it could be a preoccupation that is triggered by the current more serious turn of mind, as it was in the recession of the early 1990s, it is also one that we should not let slip through our fi ngers before it has gained the full attention it deserves. Type, as Lee and Jacoby demonstrate in this issue, lends order but in setting parameters also provides the essential catalyst for innovative design thinking at the city scale. 1

Note1. Christopher CM Lee, Working in Series: Christopher CM Lee and Kapil Gupta/Serie Architects, Architectural Association (London), 2010, p 5.

Text 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image Steve Gorton

6Serie Architects, Xin Tian Di Factory H, Hangzhou, China, 2010top left: For the project to create an urban core for a larger masterplan of Xin Tian Di, Serie was tasked with the conservation of a large disused factory and proposed rethinking the idea of the mat building as a plinth. Here the plinth serves to punctuate the factory as the anchor for the masterplan, with surrounding buildings many times its density. This alternative strategy of rethinking what constitutes an urban core eschews the reliance on hyperdense buildings that accumulates pedestrian fl ows. Instead, it presents the reclaimed void as a new urban core.

Serie Architects, Bohcky Residential Masterplan, Bratislava, Slovakia, 2009top right: Series principal concern in designing the masterplan for a residential development comprising 120 single-family dwellings designed by Serie as well as six other architects is to institute an overall coherence that does not impinge on the heterogeneity of the villas. To do this, Serie utilised an undulating giant hedge that delineates autonomous plots for the various villas. An evolved courtyard type, where rooms are spun off a circular courtyard in different numbers, is used as a typological grammar for the design of the villas.

Sam Jacoby with Type 0 (Max von Werz, Marco Sanchez Castro and Charles Peronnin), Beserlpark, Vienna, 2009above: In this masterplan, the suburban ideal of living in the park is confronted with the metropolitan typology of the inverted urban courtyard block, resulting in negotiated private and semiprivate spaces within a network of public courtyards/parks and functions.

7ABOUT THE GUEST-EDITORSCHRISTOPHER CM LEE AND SAM JACOBY

Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby are the co-directors of the new postgraduate Projective Cities Programme at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London (projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk), which is dedicated to a research- and design-based analysis of the emergent and contemporary city. They have taught together at the AA since and their investigation of the city, undertaken in Diploma Unit from to , has been published in Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City (AA Publications, ). The work has also been widely exhibited, including at the th Architecture Biennale in Venice () and as a solo exhibition at the UTS Gallery in Sydney ().

Christopher CM Lee is the co-founder and principal of Serie Architects. He graduated with an AA Diploma (Hons), has previously taught Histories and Theories Studies at the AA () and was Unit Master of Intermediate Unit from to and Diploma Unit 6 from to . He is pursuing his doctoral research at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam on the topic of the dominant type and the city.

The relationship between architecture and the city is a problem that has informed Sam Jacobys teaching in collaboration with Christopher Lee and his professional work. Jacoby is also the co-director of the Spring Semester Programme at the AA where he also previously taught History and Theories Studies. He was also a studio leader in the BArch programme at the University of Nottingham. He is currently completing a doctoral degree at the Technical University of Berlin on the topic of Type and the Syntax of the City.

In this issue of 2 on Typological Urbanism, Lee and Jacoby recognise the city as a contemporary fi eld, an area of study, and a design and research agenda, bringing together the work and research of contemporary professionals and academics that speculates on the potential of architectural experimentation and the meaningful production of new ideas for the city. 1

Text 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6(t), 7(t) Serie Architects; pp 6(b), 7(b) Sam Jacoby

top: Christopher CM Leeabove: Sam Jacoby

8SPOTLIGHT Brasilia, Brazil, 195760The superquadra housing blocks, designed by Lucio Costa, are the basic unit of the urban realm in Brasilia. Their elevations, foregrounded by trees, are the backdrop to the city.

Superquadra 308S

9Type has a strong Modernist pedigree as exemplifi ed by Lucio Costas elevations for the superquadra at Brasilia, executed in the 1950s, and Toyo Itos much more recent Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan, which is informed in its approach by the 1960s Metabolists. Though type often requires a level of order or systematisation, it does not prevent it from being playful, as demonstrated by SANAAs museum for Kanazawa where the private and public spaces are entwined in a single building.

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Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan Competition, Singapore, 200001For this IT research city, Ito envisioned a horizontal urban infrastructure connected by high-speed pedestrian walkways.

Toyo Ito & Associat es, Architects and RSP Architects Planners & Engineers (Pte) Ltd

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Arnhem Central, The Netherlands, due for completion 2013 In UNStudios work, the centralising void space becomes an adaptable type for spatial organisation, as demonstrated by this public transportation centre and the Raffl es City project on pp 747.

D UNStudio

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21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, 2004This interior space of the art museum epitomises gallery whiteness while other translucent areas embrace the city and, by extension, the public, with their transparency. Interiority and exteriority and different types are effectively entwined.

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA

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A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of the Post-Fordist City, European North Western Metropolitan Area, 200209In this project for an archetype for the modern city, DOGMA espouses a repeatable architectural form that enables the city to be based on architecture alone rather than a combination of urban elements.

DOGMA (Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara with Alice Bulla)

Text 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 8-9 Adolfo Despradel/photograph by Adolfo Despradel; p 10 Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects; p 11 Christian Richters; p 12 Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA; p 13 FRAC Centre Collection, Orlans, France

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INTRODUCTIONBy Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby

TYPOLOGICAL URBANISM AND THE IDEA OF THE CITY

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Yifan Liu, The Great Flight Forward, Chengdu, China, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2008Urban plan of airport. What defi nes Chinas public image of monumentality and iconicity? The project subverts the idea of the Peoples Square and turns its heroic fi gure into an airport.

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Bolam Lee, Multiplex City, Seoul, South Korea, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2007above: Model. The reconfi gured high-rise is spliced with vertical public spaces and functions as an urban punctuator.

opposite: Urban plan of Multiplex City. The project aims to exploit the defunct middle fl oors of multiplexes (multifunctional, hyperdense high-rises) in Seoul and converts them into vertical public spaces.

A warehouse can be turned into apartments, and a Georgian terrace into a school. What this means is that a functional reduction prevents other knowledge that can be obtained from type by considering it as belonging to a group of formal, historical and sociocultural aspects.

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At the heart of this title of 2 is an attempt to outline a possible position and approach that enables the conjectural impulses of architectural production to recover its relevance to the city. Implicit to this is that the relationship between architecture and the city is reciprocal and that the city is the overt site for architectural knowledge par excellence.

This proposition to re-empower the architect in the context of urban architectural production is founded on the realisation of three essential predicaments that need to be addressed by both the profession and academia. Firstly, the relentless speed and colossal scale of urbanisation, with the current level of around 50 per cent increasing to approximately 69 per cent by 2050, has resulted in the profession merely responding to these rapid changes and challenges in retrospect. Secondly, the form of urbanisation in emerging cities in the developing countries, and in particular in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, has departed from the Western models of centralised organisation and planning.1 The separation of architecture and urban planning into segregated domains for effi ciency and speed has left each discipline impotent to deal with the ruptured, decentralised and fast-changing context, whether in Macau, Dubai or Shanghai. Finally, the architecture of this new urbanisation, fuelled by the market economy, is predominantly driven by the regime of difference in search of novelty. Macau built the worlds biggest casino and Dubai the tallest skyscraper, with its Burj Khalifa beating the recently completed Shanghai World Finance Center of 2008 to this superlative. With this increasing stultifi cation, the disciplines inability to confi dently and comprehensively describe, conceptualise, theorise and ultimately project any new ideas of architecture in relationship to the city must be confronted and rethought.

To achieve the stated meta-critical aim, this issue tries to dispel the common misunderstanding of the notion of type (and typology) and its common misuse as the straw man in architectural experimentation and propositions. It outlines the terms on which the discussion of type and typology can

unfold today in a more precise and considered manner. It re-argues for the instrumentality of type and typology in the fi eld of urbanism and the city, and features four projects that are conventionally not seen as fi tting within the framework of typology, proposing that the reconsideration of these projects renews and enriches the understanding of working typologically. Similarly, recent projects by young practices further illustrate the possibility of utilising the notion of type in informing the idea of the city.

Type and TypologyIn common usage the words type and typology have become interchangeable and understood as buildings grouped by their use: schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on.2 Type, however, should not be confused with typology. The suffi x -ology comes from the Greek logia, which means a discourse, treatise, theory or science. Thus typology is the discourse, theory, treatise (method) or science of type. Its reduction to categories of use is limiting, as buildings are independent from their function and evolve over time, as Aldo Rossi and Neo-Rationalism have already argued.3 A warehouse can be turned into apartments, and a Georgian terrace into a school. What this means is that a functional reduction prevents other knowledge that can be obtained from type by considering it as belonging to a group of formal, historical and sociocultural aspects. The essential quality of change and transformation rather than its strict classifi cation or obedience to historical continuity endows type with the possibility to transgress its functional and formal limitations.

For the defi nition of the word type in architectural theory we can turn to Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremre de Quincys masterful explanation in the Dictionnaire darchitecture (1825) that formally introduced the notion into the architectural discourse. For Quatremre: The word type presents less the image of a thing to copy or imitate completely than the idea of an element which ought itself to serve as a rule for the model.4 Type consequently is an element, an object, a thing that embodies the idea. Type

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Deena Fakhro, The Holy City and its Discontent, Makkah, Saudi Arabia, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2008above and centre: Typical plans, sections and views of airport. Once a year, every year, the Holy City of Makkah is fl ooded by a surge of three million pilgrims, demanding unparalleled infrastructural miracles. To counter the fi nancial burden of the redundant hajj infrastructure, the gateway airports are opportunistically combined with mosque-based Islamic universities: airport-mosques, switching between pilgrim surges and student populations.

top and opposite: An airport, a mosque: a city gateway. In response to the pilgrim surge in Makkah, the project strategically proposes polynodal gateway airports that disperse congestion multidirectionally within Makkahs valleys.

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is abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and literal. Its idea guides or governs over the rules of the model. This idea, following a Neoplatonic and metaphysical tradition, is by Quatremre understood as the ideal that an architect should strive for but which never fully materialises in the process of creative production. The idea of the model, on the other hand, is developed by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand in his typological design method of the Prcis des leons darchitecture donnes lcole royale polytechnique (180205). In the Prcis, developed almost at the same time as Quatremres typological theory at the turn of the 19th century, Durand attempts to establish a systematic method of classifying buildings according to genres and abstracts them into diagrams.5 He proposes that new types emerge in response to the requirements of a changing society and urban conditions, whereby the typological diagrams are adapted to the constraints of specifi c sites. This notion of type as model, graphically reducible to diagrams, introduced precepts that are fundamental to working typologically: precedents, classifi cation, taxonomy, repetition, differentiation and reinvention. Thus Durands Prcis outlines an important element of the didactic theory of type and constitutes what we understand by typology.

The misunderstanding of type and typology, attacked by many for its perceived restrictions, has resulted in the deliberate rejection of typological knowledge. This is evident in the exotic formal experiments of the past 15 years: every fold, every twist and bend, every swoosh and whoosh is justifi ed as being superior to the types it displaces. However, it remains unclear what these ill properties or characteristics of type are that the novel forms want to replace and to what ends. These architectural experiments have no relevance beyond the formal and cannot be considered an invention, for invention, as Quatremre stated, does not exist outside rules; for there would be no way to judge invention.6

In Type? What Type? (pages 5665), Michael Hensel recounts his personal experiences in the early 1990s at the Architectural Association (AA) in London according to

him an important juncture for the theory and experiments of architecture in urbanism which he argues failed to recognise the need for a wider contextualisation of experimentation, due to the casual if not naive treatment of the type. Marina Lathouri in The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies (pages 2431) provides a critical and historiographical discussion of types role in defi ning the architectural object and its relationship to the city. This thematic engagement is complemented by the projects of UNStudio in Typological Instruments: Connecting Architecture and Urbanism by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos (pages 6677). These projects clarify the utilisation of design models to synthesise types with the complexities of practice and reality through the instrumentality of typological and serial models of organisation. The specifi c responses demonstrate that typological design models are capable of, and require, their transformation and hybridisation in order to fulfi l the ambitions and requirements of an architectural project in an urban context.

Typology and the Urban PlanThe coupling of the concept of type as idea and model allows us to discuss its instrumentality in the urban context. The word urbanism means of, living or situated in, a city or town, but it was Ildefons Cerd a Catalan engineer and the urban planner of the Barcelona Eixample who fi rst invented the words urbanism and urbanisation in his Theory of Urbanization (1867). For Cerd, urbanism was the science that manages and regulates the growth of the city through housing and economic activities. He understood the word urbs at the root of urbanisation and, in opposition to the notion of the city, proposed that its focus was not the (historical and symbolic) city centre but the suburbs.7 Thus the process of urbanisation inevitably involves multiple stakeholders, a diversity of inhabitants, and a scale beyond that of a single building incorporated in an urban plan. This inclusive urban plan has to be differentiated from the masterplan predicated on singular authority and control.

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The instrumentality of type in the process of envisioning, regulating and administering the urban plan lies in its ability to act as a pliable diagram, indexing the irreducible typal imprints that serve as the elemental parts to the plan.8 The diagrams of type, however, are not mere graphic representations of the urban plan, but embody the basic organisational performance, history and meaning of precedent types that are then developed into new design solutions. The function of the diagram hereby is both diagnostic and projective, and at the same time refers to the irreducible structure of the types in question.9

In Type, Field, Culture, Praxis (pages 3845) Peter Carl clarifi es that types are isolated fragments of a deeper and richer structure of typicalities, attempting to relate the architectural object to human situations. Typicalities, says Carl, are those aspects common to all, exerting a claim on freedom, while this freedom depends in turn on that which is common to all for its meaning.

A number of further projects by OMA, Toyo Ito, SANAA and lAUC provide a second reading of how a recourse to typology is necessary when dealing with the urban context. In the Penang Tropical City (2004) by OMA (pages 7889), distinct building types are grouped together to form islands of exacerbated difference as yet another enactment of Koolhaas idea of the Cities within the City developed with OM Ungers in 1977.10 Toyo Itos project for the Singapore Buona Vista Masterplan (2001 see pages 903) develops the use of prototypical elements albeit in a more fl uid manner that bears traces to his preoccupations with the problems of collective form that typifi ed the Metabolist movement of the 1960s in Japan. In Itos proposal, the city is envisioned as aggregating into a continuous whole, fusing infrastructure, building, open spaces and services into an integrated piece of architecture. lAUC pursues a re-representation and projection of the metropolitan conditions through typological intensifi cations of a super-metropolitan matrix in the Grand Paris Stimul (200809 pages 1089), which attempts a different approach to city-making. Perhaps the most unusual

inclusion is the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (2004) in Kanazawa, Japan, by SANAA (pages 94101). This project should be understood in relation to other projects such as the Moriyama House in Tokyo (2005) and the recently completed Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne (2010), which rethink the building as a piece of city fabric through the mat-building typology.

Type and the City If urbanisation is concerned with the expansion of human settlement driven primarily by economics, the city on the other hand is the consolidated, concentrated settlement that precedes the urb. It is usually demarcated by a city wall and a point of concentration for people and activities, resulting in a stratifi ed society that is functionally differentiated and politically divided.11 This city is a historical product and centred on the civic and symbolic functions of human settlement and coexistence. As cities owe their main characteristic to geographical and topographical conditions, and are always linked to other cities by trade and resources, they tend to specialise and form a distinct character.12 It is this distinct character coupled with the need to accommodate differences that gives rise to the possibility of a collective meaning for the city. This meaning changes over time in response to its evolving inhabitants and external circumstances, but its history is often formalised in the construction of civic buildings and landmarks that express a common identity. These elements of permanence in the city are exemplifi ed by town halls, libraries, museums and archives. It is through this understanding that we are proposing that the idea of the city can be embodied in these dominant types, communicating the idea of the city in response to specifi c historical and sociocultural conditions. From Barcelona with its Cerd housing blocks, London with its Victorian and Georgian terraces and New York with its Manhattan skyscrapers, cities can be understood, described, conceptualised and theorised through their own particular dominant types. Through Rossi, we learn that a building as

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Max von Werz, Open Source Fabric, Zorrozaurre, Bilbao, Spain, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2007opposite left: Urban plan. The differentiation of urban blocks and their collective voids is utilised to absorb the shifts in the knowledge industry that is to occupy the peninsula of Zorrozaurre. The stringing together of the exterior void offers the possibility of coexistence between the models of knowledge environments: the suburban-like technopark and the city-like technopole.

opposite right: Urban plan fragment. Resisting the tendency for singular types, the project introduces the heterogeneity of diverse type-specifi c environments capable of consolidating leisure networks to attract a lived-in population within the peninsula.

Martin Jameson, Project Runway, Thames Estuary, UK, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2008top: Airport visualisation. Heathrow Airport is top of the long list of Londons planning disasters. The solution: a 12-kilometre (7.5-mile) inhabited bridge across the mouth of the Thames Estuary.

above: Fragment model of airport. Incorporating high-speed rail and topped with three runways, this new urban condition manifests a compressed and highly varied programme tightly contained within a strict envelope. The impact: regeneration without sprawl, infrastructure without damage to civic life.

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Yi Cheng Pan, Resisting the Generic Empire, Singapore, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2006top: Masterplan model. To wrest control of the ground plane from the proliferating skyscrapers, the project inverts its massing through the cultivation of multiple urban plans within the skyscraper type. This strategy releases the ground plane for immediate activation by smaller building types (and stakeholders) and creates multiple clustered volumes for increased public and private partnerships.

above: Urban plan. The project explores the issues of control and difference, and challenges Singapores addiction to the ubiquitous high-rise type. It resists the formation of the state-engineered Generic Empire a city entirely subjugated to the whims of large corporations by providing a typological framework that cultivates difference through the coexistence of multiple types.

Yifan Liu, The Great Flight Forward, Chengdu, China, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2008opposite: Masterplan model of airport. The Peoples Square has become the airport. Its void becomes the runway, its edge the terminals and aerotropolis. By enforcing the edge and limiting its growth, new intimate scales of public spaces derived from the traditional Chinese courtyard-house typology are released and become prominent.

Typological Urbanism, in conclusion, brings together arguments and projects that demonstrate a commitment to the empowerment of the architect to once again utilise his or her disciplinary knowledge.

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an element of permanence is able to act as the typological repository of a citys history, construction and form. For Rossi, type is independent of function and therefore pliable. To understand these types is to understand the city itself.

Pier Vittorio Aureli in City as Political Form: Four Archetypes of Urban Transformation (pages 327) discusses the instrumentality of paradigmatic architectural archetype as an extensive governance apparatus and proposes that while the evolution of the city can be thought of as the evolution of urban types, its realisation can only happen within a political state of exception. Similarly, Martino Tattara in Brasilias Superquadra: Prototypical Design and the Project of the City (pages 4655) proposes that the prototype is the exemplar that does not reproduce itself through a set of norms, prescriptions or rules, but through the authoritativeness of the prototype itself. This ultimately constitutes a new disciplinary operativity by considering the prototype as a seed for the idea of the city.

Two projects by DOGMA and Serie offer a possible demonstration of the manifestation of the idea of the city as an architectural project. DOGMA, in their A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of a Post-Fordist City (pages 11019) investigate the possibility by focusing on the relationship between architectural form, large-scale design and political economy. This is rendered less as a working proposition and more as an idea of the city brought to its (extreme) logical conclusions. In the Xian Horticultural Masterplan project by Serie Architects (pages 1207), the transformation of an artefact of the city is used to confront the problem of centrality and the possible recuperation of the tradition of city-making in Xian, China. The city wall as a dominant type is utilised as the deep structure that sets out a typological grammar for the city.

Typological Urbanism, in conclusion, brings together arguments and projects that demonstrate a commitment to the empowerment of the architect to once again utilise his or her disciplinary knowledge. It is a re-engagement with architectures exteriority and architectural experimentation

governed by reason and (re)inventions underpinned by typological reasoning. It is an insistence on architecture that not only answers the didactic question of how to? but also the meta-critical question of why do?. 1

Notes 1. The United Nations expects that the population increase of 2.3 billion by 2050 will result in the growth of urbanisation levels in more developed regions from currently 75 per cent to 86 per cent, and from 45 per cent to 66 per cent in less developed regions, achieving an average of 69 per cent. Most of the population growth will take place in urban areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. See United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision, New York, 2010.2. In part, this tendency to classify group buildings according to use can be attributed to Nikolaus Pevsners Buildings of England (195175). The original series by Pevsner, for Penguin, has been expanded and is now published by Yale University Press as Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England,Scotland, Wales and Ireland.3. Compare with Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1982.4. Quatremre de Quincy, Type, in Encyclopdie Mthodique, Vol 3, 1825, trans Samir Youns, Quatremere De Quincys Historical Dictionary of Architecture: The True, the Fictive and the Real, Papadakis Publisher (London), 2000.5. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Prcis of the Lectures on Architecture, trans David Britt, Getty Trust Publications (Los Angeles), 2000. Durands diagrams primarily capture the structural elements of various building types, comprising a layer of grids that denote both structure and geometric composition. 6. Quatremre de Quincy, Rule, in Encyclopdie Mthodique, Vol 3, op cit. 7. The difference between urb and city and its implication are developed by Pier Vittorio Aureli in Toward the Archipelago, in Log 11, 2008. 8. For a more detailed account, see Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby (eds), Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City, AA Publications (London), 2007.9. This understanding of the diagram is fundamentally different from interpreting diagrams of fl ows and pseudoscientifi c indexes as novel tectonics.10. Oswald Matthias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff and Peter Ovaska, Cities Within the City: Proposal by the Sommerakademie Berlin, in Lotus International 19, 1977.11. For a more elaborate description of the evolution of cities and its defi nition, see Spiro Kostof, City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, Thames & Hudson (London), 1999. 12. Traditional cities are defi ned by their relationships to river banks, sea ports, railways, highlands (hill towns) and so on. Today we see cities that position themselves as knowledge cities, fi nancial cities, medical cities, sport cities and so on.

Text 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Diploma Unit 6, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London

242224

THE CITY AS A PROJECT

TYPES, TYPICAL OBJECTS AND TYPOLOGIES

Marina Lathouri provides a critical overview of the historiography of typology, tracing the word type back to its 18th-century origins and through to its re-emergence as a standardised objet-type in the Modernist era. She closes by questioning the pertinence of type and typology today.

Marina Lathouri

To raise the question of typology in architecture isto raise a question of the architectural work itself. Rafael Moneo, On Typology, 19781

The concept of type in architecture has a function inherently related to the one of language wherein type enables a manner in which to name and describe the artefact, primarily as part of a group of objects. Therefore, as Moneo succinctly points out, the question of typology typology being a discourse (logos) on type becomes a question on the architectural work itself , a question of what kind of object is a work of architecture. This article will begin by pointing to two characteristics of the question that could help to explain the specifi c functions of the concept of type in architecture. The fi rst is that accounts of type are informed by the different ways of seeing, thinking and producing the work of architecture. The second characteristic, following on from the fi rst, is that the notion of type, in its various meanings, has played an effective critical role in the confrontations between architecture and the city. Typological debates seek to delineate the ways in which the architectural work, by virtue of its specifi c conditions of production, engages with its broader milieu material, urban, civil, political. It is in the basis of these arguments that it seems still possible and relevant to raise the question.

When it fi rst appears in architecture during the 18th century, the word type, coming from the Greek typos meaning model, matrix, the imprint or a fi gure in relief, carries a sense of origin closely joined to a universal law or natural principle.

The notion of type, as the law or principle that might explain how forms are generated thus endowing every element with symbolic signifi cance, gained considerable presence among the Enlightenment architectural theorists. In the article Type, which Quatremre de Quincy wrote for the third volume of his Encyclopdie, published in 1825, type further implied the characteristic form or particular physiognomy that enables a building to be read as to its fundamental purpose.2 Transferring ideas developed in the natural sciences and studies of language into the theory of architecture, the word type was employed in De Quincys text not only to indicate the search for origins but to organise all the different kinds of production which belong to architecture by expressing at once general characteristics and their particular physiognomy. The link between form and purpose, general principles and the imprint of the particular intention of each building, as JF Blondel would describe the physiognomy or character of the singular artefact in 1749, turned type from its overtly symbolic function to a more signifying one.3 The meaning was to be derived from the formal and functional context of the work itself, a set of pre-existent or fi xed referents in outside reality and a system inherent in architecture.

Nonetheless, this amalgam of type as origin, natural principle, symbolic mark and legible form of a purpose, would be fi xed in the practice of the academic architect in the fi rst quarter of the 19th century. The establishment of architecture as a distinct discipline and profession, however, took place largely in the context of a view of its practice as socially embedded.

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This introduced a historicity into architecture that also reconfi gured the notion of type. Confl ated with the idea of an artifi ce socially determined, that is, an outcome of changing social customs and needs rather than of divine or natural origin, type began to designate the process of the formation of a particular building.

Signifying a process as much as an object, type claimed a functional justifi cation as well as an active role in the process of design. It was in these terms that it became extraordinarily evocative in late 19th and early 20th century. Not a fi xed ideal to imitate or aspire to, but instead a historically contingent idea, subjected to functional and programmatic changes and eventually, as we shall see, to the overriding law of economy.

Having established a fundamental connection between architecture and society within an abstract and fl exible view of history made the notion of type more instrumental to a comprehension of a kind of evolution in architecture and, ultimately, to a cultural genealogy of society.4 Suspended between an evolving architectural specifi city and a general schema, the notion of type brought together the appeal to specifi city, the myth of cultural (and ultimately national) integrity and historical dimension. At this point, the question of type and typology became a logical extension of the ideology that extended architectures boundaries far beyond the limits customarily ascribed to it either as an art or as a prosaic utility, transforming the fi gure of the architect into a social redeemer.

Objet-Type and Standard Product: The New CityIn these terms, the Modernist categories of the typical object and the standard product are symptomatic of the new understanding of the role of architecture in the articulation and expression of external change or internal demands spatial, material, economic, social. In fact, external changes and needs were internalised and as Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co put it, the notion of typical, now identifi ed with the standard, succeeded in expressing the presuppositions for the construction of the New City.5

Walter Gropius rhetoric in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, published in 1937, is telling: the reiteration of typical (ie typifi ed) buildings while increasingly approximating to the successive stages of a manufacturing process, notably enhances civic dignity and coherence.6 Here the typical building, identical with the typifi ed object, became, primarily through industrial manufacturing, a fusion of the best of its anterior forms a fusion preceded by the elimination of the personal content of their designers and all otherwise ungeneric or non-essential features.7 It was precisely this particular mode of production that, while addressing the needs of the urban industrial population,

entailed the principles for the emergence of a new harmonious social order.8 Such an impersonal standard, which was also described by Gropius as a norm, a word derived from the carpenters square, functioned as an ideal to educate and nurture the inhabitants of the new city, as citizens of a democracy linked in an intrinsically spatial fi eld.

The connection between industrial production and a normative framework for the growing urban population had already been established in the early days of Modernism: Typisierung and the objet-type are but examples of it. What was different now was that the concepts of the typical and standard, incorporated into a set of new economies material, technical, spatial, visual and graphic became the physical prerequisite for producing the social fi eld. In fact, they provided, through the very features of their design, a diagrammatic manifestation of this fi eld. Their graphic formulations exemplifi ed a form of production of the urban environment, considered as the logical precondition of moral regeneration and civic happiness.

The typical did not provide just a model for the production of the singular artefact be it a built component, a piece of furniture, a dwelling unit or the urban block. It provided a framework for conceptualising architecture as part of a social and ideological agenda. It had a strong bearing on architectural arguments that sought to formalise the connection between the singular and processes of production of the collective. It was precisely this articulation of the individual and the collective that insinuated type in the social and political aspirations of Modernism.

JNL Durand, Faade Combinations, 1809The combination or disposition (the French term disposer means to arrange, to put things in a certain order) of typifi ed elements gives prominence to a method of work that would become part of a radical redefi nition of the ambitions of the discipline.

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In these terms, the ethical value of the Modernist type consisted in the combination of the ideal of architectural perfection with the laws of economy and the reality of mass production. This sense of architectural perfection was succinctly expressed in Karel Teiges words, written in 1932, as any ideal proposal that would be technically and economically capable of realisation.9 Thus, the ideal proposal, a strictly standardised element, was an analytical scheme in which programmatic functions and architectural elements on the one hand, and economic and technical variants on the other, could be unifi ed around an idea of dwelling in the modern city. 10

Furthermore, this idea of dwelling was not so much concerned with the domestic in terms of spatial scale, but incited a programmatic and ideological link between the reality of mass production, a culture of dwelling and the ideals of the future the ideals of the new relationship between the individual, the social and the city. This is refl ected in the plans of individual dwelling units which were specifi c enough yet strategically general, on the one hand, to represent a fragment of inhabitable terrain that could be mapped and regulated, and on the other, to effectively project a schema of life across the entire social body.

To recapitulate, at the heart of the programme of the objet-type is a procedure by which a series of distinct but repetitive functions or activities are imposed on the individual. By incorporating the individual, thus controlled, within a system, the growth of that system is both ensured (by multiplication of the typifi ed elements) and regulated (by repetition of established functions). Put succinctly, the individual is rendered typical, in order to contribute to the generative and regulative operations of the city, that is, a type of development.

Urban Typologies: The City as HistoryThe conceptual and visual engagement of the different scales in the above account of the typical and type paradoxically exposes a desire for ultimate synthesis and visual coherence to be achieved in the New City. The question raised in the rethinking of the modern city in the 1950s and 1960s is what happens to the immediate conformity between the sequence of unitary elements and the synthetic instant, when we confront the complex and rather ambiguous fi gure of the existing city.

But to defi ne the existing city, how its identity is to be understood and engaged with, proved a rather complex task. Nothing illustrates more clearly this diffi culty than the historic research done in Italy by Saverio Muratori and Ernesto Rogers in the 1950s, and later, Aldo Rossi and Giulio Carlo Argan. Despite the often confl icting attitudes involved in these explorations, the aim was to stress by means of a typological permanence the cultural continuity of what Rogers would describe as the pre-existing conditions (preesistenze ambientali). In these studies, undoubtedly displaying aspects of the

A work of art, according to Focillon, was an attempt to express something that is unique, but it was likewise an integral part of a system of highly complex relationships.

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contemporaneous critique of the Functionalist city, any construction was thought as a completed cultural history.11 The architectural work was analysed and conceived as a singular entity (not a unitary element), and at the same time an expression of the development of the urban aggregate within a given place, which was the region, and within a precise historical space, the city.

On the one hand, the city was read as a structure that constantly evolves and changes, yet certain features were constant in time, and therefore typical; that is, constituent factors of that structure. On the other, this was an attempt to develop a working method; a method which invoked history in a series of transformations rather than a sequential unfolding of time. This method brought together ideas on history and principles of morphology already formulated in the 1930s by thinkers such as Henri Focillon. In particular, Focillons idea of art as a system in perpetual development of coherent forms12 and of history as a superimposition of geological strata that permits us to read each fraction of time as if it was at once past, present and future is interestingly relevant.13

A work of art, according to Focillon, was an attempt to express something that is unique, but it was likewise an integral part of a system of highly complex relationships.14 Forms thus acquire in their stratifi ed evolution a life that follows its own trajectory and can be generalised only on the level of method. It was in very similar terms that Ernesto Rogers, editor of Casabella Continuit during the 1950s, understood the architectural work and project. For Rogers, the individual artefact was a sensible form, a singular and specifi c outcome, here and

now, but also part of a broader structure, and as such a process in search of laws by means of which this structure might receive a greater degree of clarity. Thus the architectural project consisted primarily in a methodological process (processo metodologico) seeking to identify the most salient qualities (emergenza pi saliente) of the existing structure (material, urban, civil, cultural) and capture its specifi c essence (essenza specifi ca).

Moreover, if the ideal of an individual architecture was an element distinct in the time and space of experience, it was only the successive experiences of these distinct moments in the life of the individual artefact that ultimately achieve a synthesis.15 History here shifts into the realm of memory, and the singular form was not only to signify its own distinct individuality; it became a sign of forms and events that were part of a collective that is, urban memory. In these terms, any architectural form, existing or new, was the expression of its particular character at a specifi c time and place, but also embodied the memory of previous forms and functions.

If the work was to be read, by means of associations, within the construct of this collective memory, type was the apparatus (using Aldo Rossis term) which, fusing history and memory, could produce a dialectics between the individual object and the collective subject, between the idea of the object and the memory of its multiple actualities. It is precisely this dialectics which, for Rossi, was to ultimately constitute the structure of the city, a collective possession that, in its turn, must be presupposed before any signifi cance can be attributed to the individual work.16

Walter Gropius, Copper-Plate Houses, 1932opposite: Gropius Copper-Plate Houses for mass-production: a kit of standardised elements programmatic, architectural, technical enabling the investigation of systems of inhabitation held to arise within, and produce, urban space. From Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus published in 1937.

The Evolution of the Ideal Type from Paestum to the Parthenon, from the Humber to the Delagebelow: A basic notion of progress is here linked with the ideal of perfection in architecture, with the idea of it as an autonomous technical product. From Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1923.

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As he wrote in the early 1960s, the city is in itself a repository of history.17 This could be understood from two different points of view. In the fi rst, the city is above all a material artefact, a man-made object built over time and retaining the traces of time, even if in a discontinuous way. Studied from this point of view, cities become historical texts and type is but an instrument of analysis, to enter into and decipher this text, a function similar to the archaeological section. The second point of view acknowledges history as the awareness of the historical process, the collective imagination. This leads to one of Rossis prominent ideas that the city is the locus of the relationship of the collective to its place.18 And it is type, this time as an element of design, which enables the formal articulations of this relationship.

In this notion of type, we see an attempt to reinvest the work of architecture with a dimension of meaning, something that is not dissimilar to de Quincys understanding of type within a system analogous to language. Only, in this case, the meaning depends on a kind of collective memory. Nonetheless, the suggestion of type as a formal register of the collective but also an instrument of analysis as well as an element of design that can transform theoretical speculations into operative means for making architecture in the present was mostly evident in these studies, yet always recurrent in the critical discourse of architecture.

Politics of Type: The Contemporary CityOne could now attempt to reinstate this suggestion in contemporary terms. Prior to that, however, the question ought to be posed as to whether the question of type and typology is still pertinent. If it is concerned with a question of the architectural work itself , there are certain criteria that provide an overall different framework for thinking about the architectural work and its engagement with the city.

The fi rst of these criteria is, broadly speaking, historical. Every time brings specifi c conditions to the manner in which the claims on architecture and the city are made. So, the very meaning of type, architectural work and city cannot be separated from the historical situations within which it functions. It is worth noting at this point that in the ideas discussed here, type as model and natural principle, legible form of a purpose, a diagram of the new and the locus of collective memory, the relation to language has always been implicit, and indeed, operative. As Moneo writes, even the very act of naming the architectural object is a process that from the nature of language, is forced to typify.19 Yet this can only operate within a general logic of signifi cation that confers meaning on the object by situating it in a relational structure or network.

This brings us to the second criterion, which is social. In order for an artefact to be recognised as such, it has to abide by the broad parameters operative in a particular community.

For Rossi, the relationship between locus and citizenry is to inform the citys predominant image. Many of the emerging forms of urbanity, however, are partially or completely novel systems of relations and, often, novel institutional orders. New processes of economic and cultural activity problematise the traditional bond between territory and people, and citizenship is often constituted in a radically different way.

29

This is, for instance, what the categories of the typical object and the standard product attempted to entirely reconfi gure. They were part of a rhetoric whose aim was to produce a new and distinctive way of talking about architecture by turning particulars into abstract generalities such as the individual, the dwelling unit, the collective and so on.20 In new urban formations, however, or existing cities which are inscribed with a multiplicity of economies and identities ethnical, racial, cultural and religious representations of a globality which have not been recognised as such or are contested representations, a single model or method cannot be imposed. The material (and immaterial) forces that mould these communities are diverse and produce a distinctive inter-urban and intra-urban geography. Each of these communities establishes a logic of signifi cation that presupposes a specifi c understanding of what meaning is, how it operates, the normative principles it should abide by, its social function and so on.

For Rossi, the relationship between locus and citizenry is to inform the citys predominant image. Many of the emerging forms of urbanity, however, are partially or completely novel systems of relations and, often, novel institutional orders. New processes of economic and cultural activity problematise the traditional bond between territory and people, and citizenship is often constituted in a radically different way.

In this context, how can the work of architecture engage with the city in terms of its structuring? How can the multiple regimes of the architectural project address the new modes of production of the urban environment and a very different account of the political role of architecture in this environment? Is it possible that the architectural project still engages conceptions of space, norms of use and modes of appropriation that are not simply forms of mediation between polarities such as individual/collective, architectural/urban, past/present, new/existing but become effective in a more relational confi guration?

It seems to me that the question of type and typology could become extremely effective if the architectural project is rethought in terms of a method that may defi ne the general coordinates within which architectural works and urban strategies can be distinguished, yet their delimitations are precisely negotiated. Moreover, the question cannot be framed simply in relation to formal or methodological issues, but within a scheme that redefi nes the aesthetic coordinates of the community through implementing the connections between spatial and formal practices, forms of life, conceptions of thought and fi gures of the community. At the very end, it is an architectural question which implements the presupposition of politics, if politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.21 1

Hannes Meyer, Co-op Vitrine with Co-op Standard Products, Basel, 1925opposite: The exhibition piece consisted of arrays of 36 mass-produced items from cooperative factories. It is through the repeatability of the serial product that an effect of the collective is to be created.

E May and E Kaufmann, Furnishings of Small Apartments with Folding Beds, Frankfurt, 1929below: The virtues of economy in the production of forms of living considered typical of the modern age.

30

31

Notes1. Rafael Moneo, On Typology, in Oppositions 13, 1978, p 23.2. Quatremre de Quincy, Encyclopdie Mthodique, Architecture, Vol 3, Paris, 1825.3. JacquesFranois Blondel, Cours darchitecture, Vol 2, Paris, 17711777, p 229.4. While a simple notion of type of progress might aspire to the perfectibility of each type, only an internal understanding of the constructive laws of types, and the dynamic transformations of these laws under the threat of external change or internal demands, could open the way to a comprehension of a kind of evolution in architecture. Anthony Vidler, The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the Academic Ideal, 17501830, in Oppositions, 8, 1977, p.108.5. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Abrams (New York), 1986, p 326.6. Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Faber and Faber (London), 1937, p 27.7. A standard may be defi ned as that simplifi ed practical exemplar of anything in general use which embodies a fusion of the best of its anterior forms a fusion preceded by the elimination of the personal content of their designers and all otherwise ungeneric or non-essential features. Such an impersonal standard is called a norm, a word derived from a carpenters square. Walter Gropius, ibid. p 26.8. Walter Gropius, Die Soziologischen Grundlagen der Minimalwohnung, in CIAM, Die Wohnung fr das Existenzminimum, Englert und Schlosser (Frankfurt), 1930, pp 1323. The same text is in English in Walter Gropius, The Sociological Premises for the Minimum Dwelling of Urban Industrial Populations, in The Scope of Total Architecture, Harper (New York), 1955, pp 104118.

Aldo Rossi, Composition with Modena Cemetery, 1979opposite bottom: The art of codifi cation and disposition of residual typological meanings suggests the work of architecture primarily as a register and instrument of collective memory, and the city as the context within which this memory can become active.

Ludwig Hilberseimer, Vorschlag zur Citybebauung, 1930opposite top: From the serial product to the typifi ed structural element to the mass-produced living unit to the plan, identifi able architectural strategies formalise procedures and a general system that, while disposing the individual within an ever-growing multitude, produces new fi gures of the community.

BBPR Architects, Velasca Tower, Milan, 1954below: Through the use of specifi c formal elements, the building, also presented by Ernesto Rogers at the last CIAM meeting in the Netherlands village of Otterlo (1959) where it caused fi erce arguments, becomes a historically constituted signifi er establishing a discourse on the city.

9. Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, trans Eric Dluhosch, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 2002 [Nejmens byt, Vclav Petr (Prague), 1932], p 12.10. Ibid, p 252.11. Saverio Muratori, Studi per unoperante storia urbana di Venezia, Pligrafi co dello Stato (Rome), 1960, p 2. An earlier version appears in Palladio 12 (1959), pp 97106. Saverio Muratori (191073) had come from Rome where he was associated with the Gruppo degli Urbanisti Romani (GUR) and began his research on the city of Venice when he was asked to teach at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura in 1950.12. Henri Focillon, La Vie des Formes, Ernst Leroux (Paris), 1934. The fi rst translation into English was by Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler, The Life of Forms in Art, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1942.13. Henri Focillon, LAn Mil, Armand Colin (Paris), 1952. 14. The Life of Forms in Art, op cit, p 6. In fact, in Lavenir de lesthtique, published in 1929, Etienne Souriau is the fi rst one to defi ne aesthetics in terms of a science of forms (science des formes): a science that studies forms in their own structuring. Opposing the tendency of the time to reside on the psychological analysis of the pleasure of the artist and the viewer, Souriau and Focillon considered the artwork as if it was bearer of an autonomous sense. 15. Ernesto Rogers, The Image: The Architects Inalienable Vision, in Gyorgy Kepes (ed), Sign, Image and Symbol, Studio Vista (London), 1966, p 242.16. Alan Colquhoun, Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays 19801987, MIT

Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989, p 249.17. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (New York) and MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1982, p 127. The fi rst edition of this book, taken from Rossis lectures, appeared in 1966.18. Ibid, p 128.19. Rafael Moneo, On Typology, in Oppositions 13, 1978, p 23.20. Adrian Forty discusses these categories (the individual, the human) in relation to the rhetoric of modernism. He notes: a marked tendency to turn particulars into abstract generalities, for example, walls become the wall, streets the street, a path becomes the route, a house the dwelling, and so on. Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, Thames & Hudson (London), 2000.21. Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum (New York), 2004 [fi rst published in France under the title Le Partage du Sensible: Esthtique et Politique, La Fabrique-Editions (Paris), 2000, p 13.

Text 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 26 Illustration from Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Faber and Faber (London), 1937; p 27 FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2010; p 28 gta Archives/ETH Zurich; p 29 MIT Press 2002. Reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press from Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, trans. Eric Dluhosch, 2002; p 30(t) published in Entfaltung Einer Planungsidee (Berlin: Ullstein: 1963, pp 18-19, ill 7). Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer. Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer Papers, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File 070383.100914-01 The Art Institute of Chicago; p 30(b) Eredi Aldo Rossi; p 31 Enzo & Paolo Ragazzini/CORBIS

32

CITY AS POLITICAL FORM

FOUR ARCHETYPES OF URBAN TRANSFORMATION

Pier Vittorio Aureli focuses on the category of archetype as an alternative to the idea of type. Four examples the axial streets of Renaissance Rome, the 17th-century Parisian place, the 19th-century independent block in Berlin and the 20th-century Viennese superblock are explored here to describe the emergence of modern urban forms that explicitly embody power relations.

Pier Vittorio Aureli

The city is the most explicit index of power relationships. Walls, squares and streets are not only meant to support the functioning of the city, but they also form an extensive governmental apparatus. Without proposing a cause-and-effect relationship between form and politics, the intention here is to trace the political origin of quintessential city projects within the history of the modern city. The aim is to test the political instrumentality of architectural form. For this reason, instead of focusing on the city at large, the focus will be on paradigmatic architectural archetypes. The category of archetype that will be advocated here will not be the way Carl G Jung defi ned it, as a universal contentless form, nor as innate pattern of behaviour.1 Instead, following Giorgio Agamben, the idea of archetype as example will be proposed: neither a specifi c nor a general form, but a singular formal event that serves to defi ne the possibility of a milieu of forms.2 Following such defi nition an archetype could be Jeremy Benthams Panopticon (1785) whose form was interpreted by Michel Foucault not only as the model for that type of surveillance, but as an example through which it is possible to defi ne a particular paradigm of spatial governance.3 The category of archetype is advanced here as an alternative to the idea of type. If type traditionally indicates the idea that regulates the development of a group of forms (and for this reason is irreducible to any particular form), archetype offers the possibility of addressing a found singular form as a defi nition for a possible group of forms. In architecture, an archetype is thus

a paradigmatic form through which it is possible to illuminate a particular critical passage in the development of the city.

In the following notes, the political form of the modern city will be defi ned by addressing four archetypes: the papal axial streets of 16th-century Rome, the Parisian plce of the 17th century, the independent building block in 19th-century Berlin and the 20th-century Viennese superblock. The sequence of these four archetypes attempts to synthetically describe the emergence of modern urban forms that embodied specifi c power relationships within the city, especially those related to the rise of economic accumulation and management as a response to particular confl icts in the city. The aim of this essay is to attempt a short and concise outline of a political history of the modern city, and the way its ethos, made of urban management on the one hand and confl ict on the other, was embodied and represented by the use of certain architectural forms. The argument is that while the changes of the city can be thought of as the evolution of urban types, its realisation can only happen within a political state of exceptions, in which the exemplarity of specifi c and singular forms plays a leading role in resetting the urban condition. The essay counters the current mainstream of evolutionary and empirical research on the city that portrays urban space as an evolutionary and self-organising organism. Against this idea, the city emerges as a locus of a permanent political confl ict of which architectural form is one of the most extreme and radical manifestations.

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Axial Rule in Renaissance RomeThe reinvention of Rome as the capital of Christianity between the 14th and 16th centuries can be considered as one of the most antagonistic processes of urban transformation in the Western world. This was mainly due to two specifi c conditions of the city: its complex topography and geography, and its idiosyncratic political regime. Unlike any other major medieval city in Europe, the major symbolic and power centres in Rome the Capitol, the Cathedral of St John and the Vatican were not located in the city centre, but at the city margins.4 This geography contributed to make the city centre an unresolved multipolar fi eld of forces contested by the different powers represented by these centres. The political regime consisted of a non-dynastic monarchy where each pope was elected at a very old age in order to prevent too long a span of his reign, meaning he had only a very short time in which to implement reforms and to leave his legacy on the city form. The extreme political discontinuity between successive papacies meant popes efforts most often did not follow on from one another, and at best had contrasting aims. These extreme conditions resonated within a chaotic urban form made of an archipelago of clusters, each of them dominated by competing clans or dynasties.

On top of everything, the confl ict between secular and religious power represented within the city by the polar contraposition between the Campidoglio and the Vatican gave to the different forms of confl ict an acute political dimension that triggered the church to engage in the management of the city. It is for this reason that, parallel with the building of new monuments and the restoration of ancient ones, those popes who wanted to leave their mark on the citys urban form engaged with the design of new city streets. This took the form not only of the opening of new or the completion of old streets, but also in a diffuse management of urban space. Facing a situation of extreme backwardness and political uncertainty due the consequences of the Great Western Schism, and the exile of popes in Avignon (13781417), Pope Martino V (pope from 1417 to 1431) instituted the Magistri Viarium, public administrators who were responsible for the management of the streets.5 Their task was not only the physical maintenance of space in terms of circulation and hygiene, but also to reclaim political control of this space from the opposing clans that contended it. It must be considered that in Rome at the time there were no proper streets and public space was more the interstice between the different clusters of buildings. Instituting the Magistri Viarium created the possibility of an organic totalising space of control that would surpass the local scale of the building. What is interesting here is that this was organised not in terms of military control, but through the institution of a civic body whose power was administrative and managerial rather than coercive, and thus more adaptable to being diffused within rather than simply imposed on the city.

The opening and management of new streets was also directed towards the possibility of making the city a Biblia Pauperum, an urban text whose message could be accessible to the pilgrims coming to the Eternal City. Yet the central issue of the street project was that, like in ancient Rome, representation and urban management were fused in the same architectural artefact. In Rome urban circulation acquired this ambivalent meaning of both ceremonial display and urban control.

The awareness of circulation as a means of power soon resulted in a precise and archetypical form: the axial street, of which Donato Bramantes design for Via Giulia (1508) can be considered the most radical example.6 The almost 1,000-metre (3,280-foot) long street that cut through the city fabric running parallel to the river Tiber (and to Via della Lungara, its twin street on the other suburban side of the river), was, above all, a strategic link connecting two important elements of medieval Rome: the 15th-century Ponte Sisto, the only bridge built after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the commercial core of the city inhabited by the emerging class of bankers. The spatiality of Via Giulia is the direct product of the culture of perspective and its application in the representation of reality. The evolution of the science of perspective during the 15th century needs to be understood not only as a means to represent in a mathematically correct way the depth of space, but also because its mathematical implications were a framework within which to reimagine the reform of urban space according to the universal and abstract principles of spatial organisation. The unprecedented axial form of Via Giulia represents the concrete application of this culture to the real body of the city. The perfect linear geometry of the street was intended to organise in one spatial gesture not only a proper circulation space but also a strongly defi ned interdependence between public and private space, by making the public space the perfectly shaped void of the via recta both the access to and control of the private properties along the street.

Via Giulia, Rome, 1508The geometrical regularity of the street offers the possibility of controlling private property by means of public space. Public space appears as regular, universal, effi cient and magnifi cent, and in this way conceals its vested (and partial) interests.

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Economic Empowerment in the Place Royale, Paris A similar concern informs the design of another fundamental archetype of modern city spatiality: the Place Royale (1605, later known as Place des Vosges) in Paris. If Via Giulia was meant to be the urban pendant of a gigantic monumental form the Palazzo dei Tribunali where Pope Julius II intended to concentrate all the juridical and administrative functions of the city the Place Royale was conceived as a monumental space enclosed by a cohesive and quasi-anonymous residential architecture. This architecture consisted of a row of apartments with a portico on the ground fl oor. The portico was the circulation space for the silk workshop that, according to the original project for the square, was to be located on the ground fl oor.7 The square itself is thus an empty space carved within the fabric of the city. Its extreme regularity, its lack of outstanding monumental features, the sense of calm evoked by the endless fenestrations and the repetition of a few decorative elements, realised the political desire to overcome any specifi c symbolic identity.

This desire for a generic architecture can be linked to Henri IVs impetus to overcome the extreme religious confl icts that were characteristic of France towards the end of the 16th century. The formal genericness, the emphasis on space over the monumentality of architecture, can be seen as an anticipation of the biopolitical techniques of urban management implied in the theories of the raison dtat in which power is no longer identifi ed in the symbolic and plastic fi gure of the sovereign, but is distributed throughout the whole social body of the city. In this respect it is interesting to note that although the square was intended for royal gatherings and representations, its planning was guided by the requirement to gain income from the rental of apartments on the upper fl oors and the commercial activities in the workshops on the ground fl oor. Instead of a monumental architecture, the pragmatic monarchy of Henry IV assumed the economic management of the city in the form of production workshops and houses for rent. The economic raison dtre of the city thus becomes the very source of the squares architectural grammar.

As in the case of Via Giulia, it is evident how the evolution of an urban type depends not only on use, but also on the political instrumentality of the most immanent conditions of the city, such as circulation, the relationship between public and private space, economic regime, and organisation of production. For this reason the neat form of the Place Royale can be seen as the urban space that inaugurated an architecture of the city made of distances, voids and repetitions of the same architectural elements, and thus able to be the fl exible framework for the citys development and its consequent (often unpredictable) economic transformations. While the architecture of Via Giulia resulted in the contrast between the overall layout of the street and the individuality of the buildings along it, in the Place Royale the individuality of the architecture is totally absorbed in the uniformity of the space. In this sense, the empty space of the Place Royale, its uniformity, its regularity, represents precisely the ubiquity and the infi nity of the space, and not only the image but also the substance of power within the city. Space is here a framed void: the mere potentiality of social and economic relationships, the possibility of circulation, and thus of empowering the state per via economica.

The Place Royale, Paris, 160512 Engraving after Claude Chastillon, 1677. The Place Royale was built by Henry IV starting in 1605 and was completed in 1612. According to the original project, the ground fl oor of the buildings around the square was intended to host a silk workshop. The square fused economic necessity and ceremonial representation within one simple space.

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The formal genericness, the emphasis on space over the monumentality of architecture, can be seen as an anticipation of the biopolitical techniques of urban management implied in the theories of the raison dtat in which power is no longer identifi ed in the symbolic and plastic fi gure of the sovereign, but is distributed throughout the whole social body of the city.

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Bourgeois Berlin and the Independent Building BlockAn alternative to this type of urban form that characterised the development of the European city between the 17th and 18th centuries is Karl Friedrich Schinkels incremental masterplanning of Berlin between the 1820s and 1841. If 16th-century Rome and 17th-century Paris were developed through the opening of regular spaces within the medieval fabric of the city, Schinkel returns to the archetype of the isolated building block as the primary element of the city. Examples of this are his most important buildings in Berlin, such as the Neue Wache (New Guard House, 1816), the Altes Museum (182330) and the Bauakademie (18326). All were intended by the Prussian architect not only as objects per se, but also as strategic stepping stones for a punctual urban reform of the city. Indeed, the pavilion-like appearance of these buildings implies a space characterised no longer by the cohesive spatiality of the Baroque city where all the buildings are rigidly aligned along the streets and squares, but by the free and unpredictable association of the buildings themselves.

Historians such as Fritz Neumeyer have interpreted such urban forms as implied in Schinkels pavillionaire architecture as the spatial rendering of the emerging bourgeois ethos of 19th-century Berlin.8 According to Neumeyer, Schinkels archetype of the building-as-individual can be understood as the architectural analogue of the free bourgeoisie initiative no longer constrained by the social and political rigidity of Baroque absolutism. In this sense it is important to consider that Berlins urban form was strongly defi ned by the application of the Polizeiwissenschaft, the apparatus of political and social control developed through a sophisticated regime of urban policing.9 The tenets of such a regime consisted in the ubiquitous internal control of the city through pervasive economic and social legislation in which power was completely identifi ed in the principle of economic and social utility. Within such a liberal framework where control is exercised by the production of situated freedoms rather than by imposition of a strict social order, the city is no longer a rigid setting for the representation of power, but a fl exible and incremental accumulation of always changing urban situations. The multiplicity of urban space that forms between Schinkels isolated blocks can thus be interpreted not only as the analogue of the bourgeois liberal initiative, but also as the topographical product of the regime that governed such an initiative. The urban incrementalism implied in Schinkels archetype of the isolated block can be interpreted as the product of an urban ethos in which the growth of the city requires a certain openness of the city space. For this reason the spatial openness that has always been emphasised in Schinkels approach to the city can be seen as the ultimate liberal tactic in which topographic fl exibility and dissolution of rigid masterplanning becomes the ultimate form of urban governance.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Bauakademie, Berlin, 18326Photograph from Schinkels Sammlung Architektonischer Entwrfe of 1837.

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The urban incrementalism implied in Schinkels archetype of the isolated block can be interpreted as the product of an urban ethos in which the growth of the city requires a certain openness of the city space.

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Closure and Obstruction: The Viennese Superblock The tradition of urban form illustrated so far can be summarised as the progressive prevalence of space over form. The archetypes that we have seen share the common denominator of being the result of politics via urban management rather than of explicit political representation. As we have seen, the emphasis on urban management fi nds its spatial analogue in a city where fl exibility and openness towards urban development is the raison dtre of the city archetypes. It is not by chance that the legacy of such a tradition will fi nd its logical conclusion in the emergence of social housing for the workers.

As is well known, the discipline of urbanism emerged from the crisis brought about by industrial development, but the heart of such a crisis is precisely ca