INTRODUCTION

By Christopher CM Lee and Sam Jacoby

TYPOLOGICAL
URBANISM AND THE
IDEA OF THE CITY

14

Yifan Liu, The Great Flight Forward,

Chengdu, China, Diploma Unit 6 (tutors:
Christopher Lee and Sam Jacoby),
Architectural Association, London, 2008
Urban plan of airport. What defines
Chinas public image of monumentality and
iconicity? The project subverts the idea of
the Peoples Square and turns its heroic
figure into an airport.

15

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.

Bolam Lee, Multiplex City, Seoul, South

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

16

opposite: Urban plan of Multiplex City. The

project aims to exploit the defunct middle
floors of multiplexes (multifunctional,
hyperdense high-rises) in Seoul and
converts them into vertical public spaces.

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 efficiency 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 stultification,
the disciplines inability to confidently 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
field of urbanism and the city, and features four projects that
are conventionally not seen as fitting 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 Typology
In 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
suffix -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 classification
or obedience to historical continuity endows type with the
possibility to transgress its functional and formal limitations.
For the definition 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
17

Deena Fakhro, The Holy City and its

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

18

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.

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 specific sites. This notion of
type as model, graphically reducible to diagrams, introduced
precepts that are fundamental to working typologically:
precedents, classification, 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
justified 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
defining 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 specific responses
demonstrate that typological design models are capable of,
and require, their transformation and hybridisation in order
to fulfil the ambitions and requirements of an architectural
project in an urban context.
Typology and the Urban Plan
The 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
first 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.
19

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 clarifies 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 fluid manner that
bears traces to his preoccupations with the problems of
collective form that typified 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
intensifications 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
20

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 stratified 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 exemplified 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 specific 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

Max von Werz, Open Source Fabric,

Zorrozaurre, Bilbao, Spain, Diploma
Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and
Sam Jacoby), Architectural Association,
London, 2007
opposite 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-specific 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, 2008
top: 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.

21

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.

Yi Cheng Pan, Resisting the Generic Empire, Singapore,

Diploma Unit 6 (tutors: Christopher CM Lee and Sam
Jacoby), Architectural Association, London, 2006
top: 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.

22

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, 2008
opposite: 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.

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 flows and pseudoscientific 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
definition, see Spiro Kostof, City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings
Through History, Thames & Hudson (London), 1999.
12. Traditional cities are defined 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, financial cities, medical cities, sport
cities and so on.
Text 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Diploma Unit 6, Architectural Association
School of Architecture, London

23