The Question Concerning Types: A Review

A characteristic of the 21st century for architecture as a discipline and profession is dealing with contemporary challenges such as a failure of traditional economic models, an urban and architectural density, technological literacy, migration phenomena, and pandemics. Whilst these challenges describe an emerging regime; they are not entirely new from a historical perspective. Over time, architecture has attempted to solve these challenges by critically hosting other fields to inform evolving architectural types. Therein lies the central aspect of a genuine architectural type. Despite its identifiable inventor, a type possesses such a degree of universality and anonymity that can be used by architecture in general. However, this capacity of hosting has got lost with the advent of a deterministic approach to architecture. The deterministic and regulatory culture, for instance, has imposed controlled forms, standards and functions to accommodate endless cycles of architectural production and consumption. Today, therefore, an engagement with architectural types does not so much offer a dialectic for design much less a means of critical resistance. In it, a theoretical contribution to architecture through a typological analysis has been abandoned. From the 1835 architectural type’s ground-breaking definition by A. C. Quatremère de Quincy to the contemporary discourse, this paper explores the constitution of architectural types, and pinpoints the contradictions and deficiencies in their crisis. By welcoming a robust review of past and present typological debates, this paper touches upon aspects of classification unself-conscious variables, re-composition of a city’s fragments in a new context, and theories about typological design tested through constructions. Consequently, the analysis will introduce a turning point approach to architectural types that is concerned with universality again. This will allow the approach to reveal architectural types with their own renewed latent critical position equally regarding history and contemporaneity, stalemates and changes, the global and the regional.