The language of typology

The concept of typology has recurred in architectural discourse since the term’s conception in the early nineteenth century. To describe an architectural object usually involves an act of typifying; a generalisation of built form to common characteristics. Both the analysis of architecture and its creation require this abstraction, which offers the potential to form types and expose initially unapparent relationships. Typology’s Enlightenment origins sought to link architecture to a natural order, but its terminology has subsequently been adopted in modernist rejections of mass culture and Neo-Rationalist pursuits of continua and meaning. Despite widespread use of the term, the role typology plays in the process of design remains unclear. Attempts to link its academic origins to the creation of architectural form (notably by Gottfried Semper in the nineteenth century, and Guilio Carlo Argan and Aldo Rossi in the twentieth century) have done little to synthesise the two and merely succeeded in alienating it from practice.