TRANSCENDING TYPE: DESIGNING FOR URBAN COMPLEXITY

摘要

The city has always posed a problem for architects because of its multiple actors, scales and complexity. Typology offers designers the advantage of a speedy response and a standardised product, but its disadvantages are its inflexibility, lack of control by the user, the elimination of variety and choice. Authoritarian regimes or other governments threatened by sudden change have often used the typological approach as a reductive instrument to try to quickly create cities. The Venezuelan Modernist architect Carlos Villaneuva, for instance, designed massive housing blocks at the 29 Enero Estate in Caracas in the 1950s to house new rural immigrants, only to have the intended parks between the blocks invaded by later squatters who built themselves a series of impromptu urban villages up the vacant hillside.