Building types and built forms

摘要

Before suggesting why Steadman's book Building types and built forms might be of special interest to the readers of the Journal of Urban Design, the question at its core will be described. The book maps and discusses the historic evolution of building designs in the context of an explicit model of abstract design space, the space of designs that are theoretically possible given the constraining requirements associated with generic functions. Hence the title and hence also the organization of the book in paired chapters, one dealing with a particular building type and associated programmatic design considerations over a particular period-for example, residential apartments, hospitals, schools, tall office buildings and prisons-and another mapping the underlying variability of possible forms framed by these considerations. Building types are treated as essentially historic and social constructs, the language in which social institutions and social practices become realized in physical space through architecture. Built forms are treated as geometrical entities amenable to formal description. While the book offers a rather compelling panorama of the intersecting histories of building types, its distinctive contribution lies in the dialogue between history and formal modelling. This casts such familiar modes of thinking in a new light: history is illuminated by the explicit conceptualization of underlying constraints and modelling is animated by the historical record. The stage is set for thinking of buildings in terms of evolution: how formal 'conflgurational genes'conjoining geometry and generic functionality interact with the exigencies of'historic and social environments'. The design of particular building types over particular periods populates specific regions of the space of abstract possibility. It thus become possible to track evolutionary paths, but also to identify potential paths of development not taken, thus asking new questions about the constraints that we must take into consideration in order to account for the historical record. In the context of architectural discourse it is as if the subject matter of Durand's (1819) Lemons is made to intersect with Durand's (1801) Receuil, the first time that'compositional types'are brought to intersect'function types'in a way that casts light on the intrinsic dynamics of design thinking even as it makes building design the subject of a potential theory of evolution.