Typology [Critical Journal Ep.01]

Typology in anthropology is the division of the human species by races. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists used a typological model to divide people from different ethnic regions into races.

In archaeology a typology is the result of the classification of things according to their characteristics. The products of the classification, i.e. the classes are also called types. Most archaeological typologies organise artefacts into types, but typologies of houses or roads belonging to a certain culture may be set up as well. A typology helps to manage a large mass of archaeological data.

Typology (a.k.a. figura in Latin) in Christian theology and Biblical exegesis is a doctrine or theory concerning the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Typology, derived from the Greek word for "mark", posits that Old Testament events or statements are the "types" pre-figuring an aspect of Christ and his revelation, who is the "antitype" to each type.

Typology (in urban planning and architecture) is the taxonomic classification of (usually physical) characteristics commonly found in buildings and urban places, according to their association with different categories, such as intensity of development (from natural or rural to highly urban), degrees of formality, and school of thought (for example, modernist or traditional). Individual characteristics form patterns. Patterns relate elements hierarchically across physical scales (from small details to large systems.

all definitions via Wikipedia

One new concept that I have been hearing during this last year is Typology. I remember in my third year of architecture my professor Paco Marquez talking to us about the word habitat as the middle of the process of creation in architecture. He told us his experience in the school when Rossi's theories were the axioms followed by everybody in the school. In those years they spent hours and hours analysing houses, buildings... finding similarities... But no longer the architecture is talking about that. Years later Venturi was talking about narratives and symbolism. No longer a museum is under specific rules of appearance. The architecture in most of the cases is driven by the program and recently we can see that aleatory algoritmes even generate an habitable space. I find myself under this tessitura: "You have to choose a typology and it has to suffer a methamorphosis because of being activated by the brief of my project". First still without a clear picture of what is my project is about... HABITARE, HOUSE, SPACE...

These are my first thoughts for typologies to be choosen:

Reference Bibliography:
Aldo Rossi: The Architcture of the City
Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Blog: TEORIAS DE LA ARQUITECTURA. Entry: Las obras tróricas de Robert Venturi