The Third Typology

Author: Anthony Vidler, Salisbury Plain, United Kingdom (Born- 1941)

Summary
The First Typology
18th Century- Architecture was seen as imitative of the fundamental order of Nature
itself.
Laugier depicted four trees as columns, the branches laid across in the form of
beams and the boughs bent over to form the roof as a triangle, which forms a hut.
He saw the existing, unplanned and chaotic reality of Paris as a forestagglomeration of huts, which was to be tamed by cutting and pruning it and brought
into rational order by means of the gardeners art.
19th Century
Basic shift in the natural architecture forms, from a tree/ hut to an animal analogy.
Plan and sectional distribution of buildings in the same terms as the constitutional
organization of species; axes and vertebrae.
Durands theory, Professor at PolytechnicTo dispense with analogy altogether and concentrate on the business of
construction.
The medium was the graph paper grid resulting in the endless combinations and
permutations both monumental and functional. It included the basic elements of
construction.

The Second Typology

End of 19th Century-Emergence after the takeoff of the Second Industrial Revolution
Architecture was now equivalent to the range of mass-production objects, finding the
essential nature of a building to reside in the artificial world of engines. For exampleLe Corbusiers structures
The pyramid of production from the smallest tool to the most complex machine was
now seen as analogous to the link between the column, the house and the city.
In the first and second typology, architecture made by man was being compared and
legitimized by another nature outside itself.
The Third Typology by Anthony Vidler
Anthony Vidler, born 1941, is an American architect, historian, designer, curator
and critic of modern and contemporary architecture and specializes in French
architecture. (Anthony Vidler | The Cooper Union)
In the third typology, columns, houses, and urban spaces, while linked in an
unbreakable chain of continuity, refer only to their own nature as architectural
elements, and their geometries are neither naturalistic nor technical but essentially
architectural. This concept of the city as the site of a new typology is evidently born
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of a desire to stress the continuity of form and history against the fragmentation
produced by the elemental, institutional, and mechanistic typologies of the past.
According to Anthony Vidler, a city should be seen as a whole. It should not be built
out of separate elements nor assembled out of objects classified according to use,
social ideology, or technical characteristics. A city stands complete. Its fragments are
interdependent. If any fragment is destroyed, misused, delineated, the whole area
gets affected. Therefore, a wholistic approach should be taken towards the city, not
only in technical or natural terms but its architectural value too.
He sees the whole city as a garden. He believes that public spaces are the core of
the city. Therefore, there should be no division of public and private spaces. They
should merge well with each other. There should be no isolated building set in an
undifferentiated park. Design skills should be used to create good public spaces like
avenue, arcade, street and square, park and house, institution and equipment. This
should be in coherence with past fabric and present intervention to make one
comprehensible experience of the city.
The speed of a city should be able to match up the present needs. It should be able
to take care of the general public as they are the most important stakeholders of the
city. In the endless cycle of production and consumption, their needs and demands
are often sidelined to serve the creamy layer. Fancy theories like town-scape,
collage-city, strip-city conveniently ignore the proletariats (general public). Public
nature of architecture should be preferred over private and narcissistic vision. No
one should be ignored.
The three criterias of Anthony Vidler on the basis of which a city should be
developed are:
1. The fragments can be inherited from the ascribed means of the past existence of
the forms.
2. They can be derived from specific fragments and its boundaries, often crossing
between previous types.
3. They can be proposed by a recomposition of these fragments in a new context.
(Hays, 1998, pp. 305-311)