Don’t Shoot the Messenger SVP: A Brief Essay on the Theory of Typology

Abstract

The evolution of architecture has been recurrently dependent, either consciously, or subconsciously, on inherited knowledge. However, not within a scheme of literal replicas, but yes through a symbiosis between copy and invention on abstract core characteristics. The present essay intends to shine some light on Type and Typology’s role on the awareness of such process, by developing a brief journey through their juvenile and tumultuous existence as a theoretical problem. Besides that, this essay also explores two collateral reasonings. Firstly, that Typology, although being only a tool, has been taken as the ‘scapegoat’ of the architectonic ideologies that took profit of it. And secondly, that Types, in architecture, should not be solely associated with the structure of forms, but to the larger realm of Concepts.