In his essay “The Landscape of Typology,” Franco Purini argues that every building stands for a kind of society. Typology is therefore the history of how people live together, and the architect’s choice of type is a social statement.
Typology becomes the study of social organisation. It can be approached a priori, from an ideal scheme aimed at reform, or a posteriori, through statistical comparison. For Purini, three kinds of buildings shape every city:
– Concord: typological buildings that conform to their kind and to the urban fabric. They gain recognisability but risk conventionality.
– Discord: anti-typological buildings of exception, solitude and formal violence. This is the essay’s sharpest passage. Their fragments don’t long to be whole again. They are simply illegible, an insignificant rubble of architectural individualities.
– Neutrality: the model, a perfect theorem held in an alarmed neutrality just before change. For Purini, this quiet stores the most architectural energy.
Purini tests the theory on a design for a new Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Giardini. Two grids, one from the gardens and one from the Sant’Elena canal, are laid over each other and never reconciled. The pavilion reads as two buildings that happen to share a site: a primary urban conflict.
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