What is important is that type constructs a link with history, and produces transmittable knowledge. Images because they embody values, experience, ideas. Built form because buildings witness the evolution of the city. A material reality which is manifest both in built form and as images in treatise. The concept of collective memory and of type are closely interrelated, because collective memory relies on material reality. Later in The Architecture of the City Rossi discusses the concept of collective memory, via the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who wrote that historical memory reaches us through written and visual records. It should be made clear, however, that the idea of type is a dialectical principle, because it always reacts with, say: form, construction technique, site irregularities, means of production, cultural particularities, history, and also, the autobiography of the architect. Although in this sketch of a few texts that deal with theories about type, an emphasis is seemingly placed on type as it relates to classification. I have noted these texts because as Rossi wrote in The Architecture of the City, the concept of type became, “the very idea of architecture,” a fact attested to by both practice, he says, and by the treatise. Those inbetween address in succession the building programmes of the city from residential, commercial, high-rises, halls and theatres, transport, industrial, trade construction. Hilberseimer’s Groszstadt Architektur was organised into ten chapters with the first two and final describing the urban condition and proposing a response. While the latter was divided into three: on architectural elements, on composition, and on analysis of building types. In Durand’s books, the Recueil et Paralléle, and the Précis des leçons d’architecture, the former catalogued existing works of architecture from different cultures and historic periods at the same scale. Palladio’s Four Books organised the Orders, private buildings in rural and urban settings, then public buildings and, buildings of historical significance. Serlio’s books on architecture catalogued buildings from Ancient Rome in plans, elevations and perspectives, before describing the typological-form of temples: circular, square, six-sided, eight-sided, oval and cruciform. For example, in De re aedificatoria Alberti distinguished between public and private buildings in the city, assigning the Orders to certain classes of building. Although not all of these works use the word typology, or type, the concept is implied because each use classification, description, and historical precedent to formulate a position.
#Palladio four books of architecture text manual
As can be seen in canonical texts since Vitruvius, such as those by Alberti, Serlio, Palladio, during the Renaissance, to Durand during Enlightenment, Hilberseimer in the early twentieth-century, Rossi in the 1960s and others, we can view the process of architectural history unfolding, treatise to treatise, manual to manual, and manifesto to manifesto. Typology in architecture gives us an apparatus to study the history of architecture, which can also be understood as a way to examine the collective memory of the city.
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