nontypological architecture
Nontypological Architecture is a practice defined by thinking and working with examples that tend towards blank containers of empty space; architectures that tend towards either the active negation, or the disappearance, of form and subdivision.
In other examples of architecture that tends towards the nontypological, walls and subdivisions abound, typically in 'noncompositional' grids or arrays which lack the features of an endless puzzling about with rooms, corridors, and programmes to achieve frictionless routines of work and life that have defined, for example, housing since the rise of industrialisation. The tendency towards an absence of composition or typology makes visible a waning of the power to predicate, divide, and give any lasting or meaningful order to set tasks, roles, properties, classes, and categories. Composition has both both vacated and augmented older, sluggish, and more contestable prefigurative medias and mediums. Apex figuration has migrated elsewhere. In a turn that paralleled Turing’s invention of the Universal Computing Machine in 1938, the broader architecture learned to constantly modify the programme through instantaneous surveillance, feedback loops, and rapid—and then automated—modification of a programme that optimises itself without the vulnerability of needing to change physical parts.
Nontypological architecture makes visible a shift in the power to produce ideal programmatic or ontological “partitions.” Distinctions between, for example, home and work, infrastructure and architecture, politics and economy, nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, or knowledge-practice and being, animate and inanimate tend to dissolve. At a time when the mass of the ‘technosphere’ or the totality of human-made technological objects—which grows both increasingly “liberating” and suffocating by the second—weighs thirty times more than all life on Earth, more and more of the architecture we inhabit tends towards the disappearance of history, plans, or future. A frightening and exhilarating encounter with a ceaseless unfolding of the world opens up and with it comes an experience of pervasive vulnerability. This explains the appeal of those people and things that promise to be able to protect us from the worlds dissolution and transformation.
Examples of nontypological architecture include, for example, a 1950s house with no walls by a “radical” European or Japanese architect; a 1960s office hollowed out by cybernetically surveilled, newly “creative” workers; a contemporary Meta data centre; a vast Amazon warehouse; or a Walmart superstore. They include a Covid hospital installed in a convention centre, or fields of refugee beds arrayed in a grid inside a stadium. Nontypological architecture can be seen in underpasses filled with tents beneath interstate highways in Silicon Valley today, and in their precursors in 18th-century property grids laid across the so-called “wild” West. It appears in the increasing use of eminent domain and extrajudicial enclosures for “critical infrastructure” and national security, which dispossess land, water, nonhumans, and power. More crucial still is the continuous dispossession of mutually vulnerable, situated, irreducible, and constantly shifting experiments in ways of knowing, relating, and building—experiments that resurface precisely where dominant typologies, property, and infrastructure collapse, or fail to provide security, happiness, or even basic sustenance.
In an equal and opposite way, nontypological architecture is defined by a proliferation of gridded enclosures that stifle all direct relationships between bodies. This can be seen in non-compositional interior grids of one-room or micro-apartments stacked like server shelves or warehouse boxes in speculative multiplications of artificial ground; in the bedroom of an aspiring hikikomori; or of an Ono–Lennon-like “us,” though decidedly poorer. While walled subdivisions increasingly lack the power to separate categories, uses, or programmes, they instead become desperate instruments for infrastructurally separated and reconnected bodies—human and more-than-human, including land, water, bacteria, and other beings whose flourishing is co-dependent with our own.
The infrastructure of separation and abstract mediation grows ever denser, vaster, more extraterrestrial, and more nanoscopic, as it simultaneously attempts to mirror, absorb, and neutralise refusal, resistance, misuse, and excess, and puts to work the human—and indeed many other beings—most powerful trait: adaptation. In other words, to avoid threats to its own metaphysical hegemony, endlessly expanding production has undertaken a truly monumental feat of transformation, learning to put that most destructively creative power at the very centre of production: the power to negate being trapped in any determinism, whether genetic, social, cultural, linguistic, and so on. And yet production produces ever more artificial planes upon which creative negation can operate without ever threatening its proliferation of properties, classes, categories, and its bottom line.
Type refers not to a model or image that is copied, but to the deep structure of how things are put together. Types can be read through paradigmatic examples whose similarities in design, production, formal, spatial, aesthetic, material, and symbolic features allow them to be grouped as part of a series. In ancient or non-modern architecture, type is closely related to ritual and forms of life. Type therefore becomes a tool for unpacking particular modes of seeing, knowing, relating, and living, even when these shift slowly. Paradoxically, new types begin to emerge in the midst of nontypological practice, where dominant typologies of architecture, infrastructure, “Nature,” knowledge, and property fail or are rejected. They emerge through countertypological and counterinfrastructural acts of protest, protection, and regeneration that develop emphatic practices and architectures to counter extractivist forces and to protect the beings and things on which any possibility for a good life depends, such as land and water.
Typology refers to the discourse on, or systematisation of, type. From ancient fluvial empires to modern industrialising states, typology appears where the organisation of resources, relationships, perceptions, and ways of living becomes central to projects which, despite dazzling spectacles of “culture,” are ultimately concerned with the assimilation of humans, nonhumans, the dead, and the unborn into regimes of endless surplus accumulation. Our work explores how the disappearance of types and the rise of typology become legible where customary or divergent ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to others, land, water, and nonhumans are dispossessed.
Yet nontypological architecture is a decidedly ambivalent concept. It invokes a practice of negation, because through negation we arrive at what is actually here, now. On the other hand, for those of us who value living on and negating, as it were, we might engage in “positive” practices of care for the limits, needs, and rhythms of those we depend on to enjoy our lives. At the same time, we cannot simply shed those dominant types, like the family, to whose debilitating mechanisms our forces might otherwise be applied. We might thus assume many ways of being at the same time.
Syncretic practice, by learning to hold multiple, radically different modes of seeing, knowing, and building in relation to each other, without seeking to subsume or synthesis any of them, also constitutes a nontypological practice. Hybridity creates schisms, and agonisms which destabilise any fiction that seeks to universalise itself and yet this shared inessentiality becomes a kind of universal ground. As many people, beings, and “cultures” who experiment with intimate political, musical, and hybrid onto-epistemological negotiations with transience, vulnerability, and deeply entangled forms of existence with the things we depend on teach us, architectures and practices for losing the world—and returning to almost nothing—are necessary to create the conditions through which the world can be woven back together differently. Because we can only work from within our deeply mediated dependencies, we ask how architecture might take the side of those already protecting our kin, and building radically otherwise.