nontypological architecture
Nontypological architecture refers to a self-evident tendency of certain examples (like housing, a school, or an office) to gravitate towards blank containers of empty space, devoid of subdivisions or features that might anchor them to a specific function or familiar representation. Examples of nontypological architecture sometimes tend towards a disappearance of any enclosure at all. Their blankness compels us to investigate the historical, political, economic, ecological, and ontological forces that surround the disappearance of type and typology in architecture. What becomes particularly relevant are a given example’s parallels to a broader web of material-spatial typologies of the “architecture” of built reality—namely “Nature,” property, technology, and infrastructure—which, like typological architecture proper, are entangled in projects to prefigure social, human, and nonhuman relationships in (someone or something’s) ideal form.
Type refers not to a model or image which is copied, but to the deep structure of how things are put together. Types can be read through paradigmatic examples, whose similarities in mode of design, production, formal, spatial, aesthetic, material, and symbolic features mean they can be grouped. In ancient, or non-modern architecture, type is closely related to ritual and forms of life. New types emerge where protest, protection, and regenerative movements develop emphatic forms of practice and architecture to counter extractivist forces and protect all of the beings and things that life depends on, like water. Type is a tool that allows us to unpack particular modes of worlding, albeit ones in a process of constant, but often slow, transformation.
Typology refers to the discourse on, or systematisation of, type. From ancient fluvial empires to modern industrialising states, typology emerges where the spatial-political management of resources, human and more-than-human relationships, perceptions, and ways of living becomes the focus of political projects concerned with surplus production and accumulation. Our work explores how the disappearance of types and the rise of typology become legible where customary or divergent, situated, yet constantly changing ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to others, land, water, and nonhumans are dispossessed—an ongoing process. Assimilative, subordinating, extractivist regimes of property and infrastructure, which produce binary divisions and hierarchical categorisations—such as nature/society, gender, class, land/body, subject/object, mine/yours—continue to dispossess more grounded and simultaneously fluid ways of constructing reality.
Contrary to dominant ideologies and poetics, extractivist metaphysics—and the abstraction, atomisation, alienation, and distancing orchestrated by dominant typologies of architecture, infrastructure, property, and technology—increasingly fail to deliver promises of progress, security, or even basic sustenance and survival. As is well known, this is largely because, through reductive, instrumental, and oversimplified logics and extractivism, they deplete beyond the limits of life or resources’ ability to reproduce or replenish. As these systems collapse, former divisions, categories, and typologies fail or are rejected. These failures are most visible in the accelerating extinction and water crises, and in interrelated socioecological and psychic crises triggered by the reductive imposition of universal logics across a vast archipelago of radically different experiences and circumstances. Nontypological architecture is a symptom of the failure to reduce life and relationships to economy. It is one of the most defining conditions of our time.
But nontypological architecture is also an ambivalent concept. Architecture which tends towards the nontypology tilts towards a lack of aspects that would tie a given example to a broader series and network: that which exceeds or eludes essences, idealisations, or capture; that which is irreducible, singular, contingent, and in a state of perpetual transformation. As many people, beings, and “cultures” who maintain an intimate, political, and musical relationship to transient, vulnerable things and beings they depend on teach us, architectures and practices for losing the world are necessary in order to establish the conditions through which the current order could be considered from a radically detached perspective, and might be imagined and put back together differently. Our work questions how architecture might take the side of those already building otherwise.