Throughout the history of architecture, building typologies have provided the dominant model of a working design methodology. Moreover, catalogues of building typologies are so evidently bound to specific conventions, cultures, and forms of practice, it is astonishing that the practice of using abstract concepts and diagrams to generate design have retained any prevalence at all. In an attempt to reevaluate and reinvent building forms and functions it seems the diagram offers a generative and conceptual beginning to simplify and clarify ideas without the burden of type. As Bjarke Ingels explains in a recent lecture, “architecture is less an expression of our preconception than it is an expression of the specific qualities or ideas that that project is pursuing.” Primarily, diagrams are a means of reduction that respond to the complexities of building ideas through a simplification of important geometric and ordering relationships, but in the more recent past there has been a move towards diagrams realizing their potential in built, physical form. This move towards “diagrammatic architecture” has transformed the way in which architects view the use of diagrams. While some feel that this reduction should stay as a generative tool during the design process, other architects are seeing the diagrams become the buildings themselves. While these diagrams have become integral to design methodology, there is also an inevitable elegance about a physical form that realizes its function, physically, in terms of forms reduced to bare function, and to absolute lucidity.
Both diagrams and building typology are in their very intentions, a reduction of architecture. However, architectural ‘types’ as Quatremere de Quincy observed, are “formed through a process of reducing a complex of formal variants to a common root form”. While it allows for deviation, typology still maintains its presence as a formerly expended solution to another building’s demands. This approach limits the realm of imagination and intuition during the creative act of design. Even though diagrams also serve as a reductive approach to architecture, their aim is to create a subjective, and core conceptual idea. The tendency of diagrams to encourage abstractions of complex thoughts releases the architect of prior perceptions concerning program, function and form. This reliance on diagrams can evolve into a more compelling and instinctive way of designing. In other words, rather than following the typological schemas rooted in the past, contemporary methodologies can be inspired by a more distinct, present, and personal conception; from the diagram, up. Diagrams can then become the alternative to the usage of historical typologies.
In order to understand the evolution of typology and of the diagram as tools for a design methodology, I will begin my analysis with an overview of precedent studies. I will collect contemporary precedents and look at the work of OMA, SANAA, BIG, as well as other typology-based firms. These precedent studies will eventually turn into a series of sectional investigations, to help better analyze the buildings that have formed from these two approaches. These sectional explorations will prove useful in investigating the evolution of typologies and diagram-based buildings. I will investigate the theories of both methodologies and test their contemporary use by comparing and contrasting the results of both.
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