Changing building typologies: The typological question

and the formal basis of architecture By Daniel Koch

Review submitted by Noeen Fatma
4th B
A/2956/2016

There is a lot of ongoing discourse about the how building use and thereby typologies has been
changing nowadays, however the author in this paper denies this timeliness of 'nowadays' and
argues that the buildings have been ever evolving and to illustrate his point takes up the evolution
and timeline of two types - homes and stores- to account for the typological mix .

Stores or shops used to be sites of negotiation - a social and cultural institution. The shop used to be
an interface, a layer between public and private as it used to be in the front portion of the building
with house on the back.

Public street → shop → Private home

Then in came the concept of department stores which marked a remarkable change in the seller
customer relationship, a buyer got freedom of choice and no longer depended on the seller's choice
of goods. The advent of departmental store changed the internal social configuration and gave rise
to the employee culture to what used to be a family enterprise.

With the advent of industrialisation and subsequently of glass and its use in store fronts again
changed the seller buyer dynamics with the ability of a customer to see before entering the store
what it has to offer. Another important change it brought about was the visibility of price tags-
bringing in figurative as well as literary transparency.

Choices of where, what and how to shop contribute to the social and cultural structuring of
individuals and society. What a ‘shop’ was, what social and cultural practices a visit entailed, as well
as how it formulated social bonds and relations internally and externally, at this point had gone
through changes making it from many points of view problematic to equalise the before and after as
the same type of space or function, despite a consistent partial purpose being shared in the form of
economic transactions.

Talking about evolution of homes to the modern format, the author argues how the idea of a home
is essentially related to the societal values. While a home took a backseat in Greece in earlier times,
giving the limelight to the interactive social spaces and thereby democratic values, the home in
Rome during those times was the cultural centre where business, negotiations and socialising
happened.

Later the industrialisation and mass production and the emerging lifestyle of the growing middle
class transformed what constitutes the home; home and workplace, or work and spare time,
became two distinct entities.

A home was not a single-family contemporary apartment. As can be seen from the example author
gave about the homes having servants and how architecturally they were separated from the main
inhabitants, but later this trend ceased and the household was considerably reduced and these
spaces adapted and merged into the cooking and dining spaces.

To a certain extent, the modern function types, rest on very specific notions of function and use, and
their relation to build form as distinct and specific. Under such a point of view a relation between
changing habits and changing typology is immediate. If one changes, so does the other.

However, the author states this point that whether a function based change has happened over the
years or not, that’s not important, the point is that the perception of the change is linked only with
architecture while the change in social structuring, cultural communication, technological
developments are also responsible for a typological change. This was illustrated through examples of
homes and shops, how they were changing continuously rather than being historically stable as
opposed to the popular opinion about a changing type is. The architectural typology has the
potential of disguising this continuous change as stability.