Building Type Production and Everyday Life: Rethinking Building Types through Actor-Network Theory and Object-Oriented Philosophy

Abstract

The aim of this article is to reconceptualise 'building type' in order to better account for its general role in society and everyday life. The article merges the concept of building type with actor-network theory and object oriented philosophy in order to develop the concept of territorial sorts as a way of widening building type research and making it more useful for investigating how building types are actually produced, not just in terms of the work done by different kinds of authorities, such as architects, engineers and building regulations, but also in terms of the ongoing practices and power relations of everyday life.Keywords: building types, everyday life, territorality, actor-network theory, objectoriented philosophy, topologyThe concept of building type has traditionally been based on two different kinds of logic, either the logic of form (materiality and construction) such as the morphological schemata of Jean-Nicolas-Luis Durand's Preçis (1802-5), or the logic of function, such as the division into different usages in Nikolaus Pevsner's A History of Building Types (1976). Much of the discussion of building typology is also centred 2 on the relationship between these two logics and how they interrelate. Scheer names these two different perspectives formal type and use-type (Scheer, 2010: 12; cf. Markus, 1993: 33ff.), and the discourse of building types, as it has evolved in the research fields of, for example, morphology and architectural theory and history, has tended to focus on one side of the split between form and function. The focus on either form or function could sometimes have advantages, but becomes problematic in discussions on building type production. As Scheer has suggested, the production of a successful building type often includes a synomorphic evolution of form and use where "a series of functions /…/ have been choreographed and refined over time, in part because of the existence of a successful type" (Scheer, 2010: 32).Building types play fundamental, and sometimes unrecognised, roles in our societies, not just in urban planning and architectural design, but also in the simple ongoings of everyday life. To investigate this further, one would, however, need a building type theory that allows us to focus on events and effects rather than forms and functions.In this article, I use actor-network theory and object oriented philosophy to develop a building type theory that better addresses the complex and sometimes user-driven production of building types in society. In the first part I develop an actor-network perspective (Latour, 2005) that, by bypassing the traditional dichotomies of form and function, helps us to describe building types as a heterogeneous and multi-scalar phenomenon. In Mapping Controversies in Architecture (2012), Albena Yaneva has proposed an architectural theory inspired by actor-network theory (hereafter ANT) and the theories of Latour (Latour, 2005), seeking to trace an 'architecture on the move', as it unfolds in practice (Latour and Yaneva, 2008)....

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