Wojciech Odrobina

How many types of architecture are there?

Types of architecture

Have you ever looked at a building and wondered if it is Bauhaus or Modernist? Often the types of architecture and their styles build on each other, and in each past period the foundation for the advancement of the next culture is built. Just think of the lasting influence of the Egyptian pyramids or classical Greek temples.

An architectural type is an expression that describes a formal structure.

* The type is conceptual in nature, not objective in nature: it brings together a family of objects that possess all the same essential conditions.

* The type has a description by which it is possible to recognize the objects that compose it.

* Type refers to formal structure, we speak of types from the moment we recognize the existence of structural similarities between architectural objects.

One of the best definitions that we know of the idea of ​​existing classes or types of architecture comes from a literary text: Victor Hugo in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris: «Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries .

Art is often transformed when it is not yet finished: the work continues peacefully according to the transformed art.

The new art brings the monument to where it is. It is done following a natural and silent law. This is what happens in the type of European religious architecture during the Christian era.

Whatever the development of the sculptor and the embroidery of a cathedral below, it is always the Roman basilica that develops eternally on the ground according to the same law.

The internal skeleton, the logical arrangement of the parts, of which Hugo speaks. It is something that is at the very root of architecture and the styles that comprise it. That is why it always remains and reappears in its different manifestations. The superposition of different styles in the same monument is not evidence of the interchangeable character of the styles, the style links architecture with history.

Just as style relates all architectural works to precise spatio-temporal coordinates, the type of architecture expresses the permanence of its essential aspects and highlights the invariable nature of certain formal structures, which act as fixed points in the evolution of architecture and its styles.

We often find references to certain architectural types in which the designation according to each style has a chronological dimension, which seems to link it to specific historical circumstances. This terminology seems to contradict our definition of type as a permanent principle, and therefore protected from the flow of time. In reality, this contradiction does not exist because if we purify these designations of contingent attributes, their structural condition is revealed to us.

Some borderline cases show us the idea of ​​an indissoluble type of architecture linked to a specific historical event. This is the case of the Greek Peripheral Temple and the Roman Theater.