SCHOOL BUILDINGS THAT ARE BOTH SIMPLE AND FLEXIBLE are the only way to anticipate unforeseeable and rapid changes in pedagogic philosophies and learning models, changes that will only accelerate with time.
The word “typology” or “type” (same thing stripped of the esoteric tone) to architects has more than one meaning. Sometimes it refers to the shapes of buildings (shoebox, square donut, drum) and sometimes to the roles of buildings (city hall, school, library). The building’s shape and its role have often related to one another but not always. These days we tailor buildings’ shapes to their purpose, sometimes in the minutest of ways, tight as a glove. We live chastened by the now one-hundred-year-old commandment that a buildings’ form shall follow its function even as we yearn to be free, give them shapes that defy category, free up the forms.
WHILE SEEMINGLY RIGID the geometry of the rectangle is the most flexible and accommodating of shapes. A building of this type is less required to telegraph its use as it is to provide for it in the least heavy-handed way possible.
In ancient days, there were few types of (important) buildings, few shapes and roles. You could tell the role of the building by the shape of the building. There were temples, stadiums and stoa, then basilicas, rotundas and baths, then cloisters, castles and cathedrals. This all changed around 500 years ago when new kinds of buildings emerged. City halls and palaces channeled castles and monasteries, villas collaged together Greek temple front, rotunda and stoa shapes. Then came theaters and banks that looked like temples, train stations that looked like baths, libraries like palaces, and hospitals and schools like villas.
TENACITY OF TYPE EXAMPE 1: TEMPLE FRONT While certainly old-fashioned to contemporary eyes the classical temple front was the go-to motif in the rendering of the identity of buildings for over 2500 years. Across this time frame the temple front accumulated mutating symbolic connotations.
TENACTY OF TYPE EXAMPLE 2: DOMED ROTUNDA We are all familiar and take for granted the domes of our city halls, state capitols and national capitol. The domed rotunda had its origins in ancient Rome followed by two millennia of adaption first into religious buildings then secular ones.
TENACITY OF TYPE EXAMPLE 3: PORTE COCHERE An example closer to home and one that every American experiences on a daily basis might be the corner gas station. It too has a type whose history can be traced, beginning with the porte cochere (upper left) and it too has transformed and will continue to with time as we have already seen most recently in Los Angeles with the phenomenon of the Starbucks Drive-Through (lower right).
Modernist moralists sermonized that all that borrowing of old shapes to fit new purposes was nostalgic fakery and lacked imagination. For a while in the 20th century, we decided that if we started with what they called the “social program”, meaning the purpose of the building, its function—what today we would call the “space” or “building” program-- this in combination with new technologies and materials would alone produce the look of the building, no borrowing necessary.
APPROPRIATION OF THE STOA TYPE was 16th century northern Italian architect Andrea Palladio’s modus operandi in configuring buildings that embraced the countryside. (Ancient Stoa, Athens, Greece above; three of Palladio’s villas below).
THE WINGS OF A PALLADIAN VILLA configure in “I”, “C”, “H”. “T” or “U” shapes. They functioned as loggias and agricultural support buildings and created forecourts and courtyards that mediated between the larger landscape and the interiors of the buildings.
EMBRACING THE LANDSCAPE became a thing over the next two centuries, with buildings both important and quotidian expanding their reach in various iterations of simple geometric shapes.
BAROQUE CONFIDENCE in their ability to configure buildings in ever more complicated shapes led inevitably to hubristic overreach and meaningless musings over ever more ridiculous planimetric compositions. (“Architectural Alphabet”, Johann David Steingruber, 1773).
One consequence of this has been the excessive tailoring of the shape of the building to a program of spaces so tightly wound that buildings struggle to accommodate what modernism seemingly failed to anticipate: buildings’ purposes change (sometimes even over the course of a day). Another consequence has been the tendency to contort buildings’ shapes so much that they repel their neighbors. We get cities that are a scattershot of pick-up sticks, jacks, marbles and checkers. “If I can’t have it my way I’m picking up my toys and going home”. A lot of playing, not a whole lot of sharing.
THE EQUATION OF TYPE WITH FUNCTION emerged from the proliferation of specialized roles (train stations, hospitals, factories) and led to the modernist obsession that a buildings appearance ought to emerge from and only from its purpose (“A History of Building Types” Nikolaus Pevsner, 1976).
SPHERES AND CUBES contain the most and second most amount of volume within the least and second least extent of surface area. But they do not for the most part make good building shapes. The next simplest, efficient (and also viable) building shape is the shoe box.
The most flexible shape, one that more than any other for most purposes and with a few obvious exceptions, is a right-angled parallelepiped. In other words, a shoe box. Ninety-nine percent of the buildings we build would comfortably fulfill their purposes within a shape that approximates a shoe box or a combination of shoe boxes in extended rectangular (or nearly rectangular) compositions. There are few internal forces that would dictate anything but the simplest of box shapes and this ought to be our default starting point. There are, however, some internal and plenty of external forces that would suggest elaborations and deformations of the basic box—daylight, view, surrounding topography and neighboring buildings.
THE INTERSECTION OF A “V” WITH AND “E” serves mostly to demonstrate the efficiency and utility of the rectilinear geometry of the original building. The benefits of extreme angularity to the interiors of the building may be there but they are not readily apparent upon cursory review of the floor plan. (Military History Museum, Studio Libeskind, Dresden, Germany, 2011).
THE “X” SHAPE of this building will forever assure its estrangement from the riverfront upon which it faces and any building in its vicinity. The benefits to the interiors of the building may be there but they are not readily apparent upon cursory review of the floor plan. (Bibliotheque Alexis deTocqueville, Caen, France, OMA, 2016).
THE “L” SHAPE of this building is mostly rectilinear and while designed as a library entirely flexible in anticipating the unpredictable future of the American community library or even its transformation into some other use. (West Hollywood Library, Johnson Favaro, West Hollywood, CA 2011)
We might start with an “I” shape (shoebox) or an “L” shape (two shoeboxes joined at the corner) and from there try in ascending complexity a “T” “C”,”U”, “O” ,”E” or “H”. It could be fairly argued that for 4,900 years of our 5,000 years of building experience, most buildings we have built are of one of those shapes. We talk in short-hand and when we say “bar building” (“I shape), “courtyard building” ( “O” shape or square donut) or “C” or “U” shape (countless schools, apartment buildings and hotels). This is the wisdom behind the idea of typology and its utility in practice. It recognizes a trail of experience and evidence of the ability of simple building shapes to live with one another, deform as necessary to do so and accommodate any number of uses simultaneously and over time.
THE MANUFACTURING WAREHOUSE LOFT BUILDING was the model emulated in the design of these two classroom buildings for a community college located in a former warehouse district on the south side of downtown Los Angeles. (Los Angeles Trade Technical College South Campus, Los Angeles, CA, 2010).
THE “I” SHAPE of the two buildings creates consistent street frontage and together with a neutral rectangular structural frame accommodates an endless array of uses within. (Los Angeles Trade Technical College South Campus, Los Angeles, CA, 2010)
BY BEGINNING SIMPLE then following through with a sequence of elaborations, we arrive at a shape that both suits this building’s inaugural purpose and its role on the site. (Chaffey College, Main Instruction Building, Chino, CA, 2009)
THE “H” SHAPE of this building creates a forecourt on its north side and a generously scaled courtyard on its south side that emulates the role of a quadrangle and initiates the establishment of the future central mall that will form the heart of this new campus (Chaffey College, Main Instruction Building, Chino, CA, 2009).
Does this inhibit our ability to create unique, exciting buildings? Does it trap us into a vortex of nostalgia? It does not. There is no limit to the quantity and kinds of embellishment and expression, the application of new technologies and materials toward the manipulations of simple shapes to create buildings never before seen that are also welcoming to neighbors and accommodating of new purposes we cannot foresee. It suggests a design methodology by which we first start simple then allow the complexities to unfold as circumstances and details emerge. It is freedom from the tyrannical determinism of form follows function and the intemperate wanderings of free form.
AWKWARD SITE GEOMETRY drives the siting and configuring of this building on an existing campus along Mulholland Drive overlooking the San Fernando Valley (Mirman School Learning Center, Los Angeles, CA, 2022).
THE “J” SHAPE of this building is really an “L” shape with an appendage whose purpose is to mediate between the two major geometries of the campus, one oriented to Mulholland Drive in front (north) the other that of the hillside in back (south). (Mirman School Learning Center, Los Angeles, CA, 2022).