Whether described as classification, categorization or taxonomy, the typological effort essentially constitutes grouping similar things together in a way that is meant to be helpful.
Similarly, in architecture a type exists to direct, to connect or to be instrumental in other ways.
The projects explore how typology may be helpful in designing architecture in dense, complex, mixed-use urban contexts. To see typological thinking as appropriate in a complex condition seems counterintuitive.
UNStudio has developed and applied certain typologies in two different large-scale urban projects with the intention of regaining a specific architectural and urban control in complex, hard-to-control contexts, using a number of different models or types.
Arnhem Central, the project is fundamentally an urban densification exercise.
An opportunity to connect the town to a larger, transnational network and simultaneously generate new office spaces, shops, housing units and ancillary functions.
While in other times urban growth schemes were largely ground-bound or sky-bound , relying on simple models of horizontal or vertical expansion, for Arnhem central new, more topologically inclined models were developed that privilege connective and transitional qualities rather than oppositional ones.
Movement studies showed up sequences of exchange and interaction, revealing the relations between duration and territorial usage.
The typology that encapsulates and advances the technical/spatial organisation is a centralizing void space inspired by the Klein bottle.
Both models allow for column-free spaces; indeed it could be argued that they were introduced precisely to make columnlessness possible, bringing new qualities to the forgotten territory of transitory spaces in which a large part of contemporary life takes place.
A type is therefore necessary that helps to articulate and to proliferate urban qualities. Such ideas were tried by architects in the 1960s, often unsuccessfully. But at that time the knowledge-processing and visualising techniques we have available today were not in existence.
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