Typological Instruments

• 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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