What is Architectural History

62 What is Architectural History?

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to regard arch itecture
as analogous with any number of other phenomena, natural
or cultural. Like birds, paintings, rocks and people, buildings
could be divided into families that could be understood
independently of history. A typological approach to arch-
itectural history married the values of intellectual pragma-
tism with the empirical division of buildings into categories
shaped by how they appeared to work. In his Dictionnaire
historique d’architecture (1832), Antoine Quatremère de
Quincy explains the nature of the term as applied to
architecture:

The word type presents less the image of the thing than the

idea of an element which must itself serve as a rule for the

model.... The model, understood in the sense of practical

execution, is an object that should be repeated as it is; con-

trariwise, the type is an object after which each artist can

conceive works that bear no resemblance to each other. All

is precise and given when it comes to the model, while all is

more or less vague when it comes to the type.^36

As a category, then, ‘type’ is substantially looser than ‘model’,
allowing for broad groupings of buildings according to
shared points of reference, commonly connected to the build-
ing’s purpose. Just as architecture as such can be thought to
have a history, so too can its genres. Thus we can conceive
of an architectural history of the hospital, the university
campus, the basilica, the factory, the museum, the high-
density housing block, the railway station, the opera house,
the presidential library and the airport. Each family is both
fi gural and functional in character, and further divisible
according to categories that are often suggested by the type
itself: ecclesiastical architecture as a type includes sub-genres
shaped by liturgy, plan-form or period; likewise, convales-
cent hospitals, asylums for the insane, and hospitals for com-
municable diseases can lay claim to their own architectural
histories.
Types can be intimately tied to nature, as Marc-Antoine
Laugier argued in 1753: the ‘primitive’ hut refl ected an ‘ideal
of perfect geometry’.^37 Trees lent columns; their boughs gave
shape to a rustic pediment. In a seminal article of 1977,
Anthony Vidler calls this the ‘fi rst typology’.^38 Architectural