Organizing the past 65building types written as such.^43 Carroll Meeks’s The Rail-
road Station (1956) is notable among his examples, as is
Johan Friedrich Geist’s history of the nineteenth-century
arcade, dating from 1969.^44
Of course, Pevsner’s book does not exhaust the extent of
architectural types, attending mainly to those of importance
to architects of the nineteenth century. In the book’s fore-
word, though, he usefully observes that ‘this treatment of
buildings allows for a demonstration of development both
by style and by function, style being a matter of architectural
history, function of social history’.^45 Type, then, is in his
presentation a combination of function, materials and styles,
the histories of which intersect as a typological history
informed by the demands made of architects by their clients
and patrons, by the technical possibilities available to the
architect, and by architecture’s internal artistic and concep-
tual developments.^46
Most contemporary histories of architecture that follow
cues of a typological nature do not do so in order to advance
a strong theory of architectural genus. For most architectural
histories type is a category of convenience that combines well
with other framing devices. Michael Webb’s Architecture in
Britain Today (1969) makes typological divisions in a history
determined by geography and period, so that modern British
architecture is further classifi ed within a number of smaller
genres: a series of educational and institutional types, houses
and housing at various scales, shops and offi ces, sports venues
and churches.^47 Typological classifi cation is not the end for
which these histories are the means, but genre offers useful
divisions to an otherwise unwieldy subject.
Igea Troiani’s history of the bank buildings of Australian
architect Stuart McIntosh is clearly concerned with that
type of work within McIntosh’s œuvre.^48 She studies the
evolution of his approach to the problem of designing banks,
of reacting to client demands, of exploring the possibilities
afforded by this kind of commission for his own thinking
about architecture. These questions are thus partly biograph-
ical, partly contextual and partly periodic, relating to the
history of modern architecture in general, and its Australian
path in particular. Again, it would make little sense to
insist on calling Troiani’s approach to architectural history