Type Type
Research
Site: Bellaire Boulevard, Greater Houston
Program: Research
Size: 23 miles
Status: Research
Team: Shawn M. Lutz
In 1975, Denise Scott Brown wrote of social concern to the Modern Movement approach within the Oppositions 5. She lays out three propositions for the importance of architectural skills in translating physical and social requirements into physical form. During CIAM’s fiftieth anniversary conference, she presented a paper, “Make Little Plans,” challenging Modernism and returning to formal imagination reflective of evidence from cultural observations. Unfortunately, reciprocal to today’s conversations with architecture to mediate material and tectonic cultures to inspire more socially just and ecologically sustainable futures.
Two years later, Anthony Vidler wrote the Idea of Type the theory of type as a production process. Type traced through the historical cords of architectural origin through the present. Type is categorical to grouping people or things and is traditionally the root word in many histories and associations, including drawing types, line types, plan types, section types, building types, prototypes, and typefaces fundamental and contributory to discourses involving architecture.
Cross-disciplinary techniques involving graphic design and architecture are one way to interlace type into architecture proposition. In practice, graphic designers use typefaces to formulate words that speak to a multicultural world. Typefaces will be the protagonist in finding new common grounds to interface with reactions and interaction with contextual scenarios—collectively informing part-to-whole. As this research evolves towards the surface, legible readings and misreadings will inform the studio during observation and documentation of a Houston street. An act to bring cognitive and social understandings to theoretical and design approaches.
_ Bellaire Boulevard
_ Grahn, Frida. '"Make Little Plans": Scott Brown at the Fiftieth Anniversary of CIAM,' Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes : Portraits of an Architect. Basel/Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2022.
_ Moneo, Rafael. "On Typology," Oppositions 13 (1978)
_ Vidier, Anthony. 'The Idea of Type,' Oppositions 8 (Spring, 1977).
_ Vidier, Anthony. 'The Third Typology,' ibid.