A system of types in the domain of residential buildings

At the early stages of the architectural design process, general decisions are made with respect to a building's spatial organization. These concern its overall shape and size, as well as its internal organization. Characteristics of a building's spatial organization, however vaguely and incomplete-ly described at those stages, may have serious consequences for various aspects of its performan-ce. Those consequences are often difficult to determine in advance and emerge only during time-consuming elaboration of the design or even not before the actual building is in operation. A designer's ability of foreseeing them is much dependent on his knowledge of existing buildings. More particularly, it depends on his understanding of the performances of types rather than specific precedents. In general terms, the present study aims at supporting design decisions at the early stages by improving the awareness and understanding of types. Many architectural handbooks particularly those in the domain of housing attempt to support access to and acquisition of such knowledge through so-called typologies, in which types are described by means of graphical descriptions, and illustrated with one or more precedents. The effectiveness of such books as design supporting tools is limited by the fact, among others, that type descriptions are not based upon a well-defined representation of spatial organization. This leads to uncertainty as to the handbook's completeness and to unreliability of performances associated with types. The present study explores the possibilities of dealing with these shortcomings. It is limited to the domain of the complex residential building. After a review of existing work in the area of housing typology, the study presents and discusses the following products: (i) a type-representation of basic arrangements of dwellings, that is, a representation which retains only the most general characteristics of spatial organization, (ii) a demonstration of the potential of this representation; this demonstration involves the enumeration and limited exploration of certain ranges of type descriptions.