Studio Instructors: Rupali Gupte, Prasad Khanolkar, Samir Raut, Vaibhavi Dave
Studio Teaching Assistants: Manish Shravane, Rushikesh Hirulkar
19th Feb - 05th April, 2024/ Semester 4
Introduction
Architectural Typology or the study of type in architecture is one of the fundamental frameworks for understanding architecture.
Type is not the building or the drawing of the building, but it is the diagram of how the various constituent elements of the building come together. A diagram is a spatial organization of components of a form. It is the drawing of the structuring principles of a system. Diagram spatialises relationships. The various samples which identify themselves as the same type may have different nuances and therefore may have different drawings. The course helps students to identify architectural type in a specific context that has emerged from exigencies of climate, culture and life force and to work with the type to address contemporary needs, paying attention to behavioural affordances and experiences that the new interventions generate.
Capacities Built
To understand architectural type as a relationship between spatio-formal configurations and behaviour, experience, and life-practices through a spatio-ethnographic study of existing contexts.
To develop strategies for producing / improving habitation through a close analysis of existing building types in terms of problems and opportunities vis a vis questions of gender, social hierarchy, shifts in social and economic conditions as well as physical attributes relating to light, ventilation and physical upgradation.
To imagine, visualise, draw and make new spatio-formal configurations through diagraming, model making, orthographic drawings for articulation of scale, proportions, light, and materials to generate a specific experience for improving habitation and its experience.
To craft spatio-formal configurations through material phenomenologies, their spatial experience, building systems, and tectonics.
Exercise
Study of a settlement structure in Palghar identifying specific building types and analyzing the relationship between type and behaviour including social dynamics and hierarchies as well as the making of the type through a systematic study of spatial patterns and particular configurations of space, the effect of scale and proportion and phenomena such as light, temperature and materiality on behaviour and experience. This will be done through maintaining a sketch book which will be evaluated at the end of the week. Site drawings to be made at 1: 200 scale. house drawings at 1:50 scale / 1: 75 scale. Through a questionnaire, students need to understand the relationship between existing architectural type and behaviour and the shift in family structures and contemporary needs.
Speculating on a type for future development of the settlement at the scale of the house and / or a domestic institution related to the settlement. This type should respond to future needs, the problems of the current type and the new experiential requirements of expanses, intimacies, personal-private-public, connection to life and practise through control of scale, proportions, light, temperature articulation & material assemblies
References
Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford, 2015.
Habraken J. Type as a Social Agreement: MIT, 1988
Gibson, James. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
Hasegawa, Go. Thinking, Making Architecture, Living. Tōkyō: LIXIL Publishing, 2015.
Moneo, Rafael. “On Typology.” Oppositions, A Journal for Ideas & Criticism in Architecture 13, 1978
Palasma, Juhani, & Laurent Stadler. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. 3rd edition. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
Zumthor Peter, Atmospheres. Atmospheres: Architectural Environments. Surrounding Objects. Birkhauser Boston 2006