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Figure 4.8
Design for a redeveloped suburban
shopping center. This quick sketch from an urban
design workshop for planners was produced by
professional planning officers with no formal training
in design or graphics. Although a little crude, it shows
a clear grasp of the spatial enclosure needed to
define effective public space, with buildings fronting
onto streets and a large formal lawn between two
public buildings.
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Figure 4.9
Typical ‘Street Section’ Drawing. Properly
proportioned sections – vertical slices through
buildings and spaces – effectively engage the three-
dimensional qualities of a design proposal by
illustrating the heights and relative sizes of buildings,
trees, people and cars.
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Part of this confusion is because there have been
several definitions of typology during the last 200
years, and these have not always agreed with each
other (Durand, 1805; Quatremere de Quincy, 1823;
Argan, 1963; Rossi, 1966/1982; Colquhoun, 1967;
Vidler, 1978; Moneo, 1978; Krier, 1979 et al.).
While acknowledging this complex intellectual his-
tory, we choose a simple approach, and we utilize
typology in our work as a practical way of learning
from history and interpreting this history into the
present. It helps us to establish workable patterns of
urban forms and spaces quickly at the outset of a pro-
ject, setting out a framework that can be enriched by
the subtleties of site circumstances.
To explain this a little further, the urban perimeter
block (for example) can be classified as one version of
the ‘courtyard’ typology. The space on the interior of
the block is defined by the backs of the buildings lin-
ing the street edges, is generally shared only by the
users of the buildings on the block, and shielded
from the fully public world of the street outside.
Those readers familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s
famous film 
Rear Window
will recall that much of the
tension in the plot comes from Jimmy Stewart’s
visual trespassing into the private realm of the court-
yard within such a block. The academic quadrangle
so typical of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard and
many other university campuses is another version of
the courtyard typology, derived in this instance from
the medieval cloister where a zone of protected linear
circulation is attached to the interior faces of the build-
ing. Courtyards of this type, with or without the
colonnaded cloister, may be sculpted out from the
mass of a larger structure or, as shown in Figure 4.11,
they may be created as the space between freestanding
buildings. The ubiquitous American atrium hotel is a
perversion of this typology, where rooms face into a
large multistorey internal volume.
Other recurring patterns of space are the circular
form – for example, the Circus at Bath and the public
space at Broadgate in central London (see Figure 4.12) –
and the linear circulation spine with attached spaces
along its length, a pattern that underlies the Greek stoa
and the American Main Street.
Three final points about typology need to be
made. First, it is clear from these examples that ‘type’
is different from ‘model.’ A model is something to be
closely copied, an object that should be repeated
exactly. Type on the other hand encapsulates the gen-
eral forms and characteristics of an object that may
then be interpreted differently by individual design-
ers. This is very close to Plato’s notion of an ‘ideal
form’ that underlies the creation of each particular
object, be it the ideal form of a bed that underpins a
CHAPTER FOUR
●
SOURCES OF GOOD URBANISM