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Figure 4.10
Perimeter Block, Charlotte, NC, LS3P
Architects, 2003. Apartments line the public streets,
creating a pleasant central courtyard despite the
rather anaemic pseudo-classicist architecture. This
space is shared by the residents but is distinct from
the fully public realm of the city beyond.
Figure 4.11
South Quadrangle, University of North
Carolina at Charlotte, 2003. The typology of the
academic quadrangle is alive and well, but the
banal and vaguely historicist architecture stifles the
development of social life in the space. The generic
façades are sealed around the perimeter, providing
few intermediate social spaces for sheltered
gathering. Compare this courtyard with Plate 1 and
Figure 4.12.
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craftsman’s construction, or the ideal form of an
urban square that lies at the heart of an urban
designer’s plan for a plaza.
Second, typology is as much about variations as it
is about norms, as in the relationship between court-
yard/plaza/courthouse square, and civic buildings
noted earlier. It is a wonderful tool for blending
‘ideal,’ historic forms with specific contemporary
circumstances.
Third, and we owe this to the Italian architect and
urbanist Aldo Rossi, typology allows architectural
and urban forms to gather validity and usefulness
from the tradition of architecture itself, and not have
to rely on some external justification, say from the
social sciences, semiotics or chaos theory. This
internalization of meaning suggests a strong thread of
historical continuity as opposed to a continual cycle
of new theories and intellectual fads – such as
deconstruction, which attempted during the 1980s
to justify new architectural forms by reference to
French linguistic theory.
We have little patience with this ‘intellectual caf-
eteria’ approach to architecture and urbanism,
whereby architects can pick and choose their con-
cepts and meanings from a menu of fashionable
options. The city and its problems are too serious a
venue for intellectual games, and Rossi reminds us of
the value of studying our historical precedents. Here
in America that means most directly the traditional
forms of towns, cities and suburbs from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – one of the
main sources of the New Urbanist vocabulary.
Typology is the opposite of superficial nostalgia; it
holds the key to new buildings because it is both the
repository of ideas about building and urban forms
throughout history, and at the same time the genesis
of new works in the city.
This simplified approach to typology lets us con-
nect with, and be informed by, an architectural and
urban legacy larger than the particular urban design
problem under study; and, almost as importantly, it
can render our design concepts more easily under-
standable to other, non-architect members of the
design team. In the compressed time frame of a
charrette, the intensive design workshop we use to
produce our community master plans, it’s especially
important for members from each discipline to trust
the depth and quality of ideas of their colleagues.
Our forms and concepts derive a high degree of
authenticity from typology, and its power to bridge
from history to the present and the future: this is
one important way that the traffic planner, the
landscape architect and the development economist
can understand where we as architects and urban
designers are coming from. We are utilizing time-
tested techniques, not inventing untested ideas out
of the blue.
Two typologies that we use in this manner, 
and which appear in several of the case studies,
are the Mixed-use Center and the Traditional
Neighborhood. These and two others, the District
and the Corridor, are explained more fully in
Chapter 6, in the section on our charrette method-
ology, but we have already seen (in Chapter 3,
Figures 3.2 and 3.3) the typological principle at
work in the updating and continuity of the traditional
neighborhood from Clarence Perry’s version in
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES