TYPOLOGY AND THE SECRET BOOK OF CHANGES

First I have to claim my understanding about Typology.

It's from the very basic idea of typing.With the knowledge material accumulating, it's harder and harder for a ordinary people to understand some area in a whole.So we started to type. Seemingly everything can be typed, and when we listed all the types we can find, we finally don't need to understand everything one by one, but just the few types can give us a glance at the whole thing.

Typing from a information organization method becomes the first few steps to process when we started designing.

There comes the problem. We've been travel a lot these days, when I saw the typology models in GSAPP, I find it surprisingly similar to those I saw in Tokyo, GA gallery a architectural exhibition by Fujimoto. Not like infinite reality, types are limited, when types got general, it's transforming from your first glance knowledge to your easy methods, which strongly restrained you creativity.

Ancient Chinese people have done this thousands of years ago, but in a mysterious way. As everybody understand, Chinese traditional culture strongly rely on consistency, everything has the inner similarity.This idea is very geometry, like fractal geometry.So they started to type, but in a more ambitious way, they want to type the world, everything.That is the book describing changes called" zhou yi"

This book describes everything, and have been used as future telling for thousands of years. But it's a very blurred guide, only describe a trend.You can see from the picture above.It's not a simple type,it's a type system, a complex typology system. Everything come from the origin, which is in the middle. And it divided into Yin and Yang, positive and negative, Yin and Yang then becomes 4 quadrants, 4 quadrants becomes 8 Gua, which is known as a basic component, we can already use 8 Gua to do some very basic assumptions.8 Gua then become 64 sub-types then so on.

Let's look back to architecture.

Now a days typology can be seen everywhere, beautifully placed in grids, looks productive. For me, it's more likely something a graphic, especially the types got a huge number. It seems that, sometimes, typology isn't helping us make things easy, but make it meaningless.

There's a building there.
Analysis its facade - 1 drawing of typology
Analysis its plan - 1 drawing of typology
Analysis its structure - 1 drawing of typology
....

I would prefer regard architecture as a living creature. It's a whole like traditional Chinese concept of consistency. We can study typology, research typology. But when we design, we shouldn't divided each part of the architecture and typing them separately. Use typology to analysis is easy to get what you want, a series of choices, but these choices is from analysis, not from the research of the site, of the daily life, is not human.

Nowadays, we can see that the transforming between analysis diagram and real architecture is always missing. Some projects, just like diagram directly jump into real, simple and brutal, losing the humble to the context, to the people's use.Part of it is because of the using of typology methods in a wrong way.

Typology comes from big data, but turns out to be the dominator of new possibilities.

What if we can develop something not according to any existed typology?
It seems impossible because what we can do must have been done. But if we regard the architecture as a whole that's totally possible.Typology means to package, package all the information into a simple envelope so they can be discussed. If we can un-package, open the package and design distinctively.

I think the Chinese ancient book is aiming the same thing. Typology can give you a direction, but just to clarify what you need,and what already been done. The design is a serious of choices that consist a tree of decision that can not be typed, and the design process can use typology research as a reference, but not let these researches restrain your mind of creating something that can not be typed.