Non-typological architecture is this phenomenon of when infrastructure or architecture—its prescribed functions, its designed functions, its programme—and in the case of architects, a driven rejection of typology, of the dominant spatial programmatic configuration, of composition in architecture—is rejected or disappears.
And this kind of, hey, this non-typological architecture emerges from the failure or rejection of an architecture and infrastructure driven by economic reason—its ability, their ability, to capture life and contain it in very, very specific forms.
Now, the mounting, intersecting crises—socio-ecological, political crises, of depression, anxiety, etc.—today essentially all derive from one foundational idea or situation. And that is not only historically situated in the dispossession of common lands, common waters, and more fluid techniques or ways of inhabiting that were very much contingent, situated, embodied…
But also from the ongoing dispossession that entails ways of seeing, knowing, relating, and living that are always in a process of transformation, and cannot be reduced to the abstract logics of economy, technology, and so on.
So, the source of both the malaise and the crisis—both historically and as a historical opening—in the sense that perhaps there has never been such clarity about this situation. Though, we would dispute that from the angle of non-modern peoples, who were or are kinds of mystics, and who can entirely stage the loss of their world. The have architectures for losing the world.
But this condition generally is ambivalent, in the sense that we’re having this conversation because of this complete destruction of world and crisis that has been precipitated by instrumental reason and rationality—which, of course, finds its clearest manifestation in architecture. That is, in the separation of categories like nature, culture, politics, architecture, infrastructure.
And in the way that dominant social types—which are always constantly being destroyed, like the nuclear family, by economy itself—are also constantly being reterritorialized into these dominant compositional logics.
So when infrastructure and architecture—dominant forms and typologies of infrastructure and architecture—fail, or are rejected… when they fail to fulfil their promise of progress, security, or even basic sustenance, or when they are rejected because they abstractly reduce life and alienate it from relationship, from the power of creation, from our relations with those around us—human and non-human, human and more-than-human…
That’s the condition we call non-typological architecture.
And it’s the most defining condition of our time.
