On Typology, Christoph Gantenbein

Abstract: Alongside the manifest ideological modernity and its visions of a new architecture, a new city, and a new human being, there are the real modern cities. Built, not discussed. Their architecture is modern vernacular: the buildings are based on types, i.e. optimised solutions for standard problems, which, depending on the city, take into account very different external conditions. Thus, Hong Kong differs from Athens, Buenos Aries from Rome by their typical building fabric, the grey, everyday mass architecture.