Type and Elementary Structure: The Anthropological Turn

As Vidler suggests, the Third Typology’s radical proposition was to identify the nature of architectural elements as neither scientific nor technical but essentially architectural. For Martí Arís, this ‘essence’ of architecture is rooted in form-making, the act of giving intellectual order to matter. Architecture, he proposes, is born when an activity becomes a ritual. Staunchly structuralist in their approach, the purveyors of the Third Typology did not elaborate further on this processual dimension, focusing instead on the search for underlying ‘elementary structures’ as posited by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In parallel, the link between built form and ritual became a topic of study in the discipline of anthropology. Starting from the mid-1970s, the structuralist paradigm came unstuck and a new interest in everyday practices and material culture led to a body of ethnographic research on ‘the house’. Among these studies, the house is understood as an ordering principle, however, scholars highlight how the orders produced are many and unfixed, constantly defined, and redefined through social processes over time. In examining this body of research, this contribution will argue that houses cannot be reduced to a static ‘text’ or a neatly delineated object of investigation. In this light, the Fifth Typology could be a framework that moves beyond the limiting abstraction implicit in type to integrate the processual and dynamic dimensions of architecture.