Book - Chapter 3

Chapter 3.THE TYPOLOGICAL PROCESS

1.      Selection, Difference and Number

The existence of systems or codes in architecture or in any other sphere of human activity presupposes the imposition of pattern and order on to the diversity of the material world. The constancy of these systems in the face of changing conditions in their environments requires an never-ending task of maintenance and up-grading of their capacity as frames of reference for individual human actions, as a means of classifying those actions and as a means of giving them public meaning.

Such systems are not 'found' by human beings, they are constructed by them. Even the discovery of supposed systems in nature is an imposition of order arbitrarily marked out of the vast territory of the natural world. However, the 'map is not the territory'. Within this constructed frame reason maps out apparent recurrences into classified events, but these classifications do not correspond to any divisions in nature itself. There are no separate worlds of 'physics', 'biology' or 'chemistry in nature. These are different and (from the point of view of nature) quite arbitrary classifications of one complex and unified reality. The recurrences which are 'discovered' are in fact constructed by conceptually framing and isolating phenomena in order to make them visible. The so-called fundamental particles regularly found by physicists by smashing other particles together are not organic aspects of nature but constructions or transformations of nature. They are made not revealed. Classified recurrences are parts of whole systems whose interconnections are too complex to be classified in their entirety. Humankind is forced to construct a parallel world out of the bits and pieces, which can be deciphered as recurrent. The map of reality – the model - so produced has a high but not absolute predictive power since it is only part of the story.

From the manipulation of these systems of classification a model of the world is constructed which allows some degree of certainty to humankind about the results of future actions. It is a fundamentally predictive model, which attempts to symbolise the wholeness of nature and encompass all its aspects in terms of its recurrences. In this way it is hoped to prevent the sudden and deadly surprise which could erupt out of the sign-less and unmapped areas of nature.

Any de-coding procedure including that applied to the natural world is based on the tracing of recurrences and their cross-references into more comprehensive groups of similarities. It ends with the production of a conceptual framework which makes the world more comprehensible and offers resistance to the natural transience of things. The efficacy of these frames is only upheld by a continuous reorganisation, which absorbs and integrates new and unpredictable events in terms of the existing frame. It is a continuous activity of the mind, which seeks to fill in the unmapped spaces of that frame - that system of classification.

The mind which carries out these operations is not a 'thing'. It is an activity of classification and organization. As it is used here, it is a collective activity  - the result of many similar acts of classification to produce a field of knowledge or a coherent model of reality.  At the individual level, the mind with its goal-seeking activity finds its physical base in the human brain and the typological or classificatory operations which it carries out are determined by the neurological structure of that brain. Since it is not a thing, the mind cannot be pointed to directly but can only be indicated by the co-ordination and uniformity, which it brings to the phenomena upon which it acts. It can only be identified through its products and their particular organisation and relation to each other. It is an organisation which is not a natural feature of the world but a consciously produced state of co-ordination between its parts and a product of communication between many individuals which renders it (the natural world) at once comprehensible and subject to manipulation.

The hypothesis put forward here suggests that the operations the brain carries out are fundamentally typological operations. It is not even a question of classifying the world into groups of similarities and differences but rather of perceiving the world as groups of similarities and differences. Classification in this sense is merely formalising an existing and inherent method of perception. To put it another way the world cannot be seen as other than groups of similar or different phenomena. The natural diversity of the material world may resist attempts to fit phenomena into a comprehensible pattern, but the underlying human belief is that it is only a matter of time or slight change of perspective before uncertainties are finally brought within some frame of reference or another. The histories of art, science and religion are not therefore histories of the progressive revelation of the true order of things which lies beyond the classifications. They are the histories of the collision, overlapping or replacement of existing classifications by others which explain (and 'contain') the random events which disrupt existing schemes of explanation. More fundamentally perhaps, the history of a particular discourse such as architecture is a history of classification continuously acting on the material world. 

Classification of the world into groups of similarities and differences occurs at every scale of human perception. Indeed, as suggested above - it is human perception, even when thought is turned inwards towards its own processes. But all this typological activity - the making of groups - does not change the material world. It is not changed by classifying it. It is transformed by human work; by making the world 'look like' its classification. This is an attempt to reproduce the 'Ideal Style – total coherence -' in the real world and by doing so eliminate the last vestiges of uncertainty and the random which continue to plague perception.

The typological process does not vary with the different materials to which it is applied. It styles or organizes the same classification out of different materials  including architectural form. By work, it makes the material world different to what it was before - more co-ordinated more organised (in human terms) and more predictable. The typological process thus materialises itself in the real world.

2.      Simple Classifications.

It was suggested in the previous section that the recurrences which are found in nature are constructed similarities. This is done by excluding actual differences which exist in the real world. The construction of these similarities is achieved by a metonymic selection procedure – where a part is taken to represent the whole -  even at the most minute scale of the environment. Similarities are rigorously defined and classified between the elements of some diverse aggregate. These parts are then fused together at the level of the classification into a metaphor of the aggregate. The resultant classification or model is a metaphor. Parts of Parts are fused into a representative whole.

This is the simplest kind of operation that the mind can carry out to establish some consistency in an apparently random aggregate of events or artefacts. It makes similarities and differences. One can use many different typological categories to do this. For instance, speed, colour, size, shape, spatial relation, softness, hardness, and so on. One can classify phenomena in many different ways depending on how one wishes to describe the world. But whichever way it is done, the number of classified elements will always be less than the number of elements classified. The typological process is first and foremost a reduction in number. This is the same condition suggested earlier for the formation of routines or habits in behaviour (including architectural behaviour). There, a few actions (or forms) and combinations or those actions will suffice to deal with many possible situations. They can be permutated and rotated into a suitable response for theoretically any situation that has already been met. But a more important function is that some permutation of these few elements of behaviour will be able to handle future circumstances, (on the assumption that the future will be 'something like' the past).

Condensing out these few useful routines into instruments for the control of the future seems to presuppose an intention on the part of the organism or system that does it. However, there is no conscious intention in this activity. 'Intention' in this case simply describes what the system does quite naturally - what it cannot help but do. Like the concept of the Ideal Style, it is a shorthand way of naming the process and as such does not constitute a separate aspect of what the system does. In other words, there is no teleological aspect to it. 

The concept of ‘intention’ is a short-hand way of speaking about an inherent tendency in a system to progressively formalize an existing mode of behaviour. That is it looks as if it is a conscious choice, but in fact it is the way the system works anyway - the application of a predetermined mode of behaviour to a specific circumstances.

Another way of looking at this is to consider that if the mind styles or classifies all the phenomena in the world, then sooner or later it will proceed to style its own classifications. These after all have become 'external' phenomena since they have been materialized in words, sounds, built form and so on. When an organism starts to reflect on its own processes in this manner, one can perhaps say that it has become 'conscious'. That does not mean some part of the whole process has split off to become a separate part of the system, nor has something been added. It only means that in its interaction with its environment and the ensuing forms of feedback it receives, the system has developed a routine for handling its own routines. Hierarchic learning like this can still be analysed and understood strictly within the terms of its existing processes working themselves out as usual in a cumulative and recursive manner.

At this level in the hierarchy of behaviour - one routine to handle other routines - there is again a progressive reduction in the number of elements and groups. Several existing routines are incorporated within a fewer number of more comprehensive meta-routines. The economics of this process in terms of behaviour are clear.

Although the initial act of classification divides an aggregate of phenomena into a certain number of groups, this also involves a synthesizing activity which unifies the elements of each group along the lines of their designated similarity. Differentiation and synthesis are reverse sides of the same coin.  One cannot divide up an aggregate without at the same time instituting unities, no matter how initially arbitrary their relationship. The typological process conceptually explodes each element of the aggregate and distributes its parts into groups of similarities where circumstantial differences are cancelled out in favour of clear classification. No form of discourse, including architecture can ever fully resolve itself into such a frozen unity, but must continue to 'reduce' the diversity of new experiences. Out of this continuous process a fragile order does emerge in the form of the Style which to a greater or lesser degree unifies experience. In architecture buildings do more or less and at different times conform to a singular pattern, style or style of production which maintains itself in being for a limited period of time and which turns numerical diversity into qualitative similarity. It is the essence of a recognizable style in architecture that it is a unity of form which links many different buildings together in time and space.

It is a unity which is immanent to architectural production as a whole and is a product of the interchange of learned experience between many different architects over long periods of time. If architecture can be said to learn from experience, then the memory of what is learned is retained in the permanence of the buildings which are its products. But as with all memory, not all that is retained is of equal importance as a recipe for future action and the typing of experience is not therefore a 'flat' organization of information. It is hierarchic. It styles everything on the basis of its success or failure as representation. In this sense, 'success' is  measured by the greater use of certain forms and combinations than others: their recurrence, their imitation, their repetition. The process of biological evolution again offers an analogy to this. In evolutionary terms, the genetic code produces a species which, although constant in its general characteristics, adapts itself to particular local environments. Some adaptations 'fail' in the sense that for whatever reason they do not produce enough offspring to recoup the losses suffered by each generation. In other words, they become extinct. Successful adaptations do produce enough offspring to maintain or  even enlarge their populations in an environment.  One can imagine that the genetic code has put two questions to the environment in the form of two variations on the same theme. The answer to one is 'yes', the answer to the other is 'no'. The surviving variation is not inherently the best or the fittest in some abstract sense for the key issue is the relationship of the organism to the environment. For the most unpredictable of reasons it was given the opportunity to survive. In an environment subject to sudden and convulsive change this successful variation would have been given no time to survive: to develop deeply programmed routines. For any style to survive requires a continuity of environmental conditions - not some inherent quality of form or characteristic.

Similarly in architecture, 'failed variations' – particular styles - do not produce 'offspring' in the sense that their particular combination of forms is not imitated. Some styles become extinct. Those which remain and develop within a continuous and stable environment may become the basis of the potential classic architectures. Again there is nothing inherently 'correct' or ‘fitter’ in those architectures which become successful and develop further. They were simply in the right place at the right time.

3.  Form as Values

If architecture can be said to be one of the institutions which expressed the values of a society: its unique image, behaviour or characteristics, it does not do so by somehow 'carrying' some message which can be read apart from the form of the buildings themselves. The values of a society are not abstractions over and above the products of a society and which can be distinguished from those products. Using the phrase 'the values of a society' to refer to some dimension other than that of the products is to render it meaningless. As usual in these cases the problem is linguistic. The name of a class of things is treated as a thing itself. 'The values of society can only be seen in the particular configuration of the products produced by many different forms of discourse. The values do not float above those products but refer to the predictable patterns into which those products fall. One cannot therefore have two societies producing identical products and yet having different values. The values are the products. The products are the values.

In architecture it is the way the parts of buildings are put together which expresses the 'message' or the values those buildings transmit. The building is the message. If that configuration recurs throughout the architectural production of a society, it will constrain the production of new works of architecture along certain predictable lines. In this sense the values of a society constrain the behaviour of its members. Every time an architect selects a probable and therefore meaningful way of organizing the forms of a building, he or she reinforces the architectural values of a society. One can define the expression of value through form as:

"The fraction of the structure of the message which is determined not by the free choice of the sender, but rather by the accepted statistical rules governing the use of symbols in question" (Weaver, from Wilden's book).

In architectural terms, while a particular building arises out of the specific nature of its program and its site, the exact configuration of its forms is not determined by this particular context, but by the ‘statistical rules’ governing the use of available stylistic forms. This latter constraint is a collective function derived from many different contexts.  The quotation above is clearly a description of the informational concept of redundancy which turns many different experiences into a coherent and predictable pattern. The redundancy of the structure is not an organic aspect of the message for it does not tell one anything about the nature of the experience to which the message relates. It only makes that message understandable in terms of other messages. It gives it a meaning which on its own it would not otherwise have. Redundancy is a way of organizing the transmission of information in such a way that it will be understood. The message, - for instance, the representation of a particular context or circumstance in built form - is transmitted in terms of a conventional and pre-existing pattern. The fact that in architecture or in any other form of discourse, a unique message is styled out in conventional symbols constrained by generally accepted rules of formation does not negate the uniqueness of each message.  It simply makes its particular nature generally  understandable. The experience being reported remains what it is but in order to report it - to give it public meaning, it must be translated into preformed symbols. These symbols and rules are themselves the product of previous reports about other experiences assimilated and incorporated into the repertoire of probable forms.

Without this built-in redundancy of structure or organization, any message would be regarded as NOISE and therefore incomprehensible. In this sense redundancy - the Style in architectural terms (most probable configuration of form) - deflects the purely pragmatic organization of form which would be the result of local circumstances fully determining the final configuration of buildings. A building determined by such pragmatics would be meaningless to the society in which it had been produced. The redundant symbols and combinations of the architectural Style formalize the pragmatic and naive expressions of experience and circumstance which might otherwise be of no use as examples upon which future action could be safely based.

Redundancy, for this reason links together the concepts of 'meaning' and 'predictable’ behaviour with the utilitarian concept of 'learning' from past experience. Value, if it is to be found anywhere in architecture will be found in the predetermined patterns of the architectural style which itself can only be found by examining the similarities which exist between many buildings.

4.      Stabilizing History with the Style.

In emphasizing that the architectural code which produces these values is an aspect of mind is not to suggest any element of mystery or metaphysics in its activities in architecture. Nor is the concept so general, vague or all-embracing that it is of no use as a concept for the investigation of architecture. To be sure the brain is indeed a complex instrument and its operations may be forever indefinable, but the results of those operations - the transformation of the material world - can be mapped out.  Its intervention in the material world always end with the production of styles which are the mark of the human mind on the world - the sign of its coordination.  From this position it can be argued that Mind and System always pre-date the actual activity of combining materials into new representations of reality. That act is performed on the basis of the organizational template which the Mind already has – the inherent typological method derived from its neurological structure. Everything follows from this typological activity where every creative act is determined by perceptions already formed by continuous acts of classification and the innate categorical function of the mind.  

The typological process describes a circuit of power by which the Mind (a collective concept) withdraws from the natural world an image of its incalculable diversity and compresses and patterns it until it yields or emits a single, pure and unified image which is then imposed in nature by technology. For a while at least, the fluidity and transience of nature is disguised and rendered stable by the representations which overlay it. In the same way the architectural style represents and fixes temporarily into one austere pattern - the Style - a multitude of individual architectural acts assimilated into a few highly-charged elements.  In doing so it frees architecture from dependence on local context by providing an axiom which works no matter what the individual circumstances. An axiom which ensures that forms have a definite public meaning.

One can look at the Style as an attempt to defy the erosive pressures of history and change on architecture where individual works try fruitlessly to give form to inevitably transient circumstances.

5.      The Time Factor

One can begin to see how the dimension of time enters the evolutionary development of architecture. There are three time scales involved in this. The first is that of the individual work, not only in physical terms but also as an imitative source for other future works. No sooner is the project built than it is absorbed in the great field of exchanging forms as a potential imitative source where its unique characteristics are conceptually distributed and filtered into emerging new projects.

Looking at the architectural system as a whole - at the ebb and flow of stylistic movements - the effect of the individual work is relatively brief in its impact on production. (The great work in this respect has a longer life span, but even its influence on production is limited in time).

The second time scale is that of the architectural style. This encompasses the history of many individual works and its influence as a pattern may span a whole era of production before it dissolves or is replaced by another. It is the essential and most recurrent elements of a series of works produced over time which gradually converge in character so that those at the beginning are more different to each other that those produced at the end of the cycle. It is generations of projects making up the whole style and the individual project is simply one of the buildings of one of those generations.

The third time scale is that of the typological process itself. It may be a function of the mind but nevertheless it acts in history; inside the flow of events. There is no dimension of human existence which is outside history. If there were it be impossible to know it. As far as human beings are concerned the life span of the typological process is immortal. It is a seamless flow of essentializing activity which sections history into styles. It is the collective name of the program which is realized by many individual acts of architecture. If, in any sense it can be said to transcend history it only does so because it is the one facet of it which does not change its character over time and through circumstance. As long as human beings remain biologically as they have been and as they are, so the same typological process will continue. This process, since it does not begin sometime nor end sometime nor change its operations. It can be referred to as the synchronic dimension of human activity. Although it is active in history, its constancy does not lock human endeavour into a series of repetitions. What the process does is to define the rule by which such changes will take place. More exactly, it continually transforms current material in specific ways - by the act of selection and combination of most statistically probable and therefore meaningful elements and their fusion into a new and more comprehensive pattern. This is the theoretical 'generation' mentioned above, where a 'wave' of typological activity transforms existing material which in turn is transformed by another wave of activity.

This general view  of historical change is of course, an analogy to the communicational processes of architecture itself. Namely, a field of exchange of information between unique projects resulting at some unpredictable point or other in their integration into a coherent strategy for generating particular design solutions. This may be useful in explaining the complex interactions between an institution and its changing environment. What it expresses is the apparently random timing of such changes. The coincidence and collision of different stages of development endlessly provoking change between and within institutions. The environment of a cultural system such as architecture is made up of all the other systems which surround it and their continuous activity. There is here also the inevitable tension between the general and the particular, between the uniform and the diverse. It is a tension which ultimately makes and re-makes architectures and which creates and dissolves classic states of those architectures with a dice-like unpredictability.

6.      The Style as Symbol

Throughout these changing environments and within architecture's own different stages of environment, there is this ever-present drive to find that one all-encompassing symbol, that representation or routine which can represent and synthesize the diversity of architectural production. It is this 'fully automatic' drive to clarify  production by giving it a singular name - a style - which turns what had a particular use value at the level of the individual building into an exchange value at the level of architecture as a whole. That is, amongst the community of architects. The typological process as a means of exchanging information across the whole field of architecture figuratively strips each building of its circumstantial variations not repeated by any other project and consolidates the residue of these collective works into a discrete sign that can be passed among many new projects as a formative template. In this sense the style acts as the symbolic 'one' which stands for the real 'many'. It is ‘one to the power of many’. The integration of differences at the level of individual works into groups of similarities at the collective level is, as suggested before, a reduction in number but at the same time an increase in representative power. The few elements which are the residue of the typological process - the typical set of any style, are highly charged with meaning as the most probable elements and combinations available. This residual symbol expresses itself in the material world of production as uniformity but even more - its emergence produces further uniformity. Given the conducive environment of a stable and  Integrated state, this symbol reproduces itself. It narrows the range of probable and, therefore, permissible forms that can be recombined for new contexts. The representative power achieved by a reduction in number does not arise from taking anything out of the original aggregate of architectural works, but by compressing its 'many' into 'one'. Obviously it is not the number of buildings that are being reduced with the emergence of a classic architecture, but the differences between those buildings. There are fewer groups of things than there are things.

If this symbol represents a particular field of architectural production then it must clearly be distinguishable from other such symbols. It must mark out and represent its own zone of experience from other zones. Any ambiguity in this respect would diminish the vital function of the sign (as the most comprehensive representation of a particular area) which is to protect the accumulated experiences of its own zone of production. Ambiguity in a sign - implications or associations with other signs - might suggest that there were different and equally valid ways of doing things. But different ways of doing things always entail risks. The Style as the architectural symbol poses as the most reliable pattern for future action. After all, it itself is the culmination of numerous trial and error experiments. It is the collective experience of many individuals.

The terms 'sign' and 'symbol' as they are used here refer to the set of discrete elements or forms which are selectively abstracted from many different works of architecture and exchanged and combined to achieve uniformity of architectural production. They are hierarchially related in the sense that the symbol is a condensation of several different signs. It represents those signs at a higher - more comprehensive level of architectural production. A combination of discrete signs represent the essential characteristics of many individual works of architecture. In representational terms this is the basis for the formation of architectural styles. The symbol represents a merging and further essentialization of the character of those signs to render them utterly typical and applicable to a broader range of contexts. This symbolic set represents the Global or Classic architecture which can represent the whole of architectural production.

7.      Transforming the Many into One

Since the Style is not a description of an aggregate of buildings, but a highly selective interpretation of it, its clarity as a discrete sign arises because of what it does not express about that aggregate. It does not express the diversity of character present in the aggregate - a great many individual buildings - from which it arises. As the most essential characteristic of production, one can regard it as akin to the ‘plot’ which is written out in those many buildings. The style more or less maintains itself intact in the face of the many different individual interpretations of it which are played out in buildings produced for different situations. It is the underlying pattern for those buildings. Styles are, in a sense, like myths, 'which never happened, but which always are'. They only exist in the variations for which they are the pattern.  They are, in other words, immanent to the buildings which they inform. They are the simulacra for which there is no original. They are not produced by conscious action, but emerge as a cumulative result of many conscious actions. They are not 'made', they 'grow'.  They can only be perceived by the similarities which appear between a great number of different buildings. They themselves are 'nowhere'.

Only by filtering out of production all that is variable and circumstantial can typological activity make available for future action that which has been collectively found to be of value in the past. Future production elaborates on this essential experience and, like the plot - or the myth - while the 'characters' may change and the context of the action may change, the relationship between these characters or roles remains fixed. In this sense one can say that:

The Style is not a building. It is the similarity between buildings.

The myth is not  a story . It is a similarity between stories.

The plot is not the play. It is a similarity between plays.

The relevance of this analogy between myth and style; the representational power achieved by the reduction in diversity; the necessary clarity of the sign; the formation of categories, all of these factors are well expressed by an example of one version of a myth analysed by Levi-Strauss and found amongst the Bororo Indians of South America:

"At the command of the sun who considers earth too populous, there occurs a great flood which drowns the whole population except for one man, named Bokodori. He is later allowed to call back the dead to life. However their different methods of drowning had created in them different characteristics. For instance those who drowned in the rapids had wavy hair and those who drowned in the pools had straight hair. Thus a differentiation had taken place among the population of the earth who could now be distinguished into distinct groups which had been impossible before the flood. These distinct groups now offered Bokodori gifts, but those whose gifts he did not like were killed.

Levi Strauss explains that it was necessary that men should become less numerous that neighbouring physical styles could be clearly discerned. For if the existence of neighbouring clans and people bearing insignificant or non-signifying gifts were permitted - that is to say, clans whose distinctive originality was as minimal as one could imagine - there would be a risk that between two clans or populations there might be interpolated an unlimited number of other clans who would differ so little from their immediate neighbours that they would end up being confounded together. Now in any domain whatsoever, it is only with the introduction of the discrete quantity that a system of significations can be constructed (from Wilden's book, 245)

Both this myth and that of the biblical Noah, where again the earth's population is wiped out by flood to be reinstated by Noah's three sons (Shem, Ham and Japheth), concern themselves with the introduction of clear cut groups into an originally undifferentiated multitude. For instance in the case of the Bororo myth the term "less numerous" does not in fact refer to the overall numbers of the population but to the numbers of different characteristics that exist in the population. As in the Hebrew version of the myth, the earth after the flood would be repopulated again. The issue in both cases is ambiguity of identity which would lead to confusion. The populations in both cases had to be grouped into distinctive characteristics, whether as 'wavy-haired' or 'straight-haired', whether as sons of Shem, or Ham or Japheth, or (from another biblical story) divided by language. The issue is one of clearly establishing distinct cultural, racial or linguistic identities that can be clearly named and therefore signified. There must be a lesser number of groups than there are individuals and there must be a lesser number of groups of groups than there are of groups.

Classification in this way, is a continuous operation of naming and for this reason, any individual or group which does not have distinct classifiable characteristics (who do not bear ‘precise identities’) is rejected. In this way there is a continual clearing of the organizational gaps between groups ensuring a sharply-defined identity for each. Gradations of difference between groups pose the threat that the groups cannot be given a distinct name or sign. In pragmatic terms, lack of distinction between groups would mean that their behaviour might be unpredictable  in terms of existing traditions and cultural routines.

This is the link to the formation of the architectural Style: that the sometimes (perhaps always) expensive accumulation of traditions or routines out of a myriad of trial and error experiences must be protected. There must always be clear and conventional ways of handling diverse experiences which do not entail risks. Such routines must be clearly marked out. There must be 'spaces' between different traditions which allow them to be named and to be unambiguous; spaces which must be continually cleared of gradations of difference between the groups. More generally, one can say that in order to produce a generalized model of experience, that model must inevitably exclude marginal, circumstantial or ambiguous forms of experience.

In reality of course, it is the gradation of characteristics between groups which is the norm. However, in representing that reality, gaps must be introduced between the elements of representation; that is between the signs. They must be different so that each can point to some specific part of experience. Without this it would be impossible to communicate about different parts of experience.

It is useful to describe this referent - this reality - as an analogue state of continuous uninterrupted relations. The representation of it however, would be described as a digital state of discontinuous discrete elements which can be permutated and re-arranged only by the fact that they are separate from one another. It is the formation of this digital dimension which Levi Strauss refers to when he speaks of the introduction of the 'discrete quantity' which allows a system of signification to be constructed. The sign is not the thing signified and is arbitrary relative to the specific parts of which it represents. But the pattern of relations between the signs will represent corresponding relations at the level of that signified.

In distinguishing the architectural Style from amongst the great mass of buildings within which it is dispersed, it is necessary to introduce digital gaps into the analysis of this mass. Bringing the Style into view in this manner is achieved by eliminating the 'background noise' of circumstantial variations which is the reality of individual buildings designed and built for specific purpose and specific places. At this level of analysis of architecture, the infinite gradations of difference between buildings are rendered invisible through a lens which can only see their similarities - a singular character which can be identified as different from others. This character represents the deeply programmed habits and routines of one area of architectural production and upon which many variations are played out.

8.      Architecture, Entropy and Negentropy

An architectural symbol or style can be said to be authentic to the extent that it can 'contain' or represent the diversity of architectural production within the limits of a single set of forms and their possible combinations. Ultimately, as with everything else, the concept of 'authenticity' describes how useful this basic set of forms is. Does it allow architects to express the difference between different contexts while simultaneously retaining its unity of character - its identity - its ability to speak of similarities? Can it be both one and many? 

While limiting differences within one set of typical forms, the nature of the typological process increases differences between different styles or sets. It clears the space between styles of  'classless' products which cannot be named and which, therefore (relative to the Style) are improbable. In this activity a style acts like a gate or filter of a unique pattern which prevents the inclusion of buildings into its constituency which do not have the correct key or shape. It is only those who bear the correct signs which are selected for inclusion in the constituent group or set of the style. This function of the style is one of recognizing and selecting buildings which are similar in part or whole to the characteristics of the vast majority of other buildings which exhibit its conventional forms. What this means in practice is that although theoretically architects are free to design buildings in any way they see fit, there are semantic limitations to the creation of totally unorthodox work. It will simply not be understood and therefore possibly rejected. Equally it is unlikely to produce imitators and in biological terms it will not 'reproduce'. While each building is different to other buildings - unique in some sense - it is never totally different for it can only derive its meaning from its association and similarity to other works.

The apparently unconventional forms produced by avant-garde architects are not in any sense arbitrary constructions but genealogically consistent with a particular style. Their difference - their unfamiliarity - is  a result of a more rigorous analysis of those conventional forms. A stripping away of every circumstantial element to reveal essential characteristics applied to a particular set of circumstances.

Without this conservative principle - this conservation of value -enshrined in the function of the style, the precious resources of learned experience would be lost. Architecture would diversify its characteristics to the point where nothing could be relied on to provide semantically (and technically) sure patterns for future action. Architecture itself would cease to exist since architecture is only recognizable as a similarity of forms between a large number of buildings. It would simply become an aggregate of non-recurrent forms which would offer no clue to the likely results of future action. Above all, the value of the style is that it performs as a ‘machine for predicting the future’. The filtering process protects this stylistic machine from entropic degradation by slowing down the rate of change which can take place within the style – by requiring new works to conform in some degree to the general characteristics of other works.

Uniformity in an area of architectural production is the sign of the communication of conventional formulae moving across the face of production. The experience gained at one point in space and time is exchanged through the medium of the style and thus conditions the design of new buildings at another point in space and time.

9.      The Bureaucratization of  Style

One cannot communicate experience, one can only communicate about experience. The re-presentation of an event has no fragment of the event in it. There are no buildings in the minds of architects only ideas about buildings which are inevitably contaminated with ideas about other buildings, other styles. The mind cannot shut off representations from one another. This is at once its limitation in terms of precision, and yet its overwhelming advantage - for in that involuntary overlap between different ideas - that 'fuzziness' of images' there is the source of all truely original thought.

However, in times of crisis, such collective ambiguity of image is seen as a problem. During such periods uniformity of style is taken to be a value in itself. - a 'thing' - not simply what it actually is, a sign of an underlying process of exchange. The essential pragmatism of this dynamic process is overlaid with an ideplogical commitment to unity for its own sake. This results in an architectural environment where what is communicated is less important than the means of expression. At this point in time there is a rigorous analysis of the formal language which cannot but produce an arbitrary precision in the forms and combinations which are available in the architectural repertoire. At this stage, one can suggest that architecture is being further integrated. It eliminates fractional deviations in the character of the style and reduces the diversity of formal options which are still 'almost' the same by fusing them into singularities. This of course is the typological process at work, but in this situation its result is not simply the production of styles, (for that stage is long passed), but the bureaucratization of existing styles. It is in a sense a ritual purification of the means of communication at the expense of the ends. The medium here becomes the message but not just as McCluan thought only for technological civilization, but for all civilizations who have reached the same organizational stage in their development. When a society produces a set of comprehensive symbols which offer to describe the world with a single 'word', then further developments in the discourse can only lead to a ritual concern with the means of expression itself. Given the opportunity to reach a high degree of uniformity in its various symbols, any form of discourse will enter what one might call a 'Scholastic' stage of discursive activity.

In its further development, the architecture of the Integrated state freezes the variable signals emitted as diverse buildings into a luminous synchrony. For an historical moment, they are united with one another and stylistically uniform – no matter what the context. Buildings become increasingly similar to one another no matter what their location or function thus contradicting the diversity of contexts from which they arise. There is a true separation of architectural form from experience. Typological activity produces styles - economic routines and sets of forms which can represent experience with a few concise elements - its maximum practical end result. Yet activity does not stop at this point with the emergence of a classic style during the Developmental period. there is always work to be done and buildings to be built. The same formative activity takes place in the context of an already unified architectural style and the result is to further essentialize it, further 'style' its elements. This endless purification of what is already pure resolves itself into making the elements of the style absolutely precise. The 'more or less' and the 'now and then' are rendered positive and transformed into the authoritarian 'precisely' and 'always'.

No new factors are involved in this change of state from the production of styles to their bureaucratization. What happens is that the cumulatiive effect of the same factors are beginning to produce further change. Change, however, not of the same kind in the sense that the style is 'more comprehensive' or 'more representative'. At this stage the collective result of typological action on an existing repertoire and in  the environment of socioeconomically integrated state had produced a convergence of architectural characteristics towards uniformity. Each change that had taken place - reduction of formal diversity - had in effect been 'more of the same' up to the point where a uniform set of typical elements existed.  The same process will continue as before even after architecture is unified. History does not stop when architecture has become unified, but continual activity means that architecture cannot remain the same. In other words, the same rules will apply but from a different starting point. That new starting point is the now fully unified Style. Change will occur but it will be change of a different kind.

At this point a threshold has been crossed by architecture into a reflexive state where it no longer represents experience but begins to represent itself. The inherent ambiguity of the architectural work as a sign ( a fusion of diverse constituents) is resolved in the post-classical world into a very precise figure. The aura which surrounds a work, an implication of the many images which have been compressed together in order to produce it is now seen as a kind of functional error in its making. This ambiguity - the slight lack of synchronization of its multiple constituent images is eventually eradicated by further typological activity which automatically produces a much sharper focus. The continuity of this kind of analysis makes it increasingly difficult for architects to express with the limited elements now available to them the indestructible diversity of the real world.  This post-classical perception of the world can only see what is identical between things. Everything becomes  a mirror of everything else.

10.    Clearing the Space between Words.

When architectural activity is restricted by historical or developmental circumstance to seeing only what is essential or in establishing exact identities between forms, then this condition could be described as aphasic. That is, where perception is unable to recognize the context of statements and tends to eliminate variations of those statements which spring from circumstances. In fact variations on probable statements are the condition of being in the world. More graphically the post classical perception can only see the wood, but not the trees. More specifically, when applied to language, this condition is described as 'contiguity disorder' where syntax - the connecting function between words and statements is lost resulting in what has been called 'word heaps'. The telegraphic linguistic style which evolves eliminates propositions and articles and all other connectors until only the key words remain. (Another symptom of this condition is that once contextual clues are removed there is a increased dependence on metaphor in order to generate apparent differences).

In the architecture of the Integrated State, context, in the form of variations on the typical set is squeezed out of architectural form leaving only the 'key typical forms'. It can also be suggested that such an architecture cannot fully de-condense these key 'words' into meaningful and context-rich sentences. They are in this sense in the compressed form of 'code words'. Thus the so-called telegraphic style of the aphasic does not simply refer to a certain staccato-like mode of speech but, more fundamentally that much of the meaning of the sentences is locked up within the key words and is therefore inaccessible to listeners. These words mean much more than they can express. It is not that there is lack of intended meaning but that 'what is meant' is so compressed into these nodes that it is indecipherable. The limited vocabulary of a classical architecture and its convergence around a few highly significant forms and combinations is exactly analogous to this concentration of meaning.

 The problem is dramatically heightened in the post-classical phase because these few classical elements are subject to further reduction in their possible form. Given the correct analytical key, each of these nodes could be unravelled into their genealogical antecedents - the large number of buildings and styles from which they were essentialized. The deeply symbolic quality of the classical forms is based on this almost geological compression of many previous signs into a very few highly-charged elements. The symbol is, after all, a compression of signs.

A second point to note about the phrase 'only key words remain' is that they are the residue of the sentence after the elimination of contextual material. In this process, the unfettered typological activity destroys the syntactic elements which allow for variation in the context of the key words. Perhaps a better word than 'unfettered' might be 'reinforced' since it clearly links the effects of typological activity to the prevailing environmental conditions conducive to such effects. Extreme conditions like this can only occur with a continuous state of socio-economic integration. It is clear that typological activity (reinforced in its effects by environmental circumstances) tends to sterilise the space between words and between the pure forms of the classical architecture. It drives all meaning inside the boundaries of these elements, overloading them with significance. Nothing, of course is actually destroyed, but rather rendered invisible or implicit by being compressed or swept inside the key forms of architecture thereby increasing its semantic density. It is a density which is apparent in all classical architectures. Here again, is the recursive operation of complex forms being built up by the compression of variations in upon themselves. The necessary introduction of digital gaps into the architectural system of signification is by now so extreme in its manifestations that it wipes out  a whole level of meaning in architecture. What disappears is the connotative dimension which indicates 'what is meant' by 'what is said'. The denotative aspect of meaning is reinforced to the point where 'what is said' is 'what is meant' and there are no other possible interpretations.

The final point to be considered in this aphasic analogy is the increased usage of metaphor discussed above. The aphasic condition prevents the direct expression of meaning (which requires an ability to express both similarities and differences in experience). To attempt such a thing would require the unfolding of the coded forms of the classical architecture - their decondensation. This can only be achieved in architecture superficially by encoding into the building a subsidiary sign which 'explains' the primary forms. That is which gives them context. In practice this is done by the addition of decoration to the primary forms of a building. But in the end such manipulation of the forms of a building in the post-classical state can only serve to ameliorate the rigidity of the post-classical style. The historical state of the Style is irreversible for no permutation of its elements will ever allow the whole worlds of connotative meaning trapped in its forms to flow out. They must remain bound into these few tight knots of denotative clarity. It is not that these forms say nothing. On the contrary they are filled with meaning because there are so few legitimate combinations of them - they are what can be said and each building combined from them is always a highly probable, familiar and understandable configuration of typical elements.

The problem is this: a sort of Kafkaesque rationality reigns during such architectural periods. Every single part of this architecture is justified in its character, location and relationship with every other part, but what justifies the whole? The answer is: itself. While the Classical architecture was justified by its relation with experience, post-Classical architecture of the Involutionary phase having classified its way out of experience, becomes self-referring and closed.   

The sense of unease which pervades the novels of Kafka stems from the hero's inability to express what it is that is irrational about the web of accusations and bureaucracy which surrounds him. Similarly in the post-classical world, there is this sense that 'what is said' cannot be all that is meant. When discourse contracts to self-reference, even the articulation of this unease becomes difficult for if everything is rational, then what can be irrational? The circular logic of self-reference cannot be transcended at its own level of communication.  It can only be dealt with by positing another whole dimension upon which its relevance can be tested. As always this is the level of lived experience.

Underneath the grandeur and co-ordination of a total architecture, the same typological forces which brought it into being are now at work condensing that architecture out of existence. The serenity of the post-classical architecture is a surface feature of its contraction within the limits of its own typical set. The number of elements in the set is now less than the number it required to produce uniformity of production in its classical state. Under the same environmental conditions, the architectural style will - like a collapsing star - tend towards a singularity. The elements of the style are imploded into each other by a continuous definition of their most microscopic similarities  until they are volatised, rendered invisible, leaving only marginal and secondary elements on display.