On some morphological approaches

Philip Steadman’s book on architectural morphology reviews most of what had been developed in terms of morphological and configurational studies in the seventies.^ The work is particularly concerned with the limitations imposed by geometry on building plans. It examines issues on representation and on the properties of symmetry involving rectangular plans and explores the

possibilities of generating rectangular arrangements by dissection, addition, grid-tiling and colouring. Special attention is given to authors who have

Popper, K.Objective Knowledge, referred by. Millier, B. Rationalism, empiricism, intelligibilia, seminar presented at the UAS, Bartlett School, UCL, 1990.

concerned themselves with exhausting the generative possibilities of

rectangular arrangements, an issue Steadman pioneered as early as 1973, later forwarded by the works of Mitchell, Earl & Flemming, and! Bloch who contributed towards a means of predicting a range of grating sizes for dissections with any number of rectangles without having to go through the actual process of generating and counting them. The catalogues developed by Combes® and Bloch are extensively examined as is the former’s method for packing rectangles by plotting the ratios of walls to partitions . Some attention is also dedicated to issues not so much of a geometrical — i.e. size and shape — nature but involving topological properties as represented by graphs, and to the possibilities of allying geometrical and graphical procedures in the process of design.

Although primarily to suit the interests of practising designers and architectural students, as stated in the preface, Steadman suggests that systematic

classifications such as the ones proposed in his book, specially those involving a conceptual separation of dimensional, shape, and topological properties, could be applied in architectural history."** He stresses the work of Dickens on a sample of seventy-four small Cambridgeshire houses, that of Arbon on thirty-eight plans of houses in Monmouthshire, Wales, and that of Hanson and Hillier on twenty-one seventeenth-century houses in the area of Banbury, Oxfordshire, to be referred later on, as examples of morphological approaches applied to historical studies.

Dickens® undertakes a pilot study comparing ... the range of plan-forms that could theoretically exist and the probabilities of different forms occurring by purely random process ... to the range of forms actually observed ... with a

view to discovering which plans are common to a number of historical time- periods, and which are more closely associated with particular periods. ® He has found that the plans geometrically more probable are often the ones least found in real practice and forwards compactness and economy as

hypothetical reasons for the theoretically feasible alternatives having been Combes, L. Packing rectangles into rectangular arrangements in Environment and Planning B. 3, 1976, pp.3-32.

'“'Steadman, op.cit.p.209

Dickens, P. An analysis of historical house-plans: a study at the structural level (micro) in Spatial Archaeology Academic Press. 1977. pp.33-45.

restricted, although stressing that this type of study requires a larger sample In order that reliable statistical tests could be carried out.

The study by Philip Arbon Is reported In Steadman’s'^ comments on iCombes’s diagram of rectangular dissections. House plans whose outer perimeter conformed to a single rectangle were selected from The National Building Agency’s study of Generic Plans and the number of their walls and partitions measured according to the method developed by Combes, referred above. The development of building techniques. Increasing differentiation of functions within households and a growing need for privacy were some of the hypothesis suggested by the findings although, again, the scope of the sample was

considered Insufficient for conclusive results.

Frank Brown'® (In collaboration with Steadman) has also experimented with rectangular dissection techniques applied to architectural history by analysing three types of domestic buildings; the nineteenth-century terrace dwelling of the byelaw housing model; the municipal working-class cottage and the private semi-detached house. Based on the application of a program developed by Flemming for generating rectangular dissections and on

empirical observations, the authors’ aim was to understand ... the relationship between the different plan configurations and the forces — social, technical, and functional — that shaped them.

The authors demonstrated th a t... a very full picture of the constraints that

applied in house design in different historical circumstances ... can be outlined through the application of their chosen morphological approach and that by ... systematically generating plans from the constraints that are available, one can make informed guesses as to those that are missing. Although warning that the methodology applied ... is not a magic wand with which to conjure up ideology the authors stress Its value as a reliable tool for archeological and architectural studies and maintain that In the examination of the possible against the extant lies the key to Interpreting social and cultural phenomena.

Steadman, J.P. A note on Combes's classification for rectangular dissections in Environment and Planning B. 3, 1976, pp.33-36.

Brown, F. The analysis and interpretation of small house plans: some contemporary

Brown* has published a revised version of the work referred above focusing on the working-class cottage and the private semi-detached house. In it, he stresses the power that a few variables may hold in the shaping of a building plan and notes the social messages at work beneath the apparent utilitarian versus social polarity, in both instances. He contends, for instance, that the political and ideological underpinnings for hindering social turmoil and encouraging the reproduction of family life that lie behind the rigorous

guidelines for bigger, lighter, and airier rooms in government official manuals, translate, in working-class state housing, ... in a far more subtle and far-

reaching way than in its private-sector counterpart. However satisfactory his techniques have proven for meeting the designed aims. Brown reminds the

reader that the applied method is restricted to rectangular plans with few component spaces. Beyond four rooms, the number of possibilities multiplies

dramatically ... and astronomical figures can be easily reached. Plans often rooms, ... can be arranged in more than half-a-milHon different ways.

Some difficulties concerning the application of rectangular dissections emerge at once. For example, the sole concentration on rectangular arrangements and specially on rectangular perimeters and the limited number of rectangles involved are restrictions not always easy to overcome. On the other hand, many current morphological approaches, specially, it seems, those which deal with non-rectangular shapes involve very sophisticated mathematical models which are not only beyond the capability of most architectural researchers but also far beyond the pains fellow scholars would be willing to take for the

purpose of discussing and verifying those findings. Besides, setting the actual against the feasible implies exhausting all theoretically viable arrangements before the data can be fully examined. Even if a catalogue of all possibilities is available such methods are highly uneconomical and virtually unworkable when large samples are to be investigated. The fact that insights on vernacular architecture may involve not only numerous cases but very

differentiated plans and that one can hardly predict what those plans are going to be like before having actually collected the data, renders feasible-versus- actual methods far too limiting. This is perhaps the reason why morphological approaches, although being around for quite some time, still constitute a

fraction of architectural studies and even these have often relied on techniques Brown, F. Analyang small building plans in Sanson (ed.) The Social Archaeology of Houses. Edinburgh University Press, 1990. 259-276.

developed for specific purposes by each researcher.

Architect’s approaches to architecture such as Sir Leslie Martin’s “ exploration of the theoretical possibilities for fitting a given programme into different forms and Colin Rowe’s^’ comparative study of buildings designed by Palladio and Le Corbusier are examples of analytical methods developed ad h o c, mainly as design aids, and concerned fundamentally with speculating on the geometrical ordering of forms.

G lassie® and Douglas Bailey®, among others, have developed their own analytical tools for investigating processes of change. The former, constructed an artefactual grammar’ based on structural analysis, retrieved from

observations of a sample of houses in two counties of Middle Virginia. The set of identified rules was thought to reveal the folk designer’s ability to compose (from Chomsky’s notion of competence’) and to relate the composition to its ‘context’, in synchronic terms, and to allow for a diachronic interpretation to follow. Bailey traced a hundred and thirteen! house remains distributed in twelve levels of a Chalcolithic tell settlement in Bulgaria and determined

whether one house had survived from one horizon to the next wherever 75% of the walls of a preceding house could be identified in a succeeding level.

Although perhaps not of a permanent and universal application the above referred approaches, as certainly many other efforts towards a systematic investigation of the built form, seem to have targeted its aims and some, like Glassie’s, have generated further studies and a considerable amount of discussion.

Steadman has noted about the approaches reviewed in his book that, ... a// these proposals for a morphological history of buildings and building types are made in the frank recognition that such a history would be a partial one, focussing on geometrical, material, and technological constraints, on

Martin, op.cit.

Rowe, C. The mathematics of the ideal villa in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other essays, MIT Press, 1982, pp. 1-28.

“ Glassie, H. Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1975.

“ Bailey, D. The living house: signifying continuity in Sanson,R.(ed.), The Social Archaeology of Houses. Edimburgh University Press, 1990, pp. 19-48.

functional performances, ... , on the relation of spatial to social organisation ... The hope is rather that such a programme may to some extent counterbalance or complement the exclusive concentration by some architectural historians and critics on personalities, styles, 'influences’ in the narrowest sense, and especially today on questions of semiotics and iconology And. it could perhaps be added, in the hope that architect researchers may breathe throughout the thorny maze of borrowed theories and seriously investigate architecture by actually looking at architecture.