TIPOLOGIA COME MACCHINA ASTRATTA

In the 1960s and 1970s, amid intense social tensions, journals such as Controspazio
(Portoghesi, 1969) and Oppositions (Eisenman, Frampton, Gandelsonas, 1973) emerged,
intertwining art, architecture, and political critique (Saggio, 1996: 12). Within this milieu,
leading Italian scholars published works organized around dialectical pairs, including
Progetto e destino by Giulio Carlo Argan (1965) and Progetto e utopia by Manfredo
Tafuri (1973). In his essay Sul concetto di tipologia architettonica, Argan, quoting
Quatremère de Quincy, distinguishes the model (a closed replica) from the type (an
open, historically situated structure). Carlos Martí Arís extends this reflection, defining
the type as an abstract, structural, and conceptual entity, closer to etymology than
to classification, capable of preserving invariants and generating intersections (Martí
Arís, 1993). In Progetto e utopia, Tafuri analyzes Piranesi’s work as a representation of
the architectural contradictions of his era, observing that in Iconographia Campi Martii
the obsessive proliferation of types undermines the very idea of typology, transforming
the ensemble into a useless urban machine (Tafuri, 2007: 18). Confronted with design,
the type becomes rooted in place. This is demonstrated by Eduardo Souto de Moura in
the Casa em Moledo (1991-1998), where the land generates cyclopean walls, terraces
and a long glass window overlooking an archaic landscape of towering stones. The
wall-house unites permanence and change, nature and artifice. This vision connects to
Joseph Beuys’ work I Like America and America Likes Me (1974): the artist, wrapped in
felt, interacts with the coyote, a symbol of wildness and myth. Felt, a saving material
for Beuys, becomes a metaphor for an instinctive relationship between man and nature
For Souto de Moura, the installation embodies the dialogue between the natural and
the artificial, between matter and design. The “abstract typological machine” extracts
rules from what endures, generating forms in relation to contexts. It does not impose
patterns but steers consistent variations with the territory. The dialectic between the
wall and the window becomes a paradigm of a process in which the landscape is a pretext
and the project is transformed into a text. Typology and site merge in a machine
nourished by light, gravity, and memory. The type is not a schema but an open device:
it embraces the unforeseen, actualizes anachronism, and transmits knowledge through
transformation. Each space arises from a stratigraphic reading, as Borges suggests,
«every place is archaeological: digging, we would find there ruins, fragments of the
thought of those who have gone before us» (Martí Arís, 2002: 20).