Typology and urbanism: The disposition of types

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

The most recent Technical Page outlined the idea of typology — an ordered assembly of building types — as a basis for making good urbanism. Any fully developed building type manifests three consistently characteristic aspects; its function,  its configuration, and its disposition. Function is the broad range and mix of activities which may be well-harbored in a building manifesting a given type; it is not the narrow, unreachable-in-practice, mono-use tailoring of Modernist theorization. The type’s configuration is the normative three-dimensional arrangement of spaces which customarily assemble to constitute the type; it denotes both the internal spaces and their relationships. The third aspect, a type’s disposition, is less studied and understood. It is the way the type’s standard configuration is placed on its site with respect to the site’s legal and social bounds. But “is placed” is too passive; disposition is an active aspect, and of paradoxical nature.

Disposition is the most conceptually elusive of the three aspects of a type. Its doubleacting nature is nicely encapsulated in the verb “to cleave.” “Cleaving” can describe both one thing being cut apart and two things sticking together. The disposition of a type describes its cleavings; it includes both the way the type cuts apart or isolates its function and configuration from those of its neighbors, and at the same time the characteristic ways that it adheres well to those neighbors. Disposition is both cohering glue and separating padding, the ways to put buildings closely and intelligently adjacent to one another so that proximity’s advantages are maximized and its disadvantages are minimized.