Understanding architectural types

Background: Traditionally, architecture blends knowledge, doing and context in ways that largely anticipated the situated cognition movement. Within this area, the notion of architectural type has been proposed to help organize and communicate interesting patterns across the variety of spatial entities. Types have been isolated looking at different aspects like the relationship between architectural entities and the surrounding space, the form and/or functionality of the entities, and the interactions among entities and users. This led to different understandings of what types are with arguments often driven by the architects' background perspective and their historical motivations. Aims: To collect and review notions of architectural type that have been particularly influential to highlight how they have been motivated, to show their similarities and dissimilarities, and to discuss the elements that can be taken as unifying across the different views. Method: We apply techniques of applied ontology to develop a cognitive framework for the understanding of architectural types and in particular their cognitive elements. We then use this framework to analyse the different notions in the literature. We also discuss advantages and limitations of our approach. Results: The analysis is ongoing, and we have partial results at the moment. We can show that some types are constant across time and cultures and that over time new types are introduced as merging/transformations of previous types. The comparison of the different definitions in the literature allows also to clarify how the notion has been understood in different historical periods.