Typologies for Big Words

Typologies for Big Words is a collection of projects redesigning traditional building and landscape types as openings within the interiority of the current politico-economic global system.

Architecture’s original project was the invention of interiority, an enclosed area delimited from its context and made available for a narrowly defined public, function, and meaning. This original project was expanded during the Enlightenment with the invention of type to establish architectural and social institutions for molding subjectivities. The quest for interiority has reached its completion with world capitalism and its associated complexes, the ultimate interior without any possible or imaginable outside. In response to this condition, this book proposes a collection of projects reinventing traditional building and landscape types as openings within the interiority of the current politico-economic global system. Typologies for Big Words presents new types of spaces as holes within society’s big words. Each project is an inseparable pairing of a design proposal and a theoretical essay, and it is named after a spatial type and a big word: Factory of Ecology, Infrastructure of Intimacy, Mausoleum of Humanity, Waiting Room of Democracy, Media Lab of Safety, Office of Diversity, and Museum of Capitalism.