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Typology
What kind of building is this?
Where this axis ends
Typology is a whole building or premises, never a room inside one. A hotel is a typology; its lobby and its bedrooms are spaces. Typology terms also do double duty: a building IS a farmhouse, or a suburban living room EVOKES one.
39 terms
| Term | Identifier | Definition | Broader | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| House | typology.house | A whole dwelling occupying its own building from ground to roof, with its own door to the outside. The door and the verticality are the test: a bungalow is a house, a maisonette over a shop is not. | None | - |
| Cottage | typology.cottage | A small rural house of one or one-and-a-half storeys, whose smallness reads as characterful rather than as a constraint - low ceilings and small windows taken as the point, not as a defect to be corrected. | House | - |
| Farmhouse | typology.farmhouse | The dwelling of a working holding, sited among its outbuildings and planned around a kitchen that was the working room of the farm rather than a room off the hall. | House | common |
| Barn | typology.barn | A large single-volume agricultural building for crop or stock, unheated and top-lit or unlit by design, with the roof structure exposed because nothing was ever fixed below it. | None | - |
| Villa | typology.villa | A detached house standing in its own grounds and built for retreat rather than for work on the land - the Roman country-house lineage that both the Palladian villa and the holiday villa descend from. | House | - |
| Manor | typology.manor | The principal house of a landed estate, from which the surrounding land was administered: large, old and rural, but built to be lived in rather than defended. | House | - |
| Chateau | typology.chateau | The French country seat: a large house with the symmetry, steep roofline and axial approach of the French tradition, whether or not it retains defensive fabric. | House | - |
| Terraced House | typology.terraced_house | A house in a continuous row, sharing both side walls with its neighbours and taking all its light from the front and back only, which is what governs the plan. | House | - |
| Apartment | typology.apartment | A self-contained dwelling occupying part of a larger building, reached through circulation shared with other dwellings. The tenancy, not the block that holds it. | None | - |
| Loft | typology.loft | A dwelling occupying part of a building put up for another purpose, keeping that building's structure, volume and window pattern instead of being replanned to domestic scale. | Apartment | - |
| Cabin | typology.cabin | A small timber dwelling, rural and usually seasonal, built simply enough that the construction is the finish. | House | - |
| Warehouse | typology.warehouse | A building for holding goods in bulk: long clear spans, doors at vehicle height, and floors loaded for weight rather than for occupation. | None | - |
| Factory | typology.factory | A building where goods are made, planned around a process or a line - the sequence of the work sets the plan, where a warehouse's is set by storage and access. | None | - |
| Mill | typology.mill | A multi-storey industrial building organised around one shared power source, with the column grid and the floor-to-floor heights set by the drive rather than by the work. | None | - |
| Church | typology.church | A building for Christian worship, whose plan - nave, orientation, a single focus at one end - is given by the liturgy rather than chosen by the designer. | None | - |
| Chapel | typology.chapel | A small building for Christian worship that is either subsidiary to a parish church or non-conformist; the smallness together with the absence of parish status is what makes it one. | Church | - |
| Monastery | typology.monastery | An enclosed group of buildings where a religious community both lives and worships, planned around a cloister with the daily offices setting the circulation. | None | - |
| Castle | typology.castle | A fortified residence: thick walls, restricted openings and a controlled approach, built for a household to live behind rather than for a garrison alone - which is the line against a fort. | None | - |
| Hotel | typology.hotel | Premises letting rooms by the night with staffed reception and service. The building; the rooms inside it are `space.hotel_room` and `space.lobby`. | None | - |
| Restaurant | typology.restaurant | Premises whose business is cooked meals served at table, with the kitchen sized and serviced for that rather than for reheating. | None | - |
| Bar | typology.bar | Premises whose business is drink, with any food subordinate to it and the counter as the organising element of the plan. | None | - |
| Cafe | typology.cafe | Premises serving drinks and light food across a counter, trading in daylight hours with a short average stay - the counter service and the hours are the line against a restaurant. | None | - |
| Spa | typology.spa | Premises whose programme is bathing and treatment, with the servicing - humidity, drainage, heat - that wet rooms need. The premises; the wet room inside is `space.spa_pool`. | None | - |
| Nightclub | typology.nightclub | Premises for late-night drinking and dancing, planned around a floor and a sound system and lit for darkness rather than for daylight. | None | - |
| Gallery | typology.gallery | Premises showing art in changing exhibitions, generally without a permanent collection and often selling what is shown - the selling and the turnover are the line against a museum. | None | - |
| Museum | typology.museum | Premises holding and displaying a permanent collection it does not sell, with the storage, conservation and environmental control that keeping one requires. | None | - |
| Library | typology.library | Premises holding a collection for reading and lending, planned around both dense storage and long uninterrupted occupation of the reading floor. | None | - |
| Theatre | typology.theatre | Premises with a fixed auditorium addressing a stage or platform, planned around sightlines and acoustics before anything else. | None | - |
| Pavilion | typology.pavilion | A small, largely single-volume building standing free in a landscape or a public space, often temporary, whose programme is to be occupied and looked at rather than to house a settled function. | None | - |
| Office | typology.office | Premises for desk work, planned around floorplate depth, daylight and servicing rather than around a product or a process. | None | - |
| Shop | typology.shop | Premises selling goods to the public from stock held on site and carried away by the buyer. | None | - |
| Showroom | typology.showroom | Premises displaying goods that are ordered rather than carried away, frequently trade-only; the absence of stock and of a till is the line against a shop. | None | - |
| School | typology.school | Premises for teaching, nursery through university, planned around repeated teaching rooms and circulation that can be supervised. | None | - |
| Hospital | typology.hospital | Premises admitting patients to beds overnight, with the clinical servicing - medical gases, isolation, theatres - that inpatient care requires. | None | - |
| Clinic | typology.clinic | Premises treating patients who arrive and leave the same day. No beds overnight, and that is the whole of the line against a hospital. | None | - |
| Civic Building | typology.civic_building | Premises housing a public authority and the public's dealings with it - town hall, courthouse, register office - where addressing the street as a public institution is part of the brief. | None | - |
| Gym | typology.gym | Premises for training indoors, planned around equipment, floor loading and the ventilation rate that hard exercise needs. | None | - |
| Stadium | typology.stadium | Premises whose entire plan is tiered seating around a field of play, sized for a crowd that arrives and leaves all at once. | None | - |
| Station | typology.station | Premises where passengers board scheduled transport: concourse, platforms, and a plan governed by flow that runs one way at a time. | None | - |
Machine-readable
Every term on this axis is in the full dump: JSON-LD · Turtle