Buildings | Architectural Review

John schofield the last of the billingsgate fish porters london 2012 claudia leisinger

Typology: Market hall

The market hall shelters a cornucopia of delights, but the traffic and mess it generates presents a challenge to planners

Typology: Law Court

From Kafkaesque labyrinths of columns and arches to the abstraction of Modernist towers: the representation of justice in a world ruled by its absence is an intractable task

Typology: Prison

To confine, secure, rehabilitate or punish: the prison has several, sometimes contradictory aims, but however humane its approach, penal architecture is essentially cruel

Typology: Buildings for animals

Designing buildings for animals has prompted an extraordinary range of responses, from palace to cat flap, which say more about humans than the residents

Typology: Bathhouse

Since time immemorial, and from continent to continent, saunas or bathhouses have played a community role, stripping their users of social distinctions and affording a rich seam for architects

Typology: Public toilet

From the pissoir to the sanisette, from the communal to the stand-alone pod, from male to female provision, a rich seam of history runs through toilets

Typology: Shop

Sacred lair of the commodity, its mysteries veiled by plate glass: who can resist the lure of the shop?

Typology: Hotels

Anonymous rooms for anonymous and rootless lives, the hotel has long been a giant metaphor for modernity

Typology: Dams

The control of nature promised a world transformed for the benefit of humans, but have gigantic dams drowned such hopes?

Typology: Airport

Once glamorous gateways to freedom, airports have become zones of consumerist tedium and state terror – but the emotional intensity of the departure gate endures

Typology: Public Square

When human particles collide in the accelerator of the square, the public comes into being – as evanescent as an unstable element

Typology: Crematorium

Our final encounter with architecture increasingly takes place in crematoria but, despite an association with modern bureaucratic society, the type has a long history

Typology: Pub

Idealised as a comforting refuge and a site of warm conviviality, the public house can also be divisive

Typology: Housing Estate

From the green quadrangles of medieval almshouses to towering banlieues, the history of mass housing represents architecture at its most high-minded – which makes its failures all the more painful

Typology: New towns

Creating new urban areas from scratch may appear to be a utopian exercise, but more frequently it entrenches existing systems of power

Infosys Bengaluru India 2005 Hafeez Contractor2

With the 1940s came a compulsion to move headquarters from the inner-city sprawl to more tranquil environs out of town. Is the resurgent migration a retreat to a natural idyll or a calculated isolation?

Typology: Multifaith

Religious belief systems remain powerful and distinct but, alongside the differences, comes a call for greater tolerance and cohesion. Can the worship of different gods take place under one roof?

Typology: Fire Stations

The fire station is a unique blend of domesticity and workplace, with the engines brought as close as possible to the living quarters in search of the world’s briefest commute (preferably via pole)

Typology: Cinemas

Gloriously kitsch picture palaces engulfed the masses in darkness, while opening virtual space through the screen

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Typology: Factories

Commodities flowed from them, along with money for their owners - but the factory also produced new ways of living, of thinking, and of designing

Typology: Universities

The university is one of the oldest surviving institutions in the western world. It has colonised the globe, its architecture reflecting the prevailing ideology – of which it is the reproductive machinery

Typology: Tombs

A sealed volume, the tomb has no interior – or if it does, you really don’t want to go there. The exterior, by contrast, is a screen onto which we project our hopes and fears about the other side of life

Typology: Skyscraper

Soaring expression of the individualistic spirit of capitalism, logical extrusion of land values or irrational, anti-urban monster?

Typology: Artist Studio

The studio reflects the changing status of artists through time, from the humble workspace of art workers to the hallowed ground of masters

JC Prestwich & Sons, Mounts Baths, Northampton, 1936

Typology: Swimming Pools

Sites of ablution, illicit heavy petting, athleticism, surveillance, leisure, racism and death: pools bring people together stripped of status symbols, but in ways profoundly marked by wider social conditions

Typology: The semi-detached house

Symbol of middle-class aspiration, conservatism and compromised individualism, the semi-detached house is England’s modern domestic type par excellence

Typology: Opera Houses

Since its birth in the Renaissance, opera has been claimed as a reincarnation of community-forming Greek drama, while being used to represent the power of the state − whether feudal, dictatorial or democratic

Typology: Museums

Museums arrange the world according to the changing way we see it: from Renaissance memory theatres and Baroque cabinets of curiosity, via Enlightenment typologies, to Modernist teleologies and the current vogue for environmental contextualism

Typology: Offices

Conceived in an era of command and control, the traditional fixed and stratified office is evolving to embrace more fluid and intuitive ways of working

Patients at St Bartholomew's Hospital, Lodnon in 1929 being wheeled out in their beds

Typology: Hospitals

Ancient civilisation advocated letting the wider world’s healing power flow through the body and mind, but the industrialisation of healthcare isolated patients from these larger contexts. From city centres to sylvan settings, today’s hospitals must reintegrate the public realm into the healing process

Typology: Schools

In the industrial era, schools developed as highly controlled environments to instil the discipline to thrive in a machine age. Now, to prepare pupils for success in a knowledge economy, the evolving typology is more fluidly conceived to provide flexibility, connectivity, and spaces for social and educational encounters