Studies in the Morphology of the English Building Stock

Abstract

During the last six years the authors have been working in the Centre for Configurational Studies on a series of research projects whose overall aim is to increase knowledge of the composition and morphology of the English building stock. Earlier work was devoted to domestic buildings—houses and apartments—whereas more recent research is concerned with nondomestic building types, focusing particularly on offices and shops. Two large surveys are described of domestic and nondomestic buildings made in Cambridge and Swindon, respectively. This empirical work has been accompanied by the development of a theoretical morphology or science of architectural form which attempts to explain why certain plans and built forms occur in practice and not others. It is only on the basis of such a theory, the authors argue, that any scientific generalisations can be built about the relationships of form to performance. A central feature of the approach to morphological classification taken here is the separation of shape or configurational properties from dimensional or metric properties.