Practice question · Multiple choice
An architectural type is a recurring spatial configuration rather than a fixed set of measurements. What follows from this distinction when an architect adapts an ancient type for a novel programme?
Hints
- Does inheriting a type bind an architect to specific arithmetic dimensions?
- What core spatial logic distinguishes a basilica or villa across different eras?
Show the answer
D. They adopt the underlying spatial layout while adjusting the scale and details
Why
Conflating type with fixed dimensions turns a structural typology into rigid replication. Type provides an inherited spatial schema—such as axial or radial circulation—which remains coherent even when materials, proportions, or specific utilitarian functions shift.
Practise Architecture II: Reading a Building
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Architecture II: Reading a Building
- Why did the orders survive the culture that produced them by two thousand years?
- Which are true of the central-plan church in Renaissance debate?
- A plan is a horizontal cut through the building, so what is drawn solid is what the cut passes through.
- Sort each feature by whether it belongs to a LONGITUDINAL or a CENTRAL plan.
- Complete the vocabulary of reading a building.
- How many orders did Renaissance theory canonise?
- Match each element of a basilican church to its position.
- Arrange these steps for describing an unfamiliar building, in the order that works.
- The orders specify only the shape of the column and its capital.