In 2008 I had the great good fortune to see Bernd and Hilla Becher's exhibit "Landscape/Typology" at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. I was fascinated by the formal beauty, rigor, and dedication that these images showed. As so often happens, this exhibit made me look at things in a new way and I started to see patterns around me that I hadn't paid much attention to, especially in the shape of residential houses.
In some neighborhoods, especially during the housing boom of the 1950s and 60s, nearly all the homes were built at the same time and from just a few floor plans. If you walk around such a neighborhood, you can clearly see the original cookie-cutter designs, but they are gradually overlaid with modifications made by successive owners.
I call these "counter-typologies" because whereas a typology shows commonalities among things that were created independently, these photos show the divergent evolution of things that were exactly the same to start with. Each home bears the imprint of generations of people who have tried in their own (usually terribly mundane) way to make their home comfortable and different.
Duplexes (freestanding houses containing two homes side by side) show this evolution most clearly because they set the differing tastes of two neighbors immediately next to each other, with just an imaginary dividing line between.
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