RESEARCH

Observing the environment by means of typological criteria is an essential form of cultural and historical self-reflection of the humankind. It seems to be one of the most basic patterns of our cognition to want to trace the peculiarities of a time, a place, a person or a piece of work etc. Georg Dehio, the founder of monument preservation, has for instance categorized and listed the architectural works according to repetitive patterns. The entire inventory, from the number of axes to the decoration, has been mapped, described, evaluated and thus also secured. Alexander von Humboldt sought in everything he found similar patterns.
This appropriation of environment as meaningful is the key to European humanism. The categorical, the species, the scheme, a function, all these ways to make the unmanageable manageable and to conceive the inconceivable have always been inherent in the mind. All conscious perception interprets on the grounds of particularly developed matrix of types.
However, the observation of the typologies itself is always also interpretation and evaluation, which are bound to their time. The observation and therefore the typical itself are transitory. Thus, the typical implies the appeal to think further.