ABSTRACT
This essay originated in the 1970s and was prompted by a discussion that was taking place at the time in the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies in Cambridge concerning the origin of design in architecture. Part of the author’s argument was the idea of the ‘stereotype’, a preexisting general notion defining the broad characteristics of a building, from which a specific design may be developed. This first emerged in relation to the design of office buildings but, in 1980, was adopted to bring a historical context for a programme of research into the acoustics of auditoria that was then underway at the Martin Centre. In that, the value of precedent, of type, was clearly revealed in a review of the history of both the opera house and the concert hall in the period before the development of a coherent science of acoustics. In its present developed edition, the essay examines the origins of modern acoustic science in the work of Wallace Clement Sabine at the beginning of the twentieth century, and its relation to the value of typology, and further extends the timeline to embrace recent theory and practice into the twenty-first century.
