Typological investigation of mill buildings in Greece

Abstract

The thesis is concerned with the study of the evolution of mill buildings in Greece from the end of the nineteenth century using a typological approach. It is also a case-study in development and evaluation of the use of the typological method of analysis in application to a single building class.

Mills, as rather ordinary utilitarian buildings, can only be subjected to conventional stylistic analysis with great difficulty because their designers are unknown or, if known, in most cases do not adhere to any known architectural school of thought, and because most of the buildings are individually of no special stylistic or architectural intent.

The description of a sample of 57 mills according to their formal language, constructional system and articulation of spaces shows the inadequacy of the conventional descriptive approach in handling the large number of cases and in making inductive generalizations concerning their relationships, origins and meanings. An analysis of the evolution of the uses of typology in architecture leads to a clarification of the conceptual framework of the typological approach. The meaning of type is defined and type is distinguished from class.

A procedure is developed for the identification of the types of a set of buildings. The sample of the 57 mills is typologically analysed and seven types are identified. The interpretation of the types is made using factors which are either extrinsic to design (socioeconomic conditions, the nature of the production process, environmental conditions, legislation, technical and material means of construction), or intrinsic to them and related to architectural ideology.

The case-study of the sample of mill buildings provides answers to a number of theoretical issues regarding the ontogeny of types and the potential of typological analysis as a descriptive tool in architecture.