Choosing A Building Type

There are three major decisions to be made at the start of a thesis project:

1. Building type
2. Site
3. Specific interest

Knowing one of these can lead to discovering or developing the others. I personally began by listing potential building types that interested me, and using this as the starting point for the other decisions.

Having listed around a dozen possibilities I gradually eliminated typologies one by one. Eventually I settled on a brewery as my favoured building type.

Unfortunately, breweries as a building type are relatively uncomplicated, and there is limited potential to develop such a brief into a thesis subject. I therefore needed to expand the building type to incorporate other services that would layer complexity and academic interest onto the brewery typology.

Monasteries have a strong historical connection with brewing, and there are still a number of monasteries globally that generate their entire income from beer sales. They also have an incredibly strong architectural history that contrasts well with breweries, which have often been ignored by architectural historians. By combining the two, an interesting contrast of typologies combines into an exciting building type.