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Typology in Christian theology and Biblical exegesis is a doctrine or theory concerning the predictive relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament. Events, persons or statements in the Old Testament are seen as types pre-figuring or superseded by antitypes, events or aspects of Christ or his revelation described in the New Testament. The elements of typological relations consist of types in Old Testament and antitypes in New Testament. In this system the unity of Old and New Testaments of utmost importance and the latter is seen and as the realization of the former. This method may also be used in Biblical exegesis especially in Book of Revelation as well as other religious Christian texts. Yet this method is not restricted to Bible and has been influential in interpretation and appreciation of works of art. This method enjoys such an importance that without fully understand it one cannot comprehend the narrative cycle and arrangement in some medieval church images and the reasons behind their juxtapositions on the walls. This article would discuss the way for applying such a method in interpretation of Christian medieval art and describes the principals of this interpretive method.

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Although none of the concepts of form as following function or form as a purely semiological order or the necessity or otherwise of taking the context into account in design are new in architecture today, it is still hard to create any remarkably thoughtful architecture without having answers to such questions. The present text is an exploration of the high-rise, gate-like twin tower type: a type without a significant historic precedent, and as such, relatively free from post-design semiological loads despite the limited numbers of its examples. Having Jim Collins’s idea of the replacement of ‘form follows function’ with ‘value follows location’, the text attempts to demonstrate that even in the case of this type in which close associations between design ideas and semiological references are not far away, one can still witness a fluidity in the relationship between form and function on one hand, and form and socio-political and cultural context on the other. In other words, it is not just the classic views on typology whose historicist and rationalist traditions seem inadequate to explain this type, but also that neither the earlier idea of form following function nor the latter one of the building as a meaning-producer and a conveyor of semiological references can provide a firm ground in this regard.