Counterintuitive 
Typologies

Andreas Lechner’s research and teaching at the Faculty of Architecture, Graz University of Technology, center on “Counterintuitive Typologies.” Underpinned by a three-year project funded by the Austrian Science Promotion Agency (FFG), this endeavor spans international collaborations, design studios, electives, master’s theses, and PhD research.

By embracing upcycling and adaptive reuse while re-examining the notion of “type,” Counterintuitive Typologies confronts the evolving challenges of contemporary practice and seeks to update the epistemological frameworks of architecture as both an art and a science of building. Here, architecture emerges as a critical medium for negotiating tensions between cultural relevance and the material imperatives of circularity—offering aesthetic perspectives that differ from those of the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, or the fine arts.

Building on this foundation, Counterintuitive Typologies investigates the multiple contradictions and temporalities that shape present-day architectural work, recalibrating its agency and expanding its agendas. The project engages the friction between well-established typological models and emergent needs posed by global environmental, social, and technological shifts. In doing so, it highlights how architecture can remain deeply involved in material and practical concerns while attending to broader epistemological and cultural discourses.

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Fig. 8 Page spreads from Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology

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Team

Andreas Lechner (PI)

Maike Gold (Project Assistant & PhD candidate)

Laura Suvieri (PhD Candidate)

Sabine Kastner (PhD Candidate, www.sabinekastner.com)

Maria Schenkel (Student assistant)

The launch of Counterintuitive Typologies coincided with the preparation of the second German and first English edition of Andreas Lechner’s Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typologies (Park Books, 2021) [fig. 1–8].



Fig. 1

Book cover of Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology, Zurich: Park Books 2021.

Rooted in Aldo Rossi’s view of the city as a constellation of monuments, traces, and collective memory, Lechner’s text reinterprets typology through contemporary concerns. The publication presents 144 significant buildings (fig. 2),



Fig. 2

Plans of 144 projects featured in Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology drawn at the same scale encompassing theater, museum, library, state, office, recreation, religion, retail, factory, education, surveillance, and hospital structures. 

These are spanning from antiquity to the present, organized into three chapters—Tectonics, Type, and Topos—and examining twelve civic typologies. Each typology is illustrated in plans, sections, and axonometric drawings, occasionally complemented by key elevations (fig. 3, 4).



Fig. 3 Page spread of category “retail” with plans at same scale, building types and key literatures.



Fig. 4 Aldo Rossi’s “Teatro del Mondo” with plan, section, and axonometric drawings plus a brief text describing central aspects of the composition.

An accompanying booklet applies these typological methods to the edges of urban environments, exploring peripheral conditions, commercial vernaculars, and city outskirts (fig. 5).



Fig. 5 “Counterintuitive Typologies” is the title of an enclosed booklet with 12 supervised Master’s theses that is published as a supplement to Thinking Design: Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology.

Derived from master’s theses supervised by Lechner (2015–2021), these design investigations challenge mainstream typologies by asking which future monuments might emerge from peripheral landscapes (fig. 6, 7).



Fig. 6 Page Spreads from booklet “Counterintuitive Typologies” with twelve master’s theses supervised by Andreas Lechner at TU Graz between 2015 and 2021.



Fig. 7 Extract from Alexander Gebetsroither’s diploma thesis I-710/I-105 #more than infrastructure on a Los Angeles highway interjunction from 2016. This thesis was awarded Archiprix world’s best graduate thesis in 2017.

In doing so, they highlight how architecture—understood as both an art and a science of building—can engage with marginal sites as a significant part of its disciplinary purview.

Ultimately, Counterintuitive Typologies seeks to develop an approach to architecture that is simultaneously responsive to material realities and culturally engaged. By revisiting typology and analogical reasoning, it aims to reconcile architecture’s disciplinary autonomy with the fluctuating conditions of contemporary life. In so doing, it challenges the concept of the architectural work as an isolated object, emphasizing instead the fluid interplay of cultural production, material processes, and the broader socio-political and environmental contexts in which architecture operates.

Andreas Lechner (2024)