Fig. 1  Book cover of Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology, Zurich: Park Books 2021.



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.  




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. 



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.



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.

Andreas Lechner’s research and teaching at the Faculty of Architecture at Graz University of Technology focuses on the theme of Counterintuitive Typologies. This research group involves international collaborations, design studios, electives, master’s theses, PhD research, and a three-year project funded by the Austrian Science Promotion Agency (FFG).

The initiative responds to contemporary architectural challenges, particularly by engaging with concepts of upcycling and adaptive reuse, while simultaneously re-examining the notion of "type" in architecture.
Through this lens, Counterintuitive Typologies seeks to critically revisit and update architectural epistemology, positioning architecture as a key medium for navigating the tensions between cultural relevance and the material imperatives of circularity. In a field often overshadowed by the methodologies of the natural and social sciences, engineering, or the fine arts, architecture emerges here as uniquely situated to explore and reveal the aesthetic potential of the environmental turn—an understanding not easily assumed nor merely derivative.
 
Lechner’s concept of Counterintuitive Typologies addresses the multiple contradictions and temporalities of contemporary architectural practice, recalibrating its agencies and expanding its agendas. This endeavor is framed around the tension between established typological models and emergent needs arising from global environmental, social, and technological challenges. The exploration of such tensions forms the basis of Lechner’s research and educational focus, and exemplifies how architecture can simultaneously engage with material life while remaining attentive to epistemological and cultural discourses.

The launch of Counterintuitive Typologies coincided with the preparation of the second German and first English edition of Lechner’s Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typologies (Park Books, 2021) [fig. 1-8]. This text draws on Aldo Rossi’s interpretation of the city as a composition of monuments, traces, and collective memory. Lechner expands upon Rossi’s ideas by reinterpreting typology through contemporary concerns, presenting 144 significant buildings (fig. 2) from antiquity to the 21st century in three chapters: Tectonics, Type, and Topos. The book examines twelve civic typologies, each illustrated through a set of examples drawn in plans, sections, and axonometric views, occasionally supplemented by key elevations (fig. 4).

A booklet accompanying the text applies these typological approaches to interpret the peripheries of urban environments, commercial vernaculars, and city edges (fig. 5). These design projects, derived from master’s theses under Lechner’s supervision (2015–2021), challenge conventional typologies by asking what future monuments the periphery will leave behind (fig. 6, 7). In this way, they explore the question of architecture’s role in engaging with peripheral conditions as a key aspect of the discipline's subject matter.

Ultimately, Counterintuitive Typologies aims to develop an architecture that is both materially responsive and culturally engaged. It seeks to reconcile architecture’s disciplinary autonomy with the contingencies of contemporary life, thereby rethinking the role of typology and analogical reasoning. This approach challenges the notion of the architectural work as a self-contained, autonomous object, emphasizing instead the fluid interplay between cultural production, materiality, and the broader socio-political and environmental contexts in which architecture operates.

Team

Andreas Lechner
(PI, Associate Professor)

Maike Gold
(Project Assistant & PhD candidate)

Stefan Hochhofer
(TU Graz, student assistant)

Laura Suvieri
(PhD Candidate, Università degli Studi di Perugia)

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




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