Counterintuitive 
Typologies

Andreas Lechner’s research and teaching at the Faculty of Architecture, Graz University of Technology, are framed by the program Counterintuitive Typologies.

Anchored in a three-year research project funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), this initiative extends across international collaborations, design studios, electives, master’s theses, and PhD projects.

By foregrounding upcycling and adaptive reuse while re-examining the very notion of “type,” Counterintuitive Typologies confronts the shifting conditions of architectural practice and seeks to recalibrate the epistemological framework of architecture as both an art and a science of building. Architecture is here understood as a critical medium for negotiating the tension between cultural relevance and the material imperatives of circularity—offering programmatic design perspectives distinct from those of other sciences or arts.

Building on abductive, inductive, and deductive reasoning, the project investigates the contradictions and temporalities that shape contemporary architectural work, aiming to reposition its disciplinary agency and agendas. It engages the friction between entrenched typological models and emergent needs generated by global environmental, social, and technological shifts. In doing so, Counterintuitive Typologies insists on architecture’s material and practical concerns, while situating it within broader epistemological and cultural discourses.

The ethos behind this resists the two symptomatic positions of today’s disciplinary impasse as identified by Stanislaus von Moos and Martino Stierli:

“The discipline today seems to be torn between an activist stance that refuses to engage in the politics of form, insisting instead on the primacy of social planning and on the management of economic interests and conflicts that precede design decisions, and a complacent one, which contents itself with serving the growing demands of the culture industry, producing luxury commodities for high-end consumption.” (Eyes that Saw – Architecture After Las Vegas, Zurich: Scheidegger & Spieß, 2020, 13–14)

Counterintuitive Typologies thus articulates a third trajectory: architecture as a hybrid projective practice that confronts ecological, cultural, and disciplinary contradictions by transforming existing forms and reimagining their futures.


Thinking Design

The launch of Counterintuitive Typologies coincided with the preparation of the second German and first English edition of Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology (Park Books, 2021) [fig. 1]. Rooted in Aldo Rossi’s understanding of the city as a constellation of monuments, traces, and collective memory, the book reinterprets typology through contemporary concerns. It presents 144 significant public buildings [fig. 2], spanning from antiquity to the present, organized into three chapters—Tectonics, Type, Topos—and grouped into twelve civic categories: theater, museum, library, state, office, recreation, religion, retail, factory, education, surveillance, and hospital. Each is illustrated at the same scale, in plans, sections, and axonometrics, occasionally complemented by key elevations [figs. 3, 4]. The uniform graphic treatment enables comparative reading, emphasizing architecture not as isolated works of genius, but as fragments within a larger typological field.

An accompanying booklet, Counterintuitive Typologies, applies these methods to twelve design theses exploring the edges of urban environments: peripheral conditions, commercial vernaculars, and city outskirts [fig. 5].



Peripheral Monument

Derived from master’s theses supervised by Andreas between 2015 and 2021, these design investigations challenge mainstream typologies by asking which future “monuments” might emerge from more peripheral landscapes [fig. 6, 7]. In doing so, they highlight how architecture can engage with ‘marginal’ sites as a significant part of its disciplinary purview. Counterintuitive Typologies seeks to develop an approach to architecture that is simultaneously responsive to material realities and culturally engaged. By revisiting typology, it aims to reconcile architecture’s disciplinary semi-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.

Invention and Critique

Through years of teaching architectural design studios, one comes to appreciate the enduring tension between the pursuit of good design and the demands of critical reflection—not as a flaw to be resolved, but as a fertile ground for thought. Design thrives on clarity, synthesis, and intuition; critique unsettles, questions, and complicates. The studio, at its best, becomes a space where these opposing impulses are held in productive suspension—a site where form is not simply shaped, but interrogated. A research trajectory such as Counterintuitive Typologies embraces this tension, using the constraints and expectations of typology as a terrain for both invention and critique. Here, the intuitive and the analytical do not cancel one another out but co-constitute a richer architectural understanding. It must be said: even a certain “dumbness”—a bluntness of form, a naïve gesture—can, at times, serve design well, allowing ideas to surface before they are theorized. But such productive simplicity must never be mistaken for a viable stance toward the world. In the face of structural injustice and ecological precarity, architecture must be more than eloquent; it must also be awake.

(2024)

With the book Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau, a second milestone is achieved that consolidates Andreas trajectory of research, teaching, and design practice centered on typological transformation and adaptive reuse. Building on the theoretical foundations laid in Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology, this volume extends the inquiry into the political, ecological, and cultural dimensions of building upon the built. It not only brings together a corpus of projects, drawings, and texts that exemplify the methodology of Umbau, but also articulates a broader epistemological framework in which affordance theory, typological reasoning, and ecological care converge.

(update, Aug 2025)

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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)