At its core, Counterintuitive Typologies examines architectural practice as a disciplinary form of judgment grounded in spatial and social reasoning. It asks what civic capacities this judgment can disclose in structures never intended to support them. Typology provides the operative method: a way of reading, comparing, and transforming the relations among form, structure, use, territory, and time.
Three stages in an evolving research agenda: Book 1, Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology (2021); Book 2, Architectural Affordances - Typologies of Umbau (2025); and the forthcoming Book 3, Counterintuitive Typologies (2028; preliminary cover illustration).
Typology, as understood here, is neither a taxonomy of building categories nor a form of stylistic nostalgia. It is architecture’s own epistemic method: knowledge produced through drawing, comparison, abstraction, and transformation. By reconstructing spatial relations across buildings, territories, and historical periods, typological reasoning renders the existing environment—Umwelt—legible as architectural intelligence: available for analytical diagramming, critical reassessment, and further design—Umbau.
Transformation therefore begins neither with rejection nor replacement but—counterintuitively—with disciplined attention to what already exists. It proceeds by progressively clarifying latent spatial, structural, material, and civic capacities and making them actionable through design.
The initiative builds on the trajectory established by Andreas Lechner’s Thinking Design: Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology (2021) and extended through Architectural Affordances: Typologies of Umbau (2025). His forthcoming book, Counterintuitive Typologies (exp. 2028), asks how this disciplinary form of knowledge can remain operative under conditions shaped by ecological crisis, peripheral urbanisation, social transformation, and the material legacies of carbon modernity. Its central question is how architecture can recognise and reactivate the capacities already embedded in the built environment—and translate them into concrete projects of transformation.
Counterintuitive Typologies is a research initiative at Graz University of Technology led by Andreas Lechner. Established through a three-year research project funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), it now extends across international research collaborations, publications, teaching, and design research.
Team
Andreas Lechner
Nikola Beim
Maike Gold
Laura Suvieri
Sabine Kastner
Maria Schenkel
Florian Weinberger
Andreas Lechner
Nikola Beim
Maike Gold
Laura Suvieri
Sabine Kastner
Maria Schenkel
Florian Weinberger
Partners
Gennaro Postiglione
Cameron McEwan
Fabrizia Berlingieri
Andrea Canclini
Markus Penell
Francesca Serrazanetti
Gennaro Postiglione
Cameron McEwan
Fabrizia Berlingieri
Andrea Canclini
Markus Penell
Francesca Serrazanetti
Research Networks
︎︎︎CA²RE Community
︎︎︎AHRA Architectural Humanities Research Association
︎︎︎PEP Programm Entwurfsbasierte Promotion
Colleagues and Interlocutors
Diana Agrest — Cooper Union
Sandra Bartoli — HS München
Friedrich von Borries — HFBK Hamburg
Cynthia Davidson — Anyone Corp.
Floris De Bruyn — KU Leuven
Alberto Calderoni – University of Naples Federico II
Carlos Dias Coelho — Lisbon School of Architecture
Keller Easterling — Yale Architecture
Mario Gandelsonas — Princeton University
Jörg Gleiter — TU Berlin
Andrea Gritti — Polimi
Lorens Holm — University of Dundee
Elisa Iturbe — Harvard GSD
Gérald Ledent — UC Louvain
João Silva Leite — Lisbon School of Architecture
Silvan Linden — TU Berlin
Martin Maker — Royal Danish Academy
Morten Meldgaard — Royal Danish Academy
Daniel Norell — Chalmers University of Technology
Ralf Pasel — TU Berlin
Lukas Pauer — UTS Sydney
Eireen Schreurs — TU Delft
Miguel Silva — Lisbon School of Architecture
Martino Tattara — TU Darmstadt
Annalisa Trentin — University of Bologna
Caroline Voet — KU Leuven
︎︎︎CA²RE Community
︎︎︎AHRA Architectural Humanities Research Association
︎︎︎PEP Programm Entwurfsbasierte Promotion
Colleagues and Interlocutors
Diana Agrest — Cooper Union
Sandra Bartoli — HS München
Friedrich von Borries — HFBK Hamburg
Cynthia Davidson — Anyone Corp.
Floris De Bruyn — KU Leuven
Alberto Calderoni – University of Naples Federico II
Carlos Dias Coelho — Lisbon School of Architecture
Keller Easterling — Yale Architecture
Mario Gandelsonas — Princeton University
Jörg Gleiter — TU Berlin
Andrea Gritti — Polimi
Lorens Holm — University of Dundee
Elisa Iturbe — Harvard GSD
Gérald Ledent — UC Louvain
João Silva Leite — Lisbon School of Architecture
Silvan Linden — TU Berlin
Martin Maker — Royal Danish Academy
Morten Meldgaard — Royal Danish Academy
Daniel Norell — Chalmers University of Technology
Ralf Pasel — TU Berlin
Lukas Pauer — UTS Sydney
Eireen Schreurs — TU Delft
Miguel Silva — Lisbon School of Architecture
Martino Tattara — TU Darmstadt
Annalisa Trentin — University of Bologna
Caroline Voet — KU Leuven
Counterintuitive Typologies
TU Graz Research Group
Associate Professor
Dr. Andreas Lechner
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