Anchored in a three-year research project funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG, 2022–2025), the Counterintuitive Typologies initiative extends across international collaborations, design studios, electives, master’s theses, and PhD projects. It forms the central framework for Andreas Lechner’s research and teaching at the Faculty of Architecture, Graz University of Technology. At its core, Counterintuitive Typologies is an inquiry into what architectural practice is and how it thinks. It rejects the understanding of architecture as a service discipline—whether in the form of the more or less stylish staging of seduction, or in the reduction of practice to the coordination of regulations, performance metrics, and market demands. Instead, it conceives of practice as a specifically architectural mode of judgment grounded in spatial reasoning: in typology as a way of reading, comparing, and reworking the relations between form, structure, use, territory, and time.

Typology, in this sense, is not a taxonomy of building classes, nor a nostalgic return to canonical precedents. It is architecture’s own epistemic method: a mode of reasoning that operates through comparison, abstraction, and transformation. After Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typologies (2021) and Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau (2025) the forthcoming book Counterintuitive Typologies (2028) will push the disciplinary form of knowledge grounded in drawing and in the careful reconstruction of spatial relations across history as a method further (See Figure 1). It asks how typological reasoning can remain operative under contemporary conditions shaped by ecological crisis, peripheral urbanization, and the material legacies of carbon modernity.

What holds this practice together is drawing. Drawing is not secondary representation or illustration after the fact; it is the medium in which architecture becomes thinkable. Plans, sections, elevations, diagrams, and comparative redrawings make spatial relations visible, criticizable, and transferable. They allow architecture to analyze what is there, to instruct design through codification and comparison, and to speculate on what a building, site, or territory might still become. But this also means that drawing must do more than register form alone. It must expose the wider spatial rules through which buildings participate in systems of extraction, circulation, segregation, and obsolescence. The task is not simply to discover latent potential in existing stock, but to distinguish between mere adaptability and meaningful transformation.

From this perspective, architectural practice is neither pure invention nor mere problem-solving. It is an artistic-technical practice that works through form, section, and plan in order to test spatial organizations and to judge how organizational constellations may become convincing social, and ecological constellations. What matters is not compliance alone, but the architecturally cogent and pleasant and more pleasureable reworking of inherited conditions. Counterintuitive Typologies radicalizes this understanding by relocating typological reasoning into the periphery and the Disposable City, where architectural intelligence is hardest to see but most urgently needed. Here the project shifts from typology as knowledge, to typology as temporal capacity, to typology as critical agency within structures designed for turnover and obsolescence. Its ambition is therefore not only to read existing buildings against demolition-first logics, but to use drawing and typology to expose and rework the spatial logics of carbon modernity itself.

1 Thinking Design

The launch of Counterintuitive Typologies coincided with the preparation of the second German and first English editions 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 a contemporary disciplinary lens. It presents 144 significant public buildings, from antiquity to the present, organized into the three chapters Tectonics, Type, and Topos, and grouped into twelve civic categories: theater, museum, library, state, office, recreation, religion, retail, factory, education, surveillance, and hospital. Each project is illustrated at the same scale in plans, sections, and axonometrics, occasionally supplemented by key elevations. This uniform graphic treatment enables comparison and emphasizes architecture not as a series of isolated masterpieces, but as a field of related spatial propositions.

An accompanying booklet, Counterintuitive Typologies, extends this method into less canonical terrain through twelve design theses investigating urban edges, commercial vernaculars, and peripheral conditions. Here typological reasoning is displaced from the civic center to sites where architectural value is often least recognized yet spatial consequences are most decisive.

2 Peripheral Monuments?

Derived from master’s theses supervised by Andreas between 2015 and 2021, these investigations ask which future “monuments” might emerge from the ordinary and often degraded landscapes of the outskirts [figs. 6, 7]. The point is not to aestheticize banality, but to test whether architecture can recover forms of collective meaning and public intelligence within territories usually understood only through logistics, real-estate abstraction, or infrastructural convenience. In this sense, the project treats the periphery not as a secondary object but as an epistemic site from which the discipline can rethink itself.

This requires a typological approach that is both materially grounded and critically alert. Peripheral building stock cannot be treated as a neutral reserve of reusable matter. It must be understood as historically formed within energy-intensive patterns of access, circulation, specialization, and land use. The question is therefore not only whether such buildings can be adapted, but whether their transformation can alter the territorial rules they embody. Counterintuitive Typologiesseeks precisely this double task: to preserve architecture’s disciplinary intelligence while confronting the ecological and political-economic conditions in which that intelligence now operates.

3 Invention and Critique

Years of teaching architectural design studios make clear that the tension between good design and critical reflection is not a problem to be overcome but a productive condition of the discipline. Design depends on synthesis, intuition, and formal decision; critique unsettles these decisions, situating them within broader material, social, and environmental realities. The studio becomes productive when these two impulses are held together rather than separated. Counterintuitive Typologies embraces this tension by treating typology not as a fixed template but as a terrain for both invention and critique.

This also means resisting two familiar evasions. On the one hand lies the retreat from form into planning, management, and moral rhetoric; on the other, a complacent production of images and commodities for cultural consumption. Against both, Counterintuitive Typologies argues for a third trajectory: architecture as a projective and critical practice that works on the built world through drawing, comparison, and transformation. Its wager is that architecture remains culturally and politically relevant not by abandoning its own instruments, but by radicalizing them—by making typology capable of reading conflict, duration, territorial consequence, and ecological constraint within the forms of the existing city.

Seen this way, the project is not simply about reuse, nor about peripheral building types alone. It is about architecture’s capacity to think spatially under altered historical conditions. It claims that drawing and typology remain indispensable, but only insofar as they can reveal and rework the forms through which carbon-intensive ways of life have been spatially organized. Counterintuitive Typologies therefore proposes neither disciplinary withdrawal nor disciplinary self-sufficiency. It proposes a renewed architectural intelligence: one able to analyze, instruct, and speculate from within the contradictions of the present.



Fig. 1 Page spreads from Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology.


Team

Andreas Lechner, Maike Gold, Laura Suvieri, Sabine Kastner, Maria Schenkel