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 programmatic design perspectives that differ distinctly from those of the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, or the fine arts.

Building on this foundation of abductive reasoning, Counterintuitive Typologies investigates the multiple contradictions and temporalities that shape present-day architectural work, recalibrating its disciplinary agency and agendas. The project engages the friction between well-established typological models and emergent needs posed by global environmental, social, and technological shifts. But in doing so, it highlights architecture’s  material and practical concerns, as a projective practice 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)

1 Thinking Design

The launch of Counterintuitive Typologies coincided with the preparation of the second German and first English edition of Andreas’ 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 and presents 144 significant public 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)  but all drawn to the same informational depth thus helping to make them easier to compare.



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 and formatting to projects for 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.

2 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).



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 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 and analogical and, or abductive reasoning, 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. 

3 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)