Counterintuitive 
Typologies

Fig. Palazzo Madama, Turin (1st century BC–2023). A sequence tracing more than two millennia of transformation through yellow/red coding and annotations, as presented in Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau (2025).



Fig. Suspended between the humanist ideal and the commercial realities embodied in real-estate typologies, Frankenstein’s monster provides an analogy for architecture’s hybrid practices and their methodological implications.



Fig. Cover, Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau
Andreas Lechner, Gennaro Postiglione, Francesca Serrazanetti and Maike Gold, Naples: Thymos Books, 2025 · ISBN 978-88-32072-56-3

Disseminated through international conferences and peer-reviewed publications, the research extends typological inquiry beyond the classification of forms toward the recognition of architecture’s latent spatial, structural, material, civic, and transformative capacities. Typology is understood not as a system of fixed categories, but as an operative epistemic method for discerning what existing buildings enable, what they resist, and how their capacities might be reinterpreted and reactivated through design.

Drawing is fundamental to this methodology. It directs sustained attention toward empirical architectural objects, reconstructs their underlying spatial, structural, and material logics, and renders them available for comparison, critical reassessment, and transformation. Through drawing, the existing building becomes legible not simply as inherited form, but as a field of constraints and possibilities.

The principal outcome of this research is the book Architectural Affordances, which examines how buildings acquire, retain, and lose capacities for transformation over time. A shared drawing protocol distinguishes retained fabric, demolition, and addition, tracing successive material and functional changes in plan, section, and elevation. Comparative readings reveal how earlier architectural decisions both enable and constrain subsequent interventions.

Typology thus becomes a means of reading the relation between spatial persistence and changing use, while architectural affordances describe the possibilities that emerge between a building’s material configuration and the demands placed upon it. Together, they provide a framework for identifying how existing architectures might become future civic armatures rather than obsolete objects.

Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau
Andreas Lechner, Gennaro Postiglione, Francesca Serrazanetti and Maike Gold, Naples: Thymos Books, 2025 · ISBN 978-88-32072-56-3

Link
︎︎︎Architectural Affordances