1 research by design, 2 methodological inquiry, and 3 spatial research are three interrelated research streams that will converge in Andreas Lechner’s forthcoming book, Counterintuitive Typologies:
1
Building Counter Intuition
Fig. 1. Design as a Method of Inquiry: From Commercial Real-Estate Type to Peripheral Monument—Testing the Civic Potential of Transformation and Reuse
The Strip Mall as Civic Reserve?
Funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) at TU Graz from 2022 to 2025, this research investigates the latent civic affordances of commercial strip-mall typologies. Their sustainable regeneration is an evolutionary and interdisciplinary process.
2
Typological Affordances
Fig. 2. 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.
Reading Future Civic Architectures in the Existing?
Developed through a fellowship, a collaborative research project, and a publication with the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU), Politecnico di Milano, this research strand examines the productive intersection of typology and affordance theory.
3
Peripheries / Terra Civica
Fig. 3. Frankenstein’s monster set against an idyllic landscape, bringing the hybrid and constructed character of the periphery into dialogue with its pastoral idealisation.
Spatial Research: Territory as an Object of Inquiry
This research project expands the inquiry from individual buildings and typological relations to the architectural and territorial significance of contemporary peripheries. Its principal publication is a special issue of the RIBA’s The Journal of Architecture, co-edited with Cameron McEwan.
Counterintuitive Typologies completes a three-book trajectory on typology, drawing, and transformation. Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology established typology as disciplinary knowledge: a mnemonic armature through which architectural history becomes operative in design. Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau shifted this argument into time, asking not only what buildings are, but what they can still become through transformation. Counterintuitive Typologies extends the argument into the peripheral building stock: the capitalist vernacular of retail sheds, logistics halls, parking decks, office slabs, strip malls, and infrastructural edges.
The book’s central claim is that these supposedly weak and disposable structures contain latent architectural intelligence. Their modularity, repetitiveness, large spans, deep plans, and infrastructural coupling may be precisely what enables their transformation. Typology therefore becomes a method of critical inversion: a way of reading buildings against their intended economic logic and converting obsolescence into civic, spatial, and ecological possibility.
Rather than offering a catalogue of reuse projects, the book proposes a theory of post-productive architectural creativity. In an age when the archive is fully reproducible and formal novelty can be generated endlessly, architecture’s most urgent task is not the production of ever-new objects, but the careful reorganization of existing material structures. Counterintuitive Typologies argues that the periphery is no longer a marginal condition; it is the primary laboratory in which architectural intelligence must prove its contemporary relevance.
Counterintuitive Typologies
TU Graz Research Group
Associate Professor
Dr. Andreas Lechner
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