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Andreas Lechner
Counterintuitive Typologies – Architecture and the Disposable City
Book in development · Working title

Counterintuitive Typologies takes up a discrepancy: the spatial and material properties of peripheral building types persist, while the valuations placed on them do not. Shopping centres, logistics halls and parking decks are written off long before their structures are spent. Disposability names a regime of valuation, not a property of these buildings, and the gap between the two is where architectural judgement operates. Under densification, infill, ecological scarcity and the reactivation of underused stock, adaptation and reuse become primary architectural tasks.



Fig. "Recommendation for a Monument" from Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour.



Against typology understood as formal inheritance or stylistic continuity, the book develops typology as the instrument of that judgement — a means of separating what is contingent in a building (programme, tenancy, financing, depreciation) from what is persistent (span, grid, section, access, load reserve). Repetition, large spans and programmatic indifference open such structures to unforeseen use; deep plans, infrastructural dependency, regulatory and economic thresholds constrain it. Each case is assessed against five criteria: spatial suitability, material expenditure, territorial effect, institutional preconditions, and distribution of costs and benefits. 

Three parts carry the argument: 1. Territory situates these types within the settlement patterns that produced them. 2. Type redraws identical structural systems under successive programmes. 3. Transformation tests concrete conversions, including ones that do not hold.

Counterintuitive Typologies completes a trilogy. Thinking Design (Park Books, 2018/2021) established typology as disciplinary knowledge and as a didactic-critical instrument; Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau (Thymos Books, 2025, with Postiglione, Gold and Serrazanetti) reframed it as temporal capacity — the latent performance a structure holds across successive uses. This book extends rather than overturns that thesis, testing capacity against the valuations that decide whether it is ever taken up. It draws on work from the Counterintuitive Typologies research programme, design studios at TU Graz, master's theses, PhD seminars at the Politecnico di Milano, and various edited and peer-reviewed publications; its methodological backbone is the FFG-funded project Counterintuitive Building Types (CBT, 2022–2026).


References

  • Quatremère de Quincy, A.-C. (1825). "Type," Encyclopédie méthodique: Architecture (trans. A. Vidler, Oppositions8, 1977).

  • Rossi, A. (1966/1982). The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D., & Izenour, S. (1972). Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Tafuri, M. (1976). Architecture and Utopia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Pope, A. (1996). Ladders. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

  • Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso.

  • Dunham-Jones, E., & Williamson, J. (2009). Retrofitting Suburbia. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

  • Lechner, A. (2021). Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology. Zurich: Park Books.

  •  Lechner, A., Postiglione, G., Serrazanetti, F., Gold, M. (2025). Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau, Naples: Thymos Books.  


 

ARCHITEKT ANDREAS LECHNER
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Austria

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