Departing from typology understood as formal inheritance or stylistic continuity, Counterintuitive Typologies treats building types as historically embedded yet fundamentally mutable structures. Typology is approached as a medium through which cultural memory, political economy, and material inertia intersect—and through which architecture can intervene in precisely those conditions it inherits. The project is particularly concerned with contemporary urban challenges such as densification, urban infill, ecological scarcity, and the reactivation of underused building stock. In this context, adaptation, upcycling, and reuse are not secondary strategies, but primary architectural tasks that reframe typology in relation to circularity and care.

The research group operates across teaching and research formats, including design studios at TU Graz, PhD seminars at Politecnico di Milano, numerous master’s theses, peer-reviewed publications, and international collaborations. Ongoing partnerships include the research collaboration Peripheries – Peripherocene with Northumbria University.

︎︎︎www.CounterintuitiveTypologies.com. 

Fig. 1 
Robert Venturi’s Recommendation for a Monument (1972) alongside PKMN Architecture’s green-hued reinterpretation from 2014.



Fig. 2
Appended brochure “Counterintuitve Typologies“ featuring 12 master’s theses (2015–2021) exploring peripheral and commercial vernaculars through precise drawings and conceptual revaluation of 
city edges, infrastructural voids, continuous building and future monuments, in: Andreas Lechner, Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology, Zurich: Park Books 2021.



Fig. 3 
144 project floor plans drawn at same scale from Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology, Zurich: Park Books 2021.


Fig. 4
Poster for the TU Graz Architectural Research Lecture Series, Winter Semester 2021/22. Counterintuitive Typologies was launched as part of the series on January 20, 2022.

Between Critique, Care, and Ecological Reuse

Counterintuitive Typologies addresses architecture’s contemporary entanglement with aesthetic commodification, ecological degradation, and institutional inertia. Its focus is not on exceptional objects, but on the ordinary, overlooked, and often discredited environments of the urban periphery: strip malls, logistics sheds, vacant offices, infrastructural voids, and commercial vernaculars. These “low-status” typologies are understood not as failures of the city, but as repositories of embodied energy, spatial affordance, and latent monumentality.

The initiative is grounded in a lineage of architectural critique—drawing on Venturi’s embrace of contradiction, Rossi’s conception of urban memory, Rowe’s analytical formalism, and Tafuri’s ideological demystification—while deliberately resisting their formalization into doctrine. Typology here functions as a mode of resistance: an analytical and projective device that exposes how architecture both reflects and reproduces social, economic, and ecological logics, and how these logics might be redirected.

A central question runs through the work: how can typological strategies avoid becoming accelerants of gentrification and instead operate as instruments of inclusive, socially generative, and ecologically responsible transformation? Architectural history—in, for, and of architecture—provides the methodological scaffold, but the inquiry is equally advanced through drawing, design, and built work. Across these formats, four interlinked principles structure the research.

1 Typological Reinterpretation

Building types are not fixed entities but evolve under cultural, economic, and ecological pressures. Strategic misplacement, recontextualization, and hybridization of types become deliberate acts of critique. Commercial and infrastructural typologies are re-read for their affordances—their capacity to be re-scripted as civic, social, or productive architecture.

2 Peripheral Grounds
Peripheral territories—defined by sprawl, residual space, and infrastructural excess—are reframed as critical fields of architectural inquiry. Rather than deficits, these landscapes are understood as spatial archives of urbanization and as sites where new forms of collective life can be tested.

3 Continual Building (Umbau)
Favoring transformation over demolition, the research advances Umbau as both method and ethic. Existing structures are treated as constraints that generate intelligence rather than obstacles to innovation, aligning architectural practice with ecological responsibility and material continuity.

4 Material Resistance
Against tabula rasa urbanism and the seductions of spectacle, the work foregrounds typological ambiguity and drawing as critical tools. Architectural design becomes a situated form of resistance precisely because it is materially precise, historically reflexive, and theoretically grounded—capable of care, repair, and redefinition rather than replacement.

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Outputs

Andreas Lechner, Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology, Zurich: Park Books, 2021

A visual taxonomy of 144 case studies across 12 typologies, from antiquity to the present. The project privileges analogical clarity over abstraction and forms the conceptual foundation of Counterintuitive Typologies.

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CBT – Counterintuitive Building Types (2022–2025)
Funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Principal Investigator: Andreas Lechner
Investigates adaptive reuse strategies for underutilized commercial typologies, with a focus on strip malls and peripheral retail structures.

Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau (2023–2025)
Funded by DAStU – Politecnico di Milano
Co-led with Gennaro Postiglione
Examines the latent transformative capacity of existing buildings through 30 international case studies of adaptive reuse.

Peripheries – Peripherocene (2023–2026)With Cameron McEwan, Northumbria University
Explores the architectural and ecological significance of peripheral landscapes in the Anthropocene. Forthcoming as a special issue of The Journal of Architecture (2025).

Fig. 5 
Studio Posters of “Counterintuitive Typologies” iterations at TU Graz 2020 to 2023.   


Selected References
Venturi, R. (1966). Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Rossi, A. (1982). The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rowe, C. (1976). The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tafuri, M. (1976). Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lechner, A. (2021). Thinking Design: Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology. Zurich: Park Books.