For the first time held in the winter semester of 2013, Andreas’ lecture on “Design & Building Typologies” featured 12 typologies that were explored on 12 Mondays in the winter term. Continual research on this lecture was also central for my post-doctoral habilitation thesis within my tenure track.

Calendar – Concept for 12 Lectures, 2012

I started researching for the lectures using this tentative calendar structure.  Twelve typologies - theater, museum, library, state, second row with office, recreation, religion and retail, third row with production/industry, education, surveillance and hospital, with some 30 projects in each. In every lecture several architectural examples were discussed in detail, featuring plans and section prominently, highlighting characteristics, typical constellations, returning architectural types and compositions and (more or less innovative) usages of old or new building elements and techniques throughout centuries of (mainly Western) architecture. Housing and residential use is strictly excluded from these 12 civic typologes or more public buildings as there is (or was) an own institute and chair of housing at TU Graz. My mandatory lecture on public buildings in the architecture master was nominated by architecture students for the 2017 “Excellence in Teaching”-Award of TU Graz and became a finalist. 

I was tenured in 2017 and published a revised version of my habilitation thesis (2016) with Zurich Park Books in German in 2018: “Entwurf einer architektonischen Gebäudelehre”. Featuring 12 projects in 12 typologies, this selection was published in a revised and extended second German version in 2021 together with a first English version entitled “Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology.” 

After being delivered online during the pandemic, this master lecture was held for the last time in the winter semester of 2021/22. Within the framework of a revised Master of Architecture curriculum at TU Graz, this format has since been replaced by a series of lectures offered each semester by various institutes. These are loosely thematically coordinated but distributed across multiple voices and disciplinary perspectives. 

Across the twelve lectures, programmes—civic, cultural, economic, social—are shown to be distributable across a wide spectrum of structures. Given sufficient spatial latitude—generous section, adaptable spans, legible circulation—and the requisite political and architectural will, almost any programme can inhabit almost any frame. What does not follow is architectural value. That remains contingent: on context and timing, on programmatic pressure, and on the imaginative leap that converts necessity into form. Here, type is not a template but a reservoir of capacities; the work of architecture appears when those latent affordances are actualised by a specific situation. Architecture, then, is less the normative fulfilment of a brief than the episodic crystallisation of potential within the typological and visual field—an alignment of use, structure, image, and discourse that, at certain moments, compels public attention.

 
1 THEATER 
2 MUSEUM
3 LIBRARY
4 STATE