Bernhard Ogrisek, Das Infra-Gewöhliche, Master’s Thesis TU Graz (2022). 


Aldo Rossi’s extension of the Cimiterio di Ponte Sesto in Rozzano with G. Da Pozzo and F.S. Fera (1989–1995), Viale alberato with chapel, Southern Periphery of Milan, March 2023, Photo: © Andreas Lechner

Reframing Peripheries in the Era of the Anthropocene

Today’s peripheries are plural and planetary: encompassing suburbs, exurbs, favelas, informal settlements, logistics zones, old villages, and new towns. They form what Ignasi de Solà-Morales called terrain vague—ambiguous spaces full of latent potential (Solà-Morales, 1995). These geographies are shaped by contradictory forces of capital, migration, ecology, infrastructure, and state control. As such, the periphery is not a homogeneous condition but a multifaceted and dynamic terrain. Processes of peripherization—defined by uneven development, environmental degradation, and spatial marginalization—are exacerbated by crises of capitalism, climate, and care (Kühn, 2014). These processes increasingly shape rural and remote territories far beyond metropolitan cores, creating hybrid zones of agriculture, extractivism, and speculative development.

In The Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi proposed the city as a locus of collective memory, with urban artifacts, typologies, and structures expressing an “urban imaginary” (Rossi, 1982). While his analysis emphasized the historical city centre, the twenty-first century presents a different urban paradigm where the rigid dichotomies of centre and periphery have dissolved into sprawling, discontinuous, and hybridized landscapes shaped by processes of extended urbanisation (Brenner & Schmid, 2015).

The periphery, long seen as residual or secondary, increasingly defines the dominant condition of contemporary urban life. Georges Perec’s attention to the everyday, the banal, and the habitual (Perec, 1997) compels us to reconsider peripheral territories as primary expressions of collective life, containing their own monuments, memories, and spatial logics.

Key Research Questions

Our research poses urgent and generative questions:

1. What is the Peripheral Imaginary?
If Rossi employed categories such as type, locus, permanence, and monument to understand the city, what interpretive tools can help us theorize the periphery? What are the typologies, symbols, and spatial figures that shape peripheral imaginaries?

2. What Constitutes Peripheral Memory and Identity?
Peripheries, too, are carriers of memory and history. How do built forms and urban patterns reflect the lived experience of peripheral life? Who remembers the periphery, and how?

3. How Are Peripheries Reconfigured in the Anthropocene?
The Anthropocene—a term marking the deep entanglement of natural and human systems (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Haraway, 2016)—challenges traditional urban categories. How are peripheries transformed by infrastructural intensification, resource extraction, environmental displacement, and new forms of political governance?

Theoretical Contributions and Methods

We seek to build a spatial, representational, and theoretical lexicon on peripheries that integrates insights from architecture, urban theory, political ecology, and environmental humanities.

Key contributions will explore:

Extended Urbanisation: Following Brenner and Schmid (2015), we conceptualize the periphery as integral to global urban restructuring, including hinterlands, supply chains, and sites of dispossession.

Planetary Urbanism: Urbanization is no longer confined to cities; it is a planetary process (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2020).

Peripheral Monuments: New typologies and icons emerge not from central institutions but from infrastructural, vernacular, or marginal architectures (Lechner, 2021).
Critical Representation: From cartography to photography, we explore visual and conceptual strategies to render the invisible geographies of the periphery visible and legible (Corner, 1999).

Emerging Themes and Calls for Contribution

Voices from the Periphery: 
Who inhabits, governs, and narrates the periphery?How do political and economic systems create peripheral conditions?What affective registers—love, loathing, longing—emerge in the lived experiences of peripheral life?

Picturing the Periphery:What are the visual, formal, and typological manifestations of the periphery?How can peripheries be drawn, photographed, mapped, or modelled to capture their complexity?What are the representational tools required for a “critical cartography” of peripheral space?
The Anthropocenic Periphery

How do infrastructures, ecologies, and institutions produce peripheries under Anthropocenic pressures?
What new models of settlement, adaptation, and resistance emerge in these zones?
How do notions of care, resilience, and spatial justice inform our understanding of peripheries?

Book Review by Cameron McEwan: Peripheral Monuments: Book Review of Thinking Design - Blueprint for an architecture of typology by Andreas Lechner”, in: Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, Volume 46/1 (2022), 83-88, 
https://doi.org/10.3846/jau.2022.16904

"Thinking Design provides an important critical overview for theories and projects of typology and will offer a useful compendium for the student and teacher of architecture as well as the critical practitioner. Yet Thinking Design also offers an original theoretical reflection on the status of the urban periphery and opens questions about architecture and architectural design research as a practice of critical inquiry. In the face of the capitalist debris and the uneven space that is the hallmark of urban peripheries as a global condition, we might return to some of the 144 typologies that Lechner presents as inspiring examples; or study the striking suite of projects by students under Lechner’s supervision, which are compiled in the appended booklet. Lechner offers inspiring reflections, strong examples, and useful models for what may become the peripheral monuments of tomorrow."


Review in French / en français:   Guillemette Morel-Journel, in: DA – D’Architectures, 303 (Nov. 2022):

https://www.darchitectures.com/thinking-design-blueprint-an-architecture-of-typology-a6149.html

"Thinking Design: Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology" by Andreas Lechner explores the essence of architectural design, emphasizing the primacy of form and its role as a backdrop for human coexistence. The book is divided into two parts: three essays and drawings of 144 architectural projects with brief descriptions. These sections, although loosely related, overlap in their search for terminology and an ordering system to distinguish generic from particular aspects.

The author developed the book based on lectures at the Graz University of Technology, evolving the content over the years. The selection of projects reflects a continuous presence of the past in architecture, making it tangible for design teaching. The book acknowledges the complex nature of architectural production, influenced by practical, theoretical, artistic, and technological factors, without attempting to resolve the tension between the objective and the subjective. The book argues that architectural designs, seemingly pre-linguistic, serve as literal reflections of prevailing social circumstances. The book delves into three chapters: "Tectonics," "Type," and "Topos," examining architecture's attempt to establish its identity as a social and cultural force. It explores the tension between the general and the particular in building design, emphasizing the importance of this dichotomy. The concepts of "tectonics," "type," and "topos" are introduced as autoreferential rather than rigid design standards. Lechner intentionally avoids focusing on technical, historical, or local details in the representation of projects, highlighting the generic aspect of architectural bodies and their relationship with repetition. The book argues that design derives its creative power from the interplay between originality and repetition.

The chapters "Tectonics," "Type," and "Topos" address the tension between form and function, examining architecture's role as a cultural and social construct. Lechner introduces the notions of "state," "recreation," and "surveillance" to underscore the sociopolitical dimension of spatial-structural contexts. He argues that the inherent relation between form and function is not arbitrary but ambiguous. Lechner discusses the critique of Late-Modernist architecture, tracing the development of architectural typology through different eras. The book highlights the importance of theory in architecture, emphasizing a broad and open approach to design education.

The first chapter, "Tectonics," provides an overview of the book's structure, literature, and project selection process. It emphasizes the practical design approach, serving as a source of ideas and reference works. The second chapter, "Type," explores the distinction between "first" and "second typology" and introduces the postfunctionalist and urbanistic-atmospheric typology in the third chapter, "Topos." The book discusses the broader concept of type in architecture, emphasizing its relevance as “professional memory” despite changing demands. Lechner acknowledges the productive dimension of vagueness and polemics in the architectural design process, presenting the 144 projects as a selection that illustrates a design aspect based on typological understanding. "Thinking Design" thus offers a comprehensive exploration of architectural design, addressing the complex interplay between form, function, and societal context.

The book provides a nuanced perspective on typology and emphasizes the negotiation of architectural knowledge through composition and transformative design processes.

However disparate the style or ethos, beneath architecture's pluralism lies a number of categorical typologies. In Thinking Design, Austrian architect Andreas Lechner has condensed his profound typological understanding into a single book. Divided into three chapters - Tectonics, Type, and Topos - Lechner's book reflects upon twelve fundamental typologies: theater, museum, library, state, office, recreation, religion, retail, factory, education, surveillance, and hospital. Encompassing a total of 144 carefully selected examples of classic designs and buildings, ranging across an epic sweep from antiquity to the present, the book not only explains the fundamentals of collective architectural knowledge but traces the interconnected reiterations that lie at the heart of architecture’s transformative power. As such, Thinking Design outlines a new building theory rooted in the act of composition as an aesthetic determinant of architectural form. This emphasis on composition in the design process over the more commonplace aspects of function, purpose, or atmosphere makes it more than a mere planning manual. It reveals also the cultural dimension of architecture that gives it the ability to transcend not only use cycles but entire epochs. Each example is meticulously illustrated with a newly drawn elevation or axonometric projection, floor plan, and section, not only invigorating the underlying ideas but also making the book an ideal comparative compendium.

An enclosed booklet (32 pages, 19.5 x 28 cm, 58 b-w illustrations) features theses by twelve students of Graz University of Technology that further illustrate Andreas Lechner's approach in teaching and design.

1st edition, Park Books: Zurich 2021,
Hardback, 460 pages, 444 b-w illustrations and plans
23 x 31 cm

ISBN 978-3-03860-246-0