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

French Book Review / 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 positions architecture as a mode of thinking in its own right. Against its reduction to problem-solving, image production, or regulatory compliance, the book argues for design as an epistemic practice grounded in form, drawing, and comparative judgement. Developed from years of teaching at TU Graz, it treats architecture not as the application of external theory or data, but as a discipline that generates knowledge through typological reasoning. Architecture, here, “knows” the world by working through public spatial structures saturated with historical, social, and political inertia. The book is neither a historical survey nor a technical handbook in the lineage of Neufert; it is a critical didactic instrument that exposes how architectural judgement is formed, stabilised, and can be productively unsettled.

The argument unfolds through three tightly interwoven regimes of thought—Tectonics, Type, and Topos. Tectonics is reclaimed from stylistic expression and technical virtuosity and reframed as architecture’s heavy medium: the material organisation of bodies, access, and hierarchy. Type forms the epistemological core. Drawing on Quatremère, Durand, and Rossi while resisting both nostalgia and formalism, typology is understood not as classification but as a relational structure that enables inference. An atlas of 144 projects, redrawn uniformly in plan, section, and elevation and organised into twelve charged categories—state, surveillance, factory, hospital, retail, among others—operates as a comparative field rather than a catalogue. The deliberate suppression of photography foregrounds drawing as architecture’s primary epistemic medium, insisting that spatial relations, not visual affect or authorship, are where architectural knowledge resides.

Topos extends this reasoning to territory, reading context not as backdrop but as a historically produced infrastructural condition. Particular attention is given to the twentieth-century periphery—industrial, logistical, and institutional landscapes where typology appears most nakedly as a governance machine. Factories, malls, prisons, and hospitals are analysed as spatial dispositifs organising labour, consumption, care, and control. In this sense, Thinking Design already anticipates Lechner’s later work on Umbau and the periphery: architecture’s task is not to invent novelty ex nihilo, but to confront, re-type, and strategically misuse existing forms whose rigidity has outlived their original rationale. If the book is a blueprint at all, it is not for better solutions, but for a more exacting architectural intelligence—one capable of reading and intervening in the spatial logics that continue to structure contemporary life.

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.