Andreas Lechner studied architecture at Graz University of Technology and after formative study stays in Los Angeles, trained as an architect living and working in Berlin, Tokyo and Vienna. After obtaining a doctorate in 2009, he was assistant professor and is since 2017 an associate professor for architectural design and typology at the TU Graz faculty of architecture and a visiting professor at the Politecnico di Milano.

Counterintuitive Typologies is Andreas Lechner’s research and teaching focus at Graz University of Technology’s faculty of architecture. It comprises international cooperations, design studios and electives, master’s theses, PhD and research projects, and currently a three-year research project that was granted by the Austrian Science Promotion Agency FFG.

As a research and educational project, Counterintuitive Typologies responds to current challenges by combining matters of upcycling and the adaptive re-use of existing structures with re-addressing the notion of type in architecture. With type, our aim is to reconnect and critically update an epistemology of architecture, as questions of cultural relevance are seemingly counter-positioned to the inevitably material-based themes around circularity. We see architecture in a central position to discover the beauty that lies within the environmental turn – something that can neither be assumed nor taken for granted when narrowing down on methods and concepts from natural or the social sciences, engineering, or the fine arts. This  conviction draws our attention to “counterintuitive typologies” – i.e. to the many tensions arising from today's multiple contradictions and temporalities in order to recalibrate the agencies and agendas of architecture's expertise, project and design. 

Counterintuitive Typologies aims at a substantial and culturally engaged architecture of today and tries to both engage directly with the contingencies of material life and to connect and update epistemologies and policies of the discipline of architecture in face of an uneven and imperfect world. Type and analogical thinking might helps us reframing the ways we think about cultural production and certainly challenge the idea of the work of art as an autonomous entity.