Andreas Lechner (2016), Reflections on the Design of an Architectural Building Typology, Institute of Design and Building Typology

Committee: Aglaée Degros, Hans Gangoly, Roger Riewe, Daniel Gethmann, Natascha Spitzer
Reviewers: Anne-Julchen Bernhardt (RWTH Aachen), Dietmar Eberle (ETH Zürich), Elli Mosayebi (TU Darmstadt)
712 pages with 144 projects in floor plans, sections and views; German.

Andreas Lechner’s habilitation thesis describes architectural design as a transformation process of loosely present elements, patterns, and precedents for spatial formation and shielding in renewed suggestions for fixed alignments at concrete sites in two parts. Firstly, in the form of a sketched building typology that offers illustrative materials in the traditional form of notating architectural ideas: floor plans, sections, and views of twelve (in many cases) classical architectural projects in twelve contexts of public use—theater, museum, library, state government, office, leisure, religion, retail, factory, education, supervision, and hospital. Secondly, in three essays that initially conceive design as a familiarization of logistical and aesthetic scopes as a cultural dimension of building. Here, typologies assume a central, retrospective and prospective role—between empirical observation (inductive ideal types), theoretical presuppositions (deductive ideal types), and assessment of position within society. However, the knowledge interest and thus the objective of typologies—knowledge gain through information reduction—are not the focus of this work, which is also conceived as a guiding hand for design and design theory. On the contrary, the forms and functions collected here aim to call attention to the composition as aesthetic determination of form, which is presently emerging in the innerdisciplinary exploration of architectural memory lessons as a vague and thus productive relationship to contexts of use. This circumstance, which is fundamental for a thematic exploration of architecture, can also provide, for the smart nonpictorial nature of urban landscape sprawl, impulses for decentralized building densification. The projects drafted twelve-times-twelve deliver, as tableaus of forms and programs, design-related hints for comparison and association, as well as for the drawing of new connecting lines in order to disrupt the normalcy of suburbias with visually meaningful municipal programs.

A revised edition of the habilitation thesis was published in early 2018 by the Zurich publishing company Park Books under the title Entwurf einer architektonischen Gebäudelehre (Design of an Architectural Building Typology).