Andreas Lechner: Forms and typologies.

Introduction to Andreas Lechner

0:00Hello. In episode 194 of the Ayers for Architecture podcast, architect and writer Andreas Lechner, associate professor of design and building theory at TU Graz in Austria, and founder of studio Andreas Lechner, speak about his 2021 book, Thinking Design, Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology, published with Park Books. We connected off the back of my previous conversation with Hans van der Hayden to carry on the conversation, in a manner, about typology. Thinking Design combines theoretical reflections on architectural teaching, with an illustrated visual atlas of 144 projects,

0:33all drawn, orthographically, and with no photographs, which serve as an invitation to explore architectural designs through the lens of typology. Somewhat maligned in an age of humanized fun, grandiosity, pomp, and intellectual frilliness, arguing, as I read it, for something a bit more, well, normal, the primacy of form as the core of the discipline. A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture, and space.

Global journey and architectural roots

1:00Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. Today, I'm delighted to be talking to Andreas Lechner. Andreas, thank you for joining me. We're going to be talking about your really amazing, actually, book, Thinking Design, Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology, which you published with Park Books in 2021. I guess that must feel like quite a long time ago to you, but hopefully still pertinent to your teaching, and certainly it's still very relevant to practice and certainly education as well. But before we get to that, Andreas, thank you again.

1:35Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Ambrose. It's a pleasure and an honor to be on your podcast. My name is Andreas Lechner. I'm an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture here in Graz University of Technology. I also practice as an architect with my office here in Graz. And I came to the book, Thinking Design, Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology through the overlap

2:07of practice, teaching and research. Because architecture, of course, is never simply a professional service, merely nor an academic discourse either. But it is about this disciplinary question of how does architecture think and by what means does it produce knowledge of its own, I would say, yeah. Okay. That's complex stuff. But you trained in architecture in Graz, I assume.

2:39I studied architecture and finished with a master's degree here at Clio Graz, yes, that's right. Although it's quite some time ago already. It was in 2000, yes. And after that, I went abroad. I lived for a couple of years in Berlin. During my studies, I also spent a reasonable amount of time in Los Angeles. And then after Berlin, I went to Vienna. And then I got the chance of working in Tokyo,

3:19in Japan. And then I got back to Vienna. And by chance, got the university assistant job here in Graz. So it was not actually intended to go back to Graz. But the job at the university, well, that was the occasion. Yeah. There's no place like home. There is no place like home. That's true. And in the end, there were

3:51several points that made perfectly sense, which you do not envision in advance or have this huge master plan. Well, that's a wonderful sort of expansive global journey. How did you find that experience compared with your architectural education, which I'm assuming, you know, around the turn of the millennium was, to some degree, kind of inflected by those two very dominant, it seemed to me at the time,

4:25anyway, very dominant ways of thinking architecture, which, on the one hand, you have the kind of glamorous, starkitect, shape-making. And on the other hand, you had folk like Peter Zumthor in this kind of, I guess, post-critical regionalist embedded quality. I mean, did you find that that uprooting that you were doing was also kind of informing how you started to think about things? Yeah, very much, very much indeed, because I was, in a way, even though I perhaps was not able to

5:01articulate it at that point of time, but I was both not very satisfied with the signature architecture model that, of course, I was, in the 1990s, I was growing up with. That was clearly, I was studying with Tom Main from Morphosis. I was studying here at the Institute of Günther Domenik, if, and it was, Domenik was even a proto-deconstructivist architect at that point of time. Unfortunately, he couldn't speak

5:35English very well, so, but he should have made it into the deconstructivist architecture exhibition at at the MoMA back then. But it was clearly the signature architecture building model that I was trained in. And at the same time, this was also when the Zumthor and all this phenomenologically aligned and very much material and detail and all that, this was coming up. It was not yet fully

6:10at the height of its success, but it was clear that this was countering, even though it remained in the same logic, of course. But both of these, as we will be touching upon when we continue, both of these are, in a way, not really, they were, both of them are reducing architecture to a way of, you know,

6:45of imposing the author, of course, as the main male genius source of architectural form. And that is a bit of an over uh, uh, uh, uh, estimation of the role of the single individual in architecture, I would say. Where did it come from in your reading? Where did this peculiar fetish for the, as you say, singular architect? Well, it, it, it, it, it, it, of course, came from economy, uh, with the post-Fortist logic of the

7:18of the culture industry that, uh, uh, uh, uh, invaded all the fields of human endeavor and competition and all that. So culture became with the third industrial revolution, so to say, the, the, the currency, uh, with which to produce surplus and the author or the, the genius, uh, uh, was of course in architecture, uh, the, the, the, the, the star system, uh, uh, uh, was so to say the equivalent in, in, in, in, in,

7:55in the architecture and with, with it and, and, uh, uh, all the aspects that are tied to that, which are, of course, gentrification, which is always about the, the production of surplus of investing money and then earning more than you had invested through all these strategies that, uh, of course, uh, uh, rightly so had been critiqued in, in, in the, in the last two, uh, decades,

8:26I'd say of architecture, architectural criticism. Yeah, for sure. So where does this book come from?

Origins of Thinking Design

8:33Hmm. So you're a teacher and as I read it and understand it, this book is derived principally from your teaching practice and how you've sought to educate young, young designers or younger designers in an antithetical position to this signature authored building. Exactly. The book, it grew out of many years of teaching here at Teocards and especially perhaps, so I was teaching design studio, uh, every semester, but also, and perhaps especially I had to give a mandatory lecture courses on different

9:09categories of public buildings. And, uh, these lectures, uh, I was using them to inspire the students, uh, design work through comparison, drawing and redrawing because, uh, these 12 categories in the book, which start with theater, museum, library, state buildings, then it's, uh, office, all these categories, they, uh, I was, I was, um, uh, referring to them through, uh, individual lectures where I was using

9:46around 20 or something projects of architectural history to, uh, um, to illustrate what certain functions or categories in buildings, uh, could be architecturally, uh, uh, um, tackled or what they could, uh, what the architectural expression could be while at the same time, of course, uh, uh, housing these

10:18various, uh, demands of, uh, uh, uh, human habitation. And, uh, through doing that, uh, there is a, uh, there, they're very naturally, uh, uh, um, developed a sort of comparative take. It is, it's just when you are talking about 20 projects in, in two hours, you, of course, start to compare the solutions to the same problems. And it came out from that, that, uh, of course you can, you know, critique, uh, the, the definition of

10:53uh, uh, planning manuals and they're purely, uh, Zweckbau, uh, the, the, um, instrumental reasoning, which is purely economic and all that. But at the same time, what architecture did is that it took those, uh, uh, uh, economic standards and produced or came up with something that, uh, uh, uh, was again again and again surprising, uh, in comparison to what is being conventionally built. And this is

11:27where I see architecture. It is a discipline that even though it works in conventions, uh, it again and again comes up with something, uh, that, uh, is not purely, uh, an answer to market demands, but it is beyond that it is something that produces, uh, surprise would be the, uh, a very basic way of what it comes up with. Of course, it is a certain surplus. It is beyond, uh, uh, uh, an expectation

12:01or a convention that the building industry or the real estate commercial building, uh, that all these dictate more or less. So it, it is very unlikely that something is being built that, uh, uh, rightly, uh, uh, carries the title of architecture with a big A, but it's, it, it luckily is still, it's the, it's still a purse and, uh, it is through comparison that we as architects, uh, enable ourselves to

12:32be critical. Uh, it is by coming to terms with the terminology, the professional terminology, what is a lintel, what is a column, what is a pillar. It is these, how this come together as a compositional, uh, uh, in, in, in, in architectural project and, uh, how to be critical and how to find out by yourself where, uh, your personal favorites that inspire you, that you are, uh, that you're finding

13:03yourself interesting. Also, I have to say that all this in the end, 144 projects in the book that I was talking about through many years. So the selection, uh, changed in the course of the years that I was giving these lectures. And now in the end, I would say that, uh, it is a, it is a panorama that is, uh, uh, highly, uh, objectionable because it is a selection and any selection is a data set that includes and excludes. And I refer to that in the book, of course. Uh, but in the end, I think

13:37that it is a very broad panorama of architectural forms of ways of how architectural types can house various, uh, functions of, uh, human co-habitation. As I understand it, the sort of central argument

Form drawing and comparative judgment

13:57that you're making here is that we have failed in a way or we don't in a way preference the centrality or the principality of form in architecture in favor of something else. Exactly, exactly. But this idea of form that you talk about is that there's a sort of central idea and then there's this, as you say, imagination or creativity around the edges of it. And this creates, this dichotomy creates the tension which constitutes architecture itself. Yeah, this,

14:27the point that I'm trying to make, uh, actually, and it started with this book is that I'm, I'm arguing against both of these reductive positions of architecture understood as either image production or signature making. It is with the book that I insist that design is an epistemic practice that is grounded in form drawing and comparative judgment, uh, and architecture should thusly not reproduce or it should not be reduced to the application of external theory or data or

15:02regulation. But the practice of architecture has its source of form in, uh, inferring and in making judgments that is always, of course, related to the, uh, to both the history of architecture and to the city, which is nothing else but the materialized form of it. But this is what we deal with. And what our practice is about is transforming this, what we have as a given with more or less, uh, intriguing, uh, solutions

15:36or examples, or continuing to build upon, uh, what is being given to us, uh, as, uh, as all the structures that are already existing. But the main point I think to, to stress that is that in thinking design, in the book, I, I, I firstly crystallized my, my larger argument that I continue to work on, that is that architecture is a knowledge producing practice. And it does so through public spatial

16:09structures that are always already saturated with historically social or political inertia. That is perhaps the, the, the, the most distilled, uh, form of my, of my argument, I'd say. So this idea of knowledge producing, this moves architecture beyond the idea that it is just simply representative and particularly in that late 20th century way, representative of power, but it's deeper and more embedded and communicates meaning to a wider public if done well.

16:44Exactly. I mean, it would, of course, be naïve to think of architecture as, as a cultural expression that uses most of, of, of, of, uh, any form of human capital, uh, that it is not, uh, uh, uh, uh, an, an, an agent in, in, in power mechanisms. Uh, but still it is, uh, as a discipline, uh, something that has its own intelligence and that we, especially in teaching architecture,

17:22uh, have to, have to, um, try to get as close as possible to a definition or at least a working argument that can be used, uh, in the studio as well as in talking about, uh, the, the work that you're producing. So I think that is, that is really, I mean, with all the, the, the, the, the connections to the real world out there, it is still, it is not, I'm not saying that it's, it's an autonomous,

17:55uh, thing, but it is a certain way or a mode of knowledge that we, uh, subscribe to as architects that is, that is, uh, immensely, uh, important to, to, um, to cultivate and to continue.

18:16So this knowledge is communicated through type and that type is communicated through its,

Public buildings and disciplinary memory

18:25well, how, I guess, is the argument here that there is a sort of inherent quality to certain types of building which both consolidate collective knowledge, but also communicate advances to or critical relationships to knowledge. So a church looks like a church, a theater has theater characteristics and where architecture exists is at the moments at which that kind of platonic form of the thing then meets with contextual, environmental, economic,

18:57social conditions. Yes. I think, I think what you're saying is very close to what I was trying to argue. It means that the architecture is never simply original and it is never merely repetitive. Uh, it is exactly because every project is singular. Uh, it is also situated. It has a site, it has a program, it has a history and it has a material condition, but at the same time, every project also works, works, works through prior relations through inherited structures and of

19:31course, through recurring spatial problems and disciplinary memory. I mean, we cannot leave that out of the equation. And so what design does is it takes place in this productive tension between exactly invention and repetition. And that tension is not the weakness of architecture, but it is, it is, it's very, very medium. And we access this medium and we communicate in this medium still through the means of drawing. That is, that is why, uh, also in the book, there are no photographs,

20:11absolutely no photographs. It's just, uh, the most significant floor plan section and either an elevation or an or an axonometric of the projects that, uh, very, very quickly gives you an idea about the spatial, uh, organization and the relationships between the internal organization and the, the formal, uh, the outline or contour of the project, uh, in, in, in the outer space. So, and this is done precisely through this extremely

20:45reductive, uh, uh, way of communicating spatial relationships through drawings. And it leaves, of course, out the question of atmosphere, the question of, uh, all these interior qualities that depend on surface and light and all. So all of this is, of course, central to the the profession of architecture. But I would say that, uh, with my book, I am, of course, focusing on building types, uh, that are public in nature. And it's not about interior architecture. It is not about

21:22atmosphere. It is not about and all that, uh, everything that derives from material qualities and from tectonic rigor and, and all that, but it is about the more general ways of, uh, uh, producing and, uh, collective dimension through public buildings that we can refer to as precedence or as inspiration for our design. So also, I have to say that, uh, this, this book, it was, uh, it was my postdoctoral

21:59habilitation. It's called in German, uh, a thesis that was, uh, the task of the, of the, uh, what I was having to do. It was, it, it excludes residential and housing projects completely. It's just about public architectures. And this was, uh, for my tenure track, uh, towards, uh, the associate professorship. This was, uh, uh, uh, the topic that I, uh, I, I, I, in a way chose myself. So it had, there had to be

22:32certain restrictions, uh, and these, uh, as I, as I said before, office buildings, religious buildings, hospitals, uh, surveillance, education, all these categories of buildings. These are the, the, these were the topic of my, of my habilitation.

22:55I'm very interested in this idea of the way that you've presented these drawings and perhaps we can come back onto that, but you, you've mentioned these types, these project types that you've, and there's 12 of them. And I love the fact that you include surveillance, which I think is very, very saucy. Can you give an example to illustrate this idea between this core and periphery in this dichotomy of perhaps, I don't know, in any one of those project types, where we can see illustrate this kind of central thesis, but also perhaps explain how you went about

23:28measuring them against each other. How did you go about making this comparison to find this core? Well, I have to say that there are obviously some categories that are, that make more sense in a typology, uh, category. Let's, let's take theater, for example, and you then take 12 example, and you start in Greek antiquity with the theater of epithelos. And I end with the, the George, the Wiley theater in

24:01Dallas downtown by OMA, you have this 2,500 years of, uh, spatial relationship where a large audience, a number of people spectates something that happens at the focal center of attention, which is a spatial relationship. And on the other hand, I have this, let's say a bit more complicated, uh, categories. And you mentioned, uh, surveillance as one, I, I have recreation as another one. And the third one

24:35would be state, which are ambivalent. They are not referring to any building type at all. And what I do with these three categories is that I, a very, uh, ostentatively point at the fact that of course it is political regimes that are much, much stronger than, than, than the most, you know, uh, menacing or the most, uh, uh, uh, uh, powerful architecture could ever be. It is, it is, there is, uh, a sort of,

25:05there's a social political, uh, aspect to architecture that is stronger than the coordinating or the enforcing power of architecture itself. And it's, it is of course, uh, a Rem Kohlhaas quote that he, uh, used to, and he was saying that, uh, uh, uh, it's something like in, in comparison to political regimes, uh, architecture can only wish that it had the power that it once had. And that very,

25:36very much makes sense. And also what I was trying to not get too much into is a collection of architects' data. I wanted this, uh, cultural, sociologically problematic aspect of, uh, biopolitical power that architecture, uh, still to a certain degree, of course, uh, enforces upon us. I wanted that to be critically reflected through these more ambivalent categories that I also used to then collect a lot

26:11of very, very different, uh, building types into it. So I hope that this, uh, uh, because let's say

26:21this example would be in the first four categories that I'm using, I'm using theater, museum, and library. And you could stay, you could say that, well, these three tasks for architecture, they were very much 19th century task of, uh, of a bourgeois, uh, culture that was a building in the forming nation states of Europe. And then I use state to counter that and to bring that into the contemporary

26:52world. I, I, I, I subsidized archives, uh, uh, commemorative sites, uh, in the German speaking world of how to deal with, uh, the concentration camps, all of that is state architecture and it's not institution only by a police headquarter or a fire station, but I use this fourth category to in a way get a critical approach on this very obvious, uh, 19th century types of theater, museum,

27:27uh, and library and to, to counter them with more critical and more diverse projects.

27:36So this approach is not just a way of kind of documenting, but is a productive way of critiquing the efficacy of projects in relation to this, to this notion. So we, we see some projects that do this particularly well. And I guess, I guess one can argue about what a good theater might be, but it definitely has to have a stage and everybody has to be able to see things. So there's some fairly basic things where it's, you know, maybe church is a bit different and certainly office would be, would be very different. How do you use these techniques in your studio teaching,

28:08or do you use these techniques in your studio teaching? It's a very, it's a very good question, Ambrose, because what also was one of the reasons that I started, uh, with the lectures and also trying to have the drawings included in them as much as possible, uh, is exactly the fact that in the studio teaching, there was always a lack of quick reference to a certain panorama of how you can specially approach, uh, a given, uh, brief or a task for a

28:44building. Uh, because, and it then, I mean, it nowadays it's, it has changed again because of course the, the immediacy of being able to access Instagram, it, it, it also, it has accelerated everything once again, but in this course of let's say 10 years between 2012 and 2022, there was an aspect of, I wanted to hand out, uh, on the table at the desk grids in the studio

29:16available where I can very quickly, uh, uh, turn to this and that page and make a quick panorama of possible, uh, uh, approaches to a certain, uh, uh, problem, uh, in spatial terms. And this is what the book, I think still very beautifully, uh, delivers, it gives you an immediate overview of probable, uh, or, or, or of, of viable approaches to a certain, uh, to certain topics. And of course, in, in, in a way,

Types across history and geography

29:53they, they always repeat this type of, uh, uh, this typical, uh, uh, uh, aspects that people like Carlo Marti Aris refer to, uh, as a variation of identity. And that means, uh, it's the hypostyle hall, uh, appears in Kohlhaas as well as it appears in Greek antiquity. The, the longitudinal or the basilica type, uh, reappears again and again, uh, the peripteros, which is columns on all four sides,

30:29uh, uh, uh, appears constant, reappears constantly throughout history. And, uh, the atrium, of course, is the, the most, uh, uh, uh, it's, it's a global, it's a global and, and, uh, uh, a historical, uh, type, uh, type you could say. And the same is, uh, true of reticulated structures. Uh, so all of these types in architecture, uh, especially if we talk about public buildings, so buildings that are

31:02not residential, that are not private, that are not, but that give you a, an idea, uh, or a feeling of a of a collectivity that is being housed and addressed and given an expression, there are these types, they appear throughout history. And, uh, uh, that is, that is something that the book does not, you know, give you the, the direct diagram, uh, because every student can do

31:35that very quickly. I'm doing that in seminars. I say, take the book, uh, and, uh, use the types that Carlo Marti Ariz in variation of identity refers to and draw all of them through the examples, through the 144 examples in the book. And it's, uh, works very, very, uh, convincingly. Yes. Well, certainly it must work more convincingly than, as you said, the Instagrammification of architecture. Architecture reduced to a few sweet atmospheres

32:08that always very seductive, but mean that students certainly, and probably architects, if we're honest, fully trained architects, sort of end up scouring the globe for stuff that looks cool. Yeah. It's Gvork Hartunian, of happy memory, Gvork Hartunian's idea about the kind of philosophy of cool as being one of the dominant ontologies of our age. And I think that that's what they kind of feed into. Whereas this book, as you say, doesn't have photographs. It has plans, which are extremely rigorous, beautifully drawn, diagramatized, but sort of, it demands that we

32:41think more carefully and less emotionally, perhaps. There's a, there's a kind of strange abstraction going on here as well, which is that you're sort of demanding that we, the reader, but we, the practice, we, the profession, adopt a more, in a way, scientific positionality in relation to the culture that we work within. Is that a fair way of reading it? That's a, that's a, that's an absolutely fair observation. And it's interesting because I know

33:12the, let's say the, the language of the, of the, the graphical language, it might give you the, an impression of a certain, yeah, uh, technical, uh, um, abstraction, a certain, a certain coldness. Um, but it is, it is, uh, I would, I, I like to, I like to compare it in a way that we as architects, as architects being in between the science and the art of building, uh, we have from time to time

33:51act as engineers. And of course we cooperate with engineers. So there is a certain, uh, uh, middle ground that we can use in order to get into all the specialized planning, uh, expertises. And at the same time, we have to be able to talk to artists because, uh, it is not about, uh, talk, talk about artists also in, in a way of, of talking with ourselves and our subjective,

34:22emotional, all this repertoire that you have to rely on because otherwise you could have, uh, already decided to fully go to the engineering side. So it is both of these aspects, uh, that are necessary and they find a common ground in a drawing. Perhaps of course, the drawing is only, uh, uh, a very, very structured, a very, very abstract and, uh, in no way phenomenologically, you know, close to the physical sensation of, uh, being on, on, on, on the crust of earth.

34:57But it organizes a lot of aspects. It, it, it, it, it, let's say it not only organizes, it, it, it, it, it communicates, uh, spatial relationships and without this expertise of doing exactly that of being able to analyze both existing spatial relationships and of projecting these spatial relationships! If we give that in a way, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, abandoned our

35:29expertise, uh, then we can, uh, uh, be, uh, um, AI agents of quickly coming up with beautiful rendering of... but this is what I insist on. I know it is, uh, our expertise in both critically analyzing and projecting spatial relationships for human togetherness, I might say very with a certain pathos.

35:59But that is our task and it has both these sides. It has this more engineering and it has, of course, this more emotional and subjective side. They both belong, of course, to our instruments that we use. Yeah, I concur. I really do. It's difficult, though, isn't it? In a very postmodern epoch and a very subjectivist epoch, in which this kind of form of riotous, subjective architecture

36:31has taken hold of the student imagination and to some degree even the popular imagination with things like the Serpentine Pavilion summer extension being a case in point, but the kind of squiggly, stupid-shaped buildings that we see poppling popping up all over the place now, often very expensive. It's a very difficult thing to demand now that we set that aside and say, actually, there's a core to our profession and it comes around typology. It's a very difficult

37:01sell, and in some ways, I suppose, it seems to be a slightly anti-modern or anti-postmodern hypothesis or thesis, which I think is kind of challenging. It certainly becomes tied into any critique of the contemporary. It comes tied into a political, a party political discourse, which is overcharged, divisive, unhappy,

Universal language and ideology

37:28and so on and so forth. So how am I to understand this? Are you proposing, to some degree, a return to a kind of more traditional deportment for the architect and for their architecture? Is it in some way related to ideas around the vernacular, for example, where you have in indigenous settlements the reproduction of a core form, be that in dimensions, in spatial organization, material selection, in details and ornamentation, for example?

37:58Is it more linking back into that? Or is this an extension development of a postmodern idea? That's a difficult question because, of course, you're right that it seems that I try to, in a way, continue this universalist language that modernism wanted to impose upon all of us as a political category.

38:29That was, the project of modernism was nothing as, was nothing short of demanding the position of infrastructure for architecture. And I would say that that is not, that is a, that's a, a bit of a gargantuan question to ask for architecture because, as we know, that architecture is, this is also interesting

39:00statistics that of all the buildings that have been built in the, in the, in the last decades, are professionally trained architects. You know, that there are only a fraction of the people responsible for the built world. So, we are, in a way, academic elite that, compared to the built physical world, is, it's just a tiny

39:31fraction in, in comparison to lawyers, to engineers and technicians. But at the same time, I think what we have to insist, especially as, as academic architects and as training students in our, in, in the profession that we, that we are deeply and emotionally invested,

40:02is that it is not about a universal language, language, and this is not about a universal truth, because all of that immediately sounds like dogmatics and ideology. And this is something that all these claims for, for, for universal reason, all of this is extremely suspicious, and I would be extremely suspicious, and I wouldn't want the book to be understood in that way that here is somebody who is

40:32insanely trying to come up with a new universal language that understands everything. No, that is not, I would say, the point, but the point is that the build world that we live in, and also the world of architecture, the ideas of architecture, they do intersect in certain patterns, and patterns sounds a bit flat, but there are ways of organizing our togetherness

41:02on earth, and there are beautiful examples, and we have to, you have to go out there and find them for yourselves. Why do they touch you? And if they don't touch you, perhaps you are in the wrong field, but there needs to be, if you are not personally invested in architecture, then it's not a very good profession to choose, because you can hardly make any money with it is something where we

41:33still are absolutely forced to subscribe to an optimistic view of the world, and to make something meaningful for all of us by insisting on a sense of communal meaning making. meaning. Meaning, absolutely. Although, of course,

42:04meaning is problematic because it semantically shouldn't be reduced to meaning in the sense of what does a layman understand from architecture, because architecture, as we all know, is, if you just think of approaching the settlement in a landscape, it is phenomenologically completely different from walking around the neighborhood where a

42:35public building is at the center of the square. And this, again, is something completely different from being in an interior space at sundown and trying to fall asleep. So all of these aspects are, of course, part of our responsibility as architects. But at the same time, it would be fairly unwise

43:06to, you know, try to have them immediately intersect in a common denominator. Because as said, I mean, these are three completely different scales that we as architects learn to work in.

43:22And so what I'm trying to say, I guess, is that this reducing something to some sort of recipe, or I don't believe in that. And also the book is trying to make a sort of balance between the complicatedness of things and responsibilities and at the same time giving it a pedagogical quality through this

43:54emphasis on comparison and of finding out by yourself what... So this would be... I hope this answers... Yeah. The book is obviously framed around these case studies and these three principal chapters of tectonics type and topos. Yeah. What are these three things and why? Why is this a productive way? Why is this a generative way of thinking, rethinking about architecture? Yeah. And obviously I don't want you to have to reframe

44:24your entire book. No, no. Absolutely.

Tectonics, type, and topos

44:28I think, I mean, I think this follows more or less directly from what I was trying with these various scales of responsibility before. Because for me, tectonics is not only about an expressive detail or the fetishization of construction. It is basically architecture's heavy medium. I mean, it's the material organization of structure, of load, access, thresholds, bodies, and hierarchy. That is the

44:58material world that architecture operates in. And type, I would say it is the epistemological core, what I was trying to talk around today. It's not classification in a taxonomic sense, but it is a relational structure that allows comparison, inference, and judgment. And with topos, the third one, I would say, it is not context understood as a scenery or a backdrop, but it is the historically

45:28produced territorial and also infrastructural condition within which we as architects operate inevitably. And together, taking together these three tectonics, type, and topos, they, I'm of course referring to Kenneth Frampton here, taking them together makes up a complicated, a reasonably complicated panorama schema, that is the source of

45:59architectural form.

46:02And the source of architectural form also as you lead in the course of your design process, conversation with all, with the material, with the repetition of a certain human hues or function that is going to be housed, and of course with the dialogue with a site, with a specific geography, specific convention. But it is not

46:32about originalism, however, because this would also be blind to the fact that the building industry is a global phenomenon. and just by insisting on, I mean, there are wonderful design build approaches that try to reorient

47:02the practice of building and I'm hugely sympathetic with all of that. At the same time, it's my focus in architectural design with this individual building is much more on the relationship towards the urban or the territorial or geographical and not so much on the material, I would say. Of course, this comes together inevitably in architecture and in practice even

47:33more so, but my academic focus would be, let's say, on type and topos and not so much on type and tectonics, which is more the construction building construction and does that? Yeah, no, I understand it's very beautifully kind of articulated and I guess the question for an architect is how do you organize that triumvirate? How do you balance it? And is there space

48:04within your proposition for a certain architecture that leans more heavily towards type or leans more heavily towards topos or as you say leans on two of them but perhaps leaves the other free in a way and I guess that question sort of comes back to the effect that the architect is trying to achieve on the public imagination or the public consumption on the public consumption of this building and do you see in the examples that you articulate

48:34this kind of shifting between these three legs? yes I would say that inevitably any architectural project probably leans a bit more towards the one or the other aspect in relation to the brief and to the task at hand but as it has recently become more and more usual

Architectural affordances and Umbau

49:03to talk about adaptive reuse and about the transformation of buildings I would say that there is a certain that it is clear that there is a necessity on the side of the designer also of the student to be able to assess the qualities of a given structure and that means that there is in my point of view there is a certain leaning towards the historically

49:33sounds a bit too heavy or too academic but there is a necessity of being able to use judgment for describing the qualities of a given situation be it urban be it a single structure but being able to assess that being able to say well there is a certain generosity in the load span of this

50:04load typology shed of a supermarket there is no other quality but well at least this dimension between those two beams it's quite generous it's not something that you find in a residential building and this is something that in the recent years I was more and more focusing on the and also in with a recent book that I was lucky to work on together with a colleague from the

50:35Milan Polytechnical and it's called Architectural Affordances Typologies of Umbau Umbau is the German word for transformation and what that does what this book does is it also uses drawing as the main medium to communicate what to communicate that there is a certain we call it typological clarity or strength in buildings that enables them to house different functions over centuries

51:05and it is only in the 20th century and you know we've reinforced concrete skeleton structures that the layers of a building the primary structure the single cell forming material and the outer experience that they become separated and up until then with only stone and bricks and masonry

51:36work and wood and timber construction the formal expression the additive way of building the building plan all of that remained clearly aligned and so they had a strong typological clarity up until because also until the end of the 19th century the architects were basically deciding on a style to dress the skeleton in

52:06and here in Austria the municipality got in Vienna it got a red brick facade so this seems to be the right expression for a public city council but what I'm trying to get at is that with this book what we found out is that the most and this book gets together 30 projects

52:36and these 30 projects 10 projects are the timescale of centuries and this is basically the Italian palazzo that was one the resident of a noble prince then it became a housing project it became a supermarket even and then it became the architecture school I'm talking about Naples the palazzo gravina and it all remains within this clear footprint of the atrium palazzo type and it was

53:07centuries and it's still breathtakingly beautiful today and in the 19th century this is the second category we have these 10 projects from the 9th century where all these institutions were newly founded like hospitals train stations military buildings and this is where the classic adaptive reuse today you know as transformation

53:38of power plants into mostly luxurious housing for today and culture venues so this is the 19th century transformation of the city and then it becomes problematic the final 10 projects we have in there and they are always drawn with one floor plan one section and one elevation and we have featured projects of the 20th century which is more or less the city

54:09of the disposable city we could say it's all of that that has been built in between the untouched natural landscape and the historical thick core of the of the well-oable city and right there in the middle is the periphery it's the nowhere's land which is mostly structured through infrastructure through train lines through cars through parking facilities and all of that and this is where I would say

54:40our responsibility or where I'm trying to draw attention to with students and PhD workshops it is the question if our expertise shouldn't be asking whether these monofunctional and purely for economic profit build structures if they couldn't house through transformation something of a more collective communal value of course

55:11it doesn't make sense everywhere but it is a material source that is there that is connected to infrastructure that our taxes are still paying for and it would be not reasonable to just tear them down and re-naturalize them because again this would be our task as taxpayer to come up with

Drawing as the medium for change

55:30them

Drawing as the medium for change

55:31so the question is what I'm trying to you know a bit polemically trying to get it is that I think that this arc of insisting on the knowledge on a specific mode of knowledge and architecture is related to as much the physical world out there and our observation of it as it is related to projecting on changing and transforming this world and both of them this analytical

56:02and the projective of course they meet in drawing in our way of recording our observations and it is the privileged medium through which we at the same time can project change and this is why I would say it's extremely important to be acutely aware of it and to cultivate it to continue it and to not get too easily distracted by everything that AI can come

56:32up with because this jumping into the projective and then coming up with something reasonable this is something that I am completely convinced of that it will keep us invested and it will keep us in demand for the coming decades brilliant

Closing remarks and podcast outro

56:56that's a fabulous point to finish on Andreas thank you so very much thank you so much for having me the birds have abandoned our cities and the plague of silence multiplies through their arteries they fought the war and they lost and there's nothing subtle or vague in this horrifying vacuum that is New York that's nice from Derek Wolcott's In the Village but have we though not if Andreas prevails thank you to Andreas for coming on the podcast and for suffering my ignorance with such grace please see the podcast description for links to the book to Andreas

57:27his practice and on the social media thing and thanks for listening