Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology
Zurich: Park Books, 2021
The cover assembles five images into a visual genealogy of type: bricolage, applied arts, social stratification, modern archetype, and the primitive hut. The sequence begins with a screenshot of Georges Méliès’ Man in the Moon (1902) — not only a nod to cosmological archetypes but also a proto-Anthropocene projection. As cinema’s first special effects pioneer, Méliès tinkered with sets and tricks in his studio — a form of bricolage strikingly close to architectural design: crafting worlds with what is at hand, in contrast to the engineer’s abstractions.
➡️ Swipe through to see how these five images connect to typological theories: from Semper’s applied arts to Goldmann’s taxonomies, from Le Corbusier’s universal frame to Laugier’s primitive hut. Typology here is bricolage, craft, taxonomy, arche- and stereotype, and myth — above all, a blueprint for thinking design today.
(0) Cover: Thinking Design – Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology - A visual genealogy of type in five images.
(1) Méliès’ 'Le Voyage dans la Lune' — Bricolage
Cosmological archetype → Proto-Anthropocene projection.
Architectural design as bricolage — crafting worlds from fragments at hand, and looking back onto earth.
(2) Semper’s Caribbean Hut — Typology of Applied Arts
Craft, tectonics, and cultural transmission.
Gottfried Semper, Der Stil, vol. 2, 1863.
(3) Goldmann/Sturm — Typology of Social Stratification
Taxonomic ordering of building tasks according to societal ranks. Synopse der Bauaufgaben, 1699.
(4) Dom-ino — 20th-Century Archetype
Modern universal frame, abstract and repeatable.
Le Corbusier, Maison Dom-ino, 1914–15.
(5) Primitive Hut — Mythic Origin
Architecture as allegory and cultural memory.
CDJ Eisen: Allegory of the Primitive Hut, frontispiece to M. A. Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture, 2nd ed., 1755.
(6) Page Spreads - Typology unfolding as method.
(7) Back Cover
(8) Typology as blueprint: navigating history, memory, and transformation.
The book is based on Andreas’ habilitation thesis, published in German as 'Entwurf einer architektonischen Gebäudelehre' (2nd rev. & exp. edition; Zurich: 2021, Park Books)
Research Group
Counterintuitive Typologies
Developing since 2022, the research initiative "Counterintuitive Typologies" began as appended brochure to my book "Thinking Design" (2021)—collecting extracts from 12 supervised master’s theses that explored peripheral and commercial vernaculars through precise drawings and conceptual revaluations of city edges, infrastructural and political voids, continuous building, and possible future monuments. Since then the initiative investigates the latent potential of typologies that subvert while enriching architectural convention, drawing energy from the poetic friction between expectation and possibility. It connects international studios, electives, master’s theses, PhDs, and an Austrian Research Agency-funded research project into a shared discourse.
(1) page spreads brochure,
(2) offspring of 'Thinking Design - Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology'
(3) exterior &
(4) interior images of the 12 featured theses,
(5-9) highlight Alexander Gebetsroither’s master’s thesis (2017) at the intersection of Interstate 710 and 105 in Los Angeles: Anticipating a post-fossil fuel era of hybrid mobility and networked transport, the project reclaims the immense spatial capacity of freeway interchanges. A uniform mixed-use ring frames the infrastructural void, transforming a paradigmatic 20th-century monument to the automobile into a civic landmark—inscribing memory and identity into a former non-place. This work received the Archiprix Hunter Douglas Award 2017 as the world’s best graduation thesis.
(5) Thesis as featured in the booklet subscribing to the fornat of the 144 projects in 'Thinking Design',
(6,7,8,9) Alexander's breathtaking fotographic work
(10) Kick-off poster/lecture “Counterintuitive Typologies” at TU Graz Architectural Research Lectures in January 2022.