Every architectural design emerges from a process. The different tools and media constitutive of these processes in turn foster approaches to architecture, as well as the creation of new categories of knowledge. With the progressive development of computer-based design techniques, the contemplation of the procedural aspects of architecture becomes increasingly significant for the production and reception of architecture.

It is from this perspective that this special issue sets out to examine the specific roles that processes and practices play in computer-based design by seeking to illuminate those techno-cultural contexts and historical and intellectual bonds that unite them. Which traditions and strategies, and what historical correlations among architecture, culture, and technology, have motivated and shaped the development of computer-based design processes?

Cybernetic simulation programs that renewed the development process of urban agglomerations began to emerge as part of a paradigm shift that took place in the 1960s. During this period, changes in urban planning evolved in the context of cybernetically-informed research methods, in which architects and systems scientists focused on the environmental control of social and cultural planning processes. As such, the urban fabric became an object of planning and regulation. These events in turn generated the need for ‘big data’ processing in architecture. Consequently, the reconfiguration of urban architectural fabric emerged as a topic of scientific operation.

In this context, in 1967, the Architecture Machine Group developed ‘Urban 5’, a planning program for urban participation based on man-machine dialogue. In the late 1960s, systems scientist Jay Wright Forrester also developed ‘Urban Dynamics’, a computer simulation exploring the interdependence of urban population, housing, and industry in the urban fabric. It was in this same 1967 environment that the Austrian architect Bernhard Hafner began to work autonomously, and without any personal relation to the other two projects, on a program for the ‘Comparative Simulation of Alternative Urban Prototypes’, based on the assumption that the design of urban forms had to be accompanied by the simulation of fields of urban dispersion.

Histories of the advent of architectural computation typically describe a moment of transition from physical models and drawings to codes, information and data, leading almost inevitably to the digital technologies of the present. However, the trajectory from material form and its calculated representation was not always so direct. The work of Frei Otto, and the Institute for Lightweight Structures (IL) that he founded in 1964 at the University of Stuttgart, is an example of how material experimentation, media techniques, and calculation came together in novel ways. This history is distinguished by the fact that calculating machines played a minor role. In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers at the Institute for Lightweight Structures arrived at ways of making and calculating architectural form that was arguably proto-digital. But this began with entirely material processes that were not easily turned into numerical data, nor were they limited to the immaterial ‘space’ of the screen where every coordinate position – and thus every form – had to be numerically accounted for. Experiments, devices, tools, and modes of representation were developed to serve as means of translation between incalculable materiality and calculable information. Unlike early experiments with computation that happened largely within the black box of the computer, here the interaction between material objects and data took place in physical laboratories and workshop spaces.

During late modernism, the promise of, not only vaguely, but also precisely predicting the future had acquired enormous prestige. When evoked, this predictive project lent power, legitimacy, and a cohesive identity to endeavours in almost any realm of society and culture – including the discipline of architecture. In particular, in cybernetics, seen as a means of regulating and controlling complex systems, these optimistic ideas of ‘mastering the big picture’ flourished.

Under the heading of ‘Cybernetics: Circular Casual, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems’, the umbrella organisation Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation hosted ten conferences on this very topic between 1946 and 1951. These events, known as the Macy Conferences, provided a forum for the collation and presentation of existing research, and in retrospect can be seen to have been the most important ‘get-together’ of their kind, judged in relation to subsequent crucial findings in the history of science after the Cold War. Based upon the theoretical framework of the terms of ‘information’, ‘feedback’, and ‘analog/digital’, they searched for that single universal theory of regulation and control – which they claimed might be applied to any species, machine, economic or psychological process, aesthetic or sociological phenomenon. As a consequence, cybernetics transformed into a tool to describe and explain methodologies not only in its own core knowledge/ research area, but became seen as a subject capable of giving answers to societal questions of any kind. In doing so, cybernetics linked new scientific-technical methods with all issues of social relevance.

Translating the German expressions Entwurf or Entwerfen into English seems to be an easy task: ‘design’ or ‘designing’ are the common choices recommended by dictionaries whenever a translation of Entwerfen or Entwurf is intended. The mutual translatability is evident since both ‘designing’ and Entwerfen refer to the same phase of an architectural process. Similarly, Entwurf and ‘design’ refer to the outcome of the architectural process as well. This confirms their exchangeability. It is notable that there are no similarly convincing alternative translations available, at least not in the form of single words or short expressions.

But there is no doubt that the expressions ‘design’ and Entwurf refer to different practices and media. They stress different aspects of the process of developing new concepts, ideas or objects, and different aspects of the result. This is why the common translation becomes dubious. Translating proves to be a challenge. The term ‘design’ offers characteristic and conceptually important qualities, as does the German word Entwurf, and the implications of each are so different that there is some doubt that ‘design(ing)’ can function as the adequate translation of Entwerfen.

A founding member of the Computer-Aided Design Group at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a student and collaborator of CAD pioneer Steven A. Coons at MIT, Robin Forrest occupies an important place in the history of computational design. Along with important contributions to the mathematics of shape representation, his coining of the term ‘computational geometry’ in 1971 offered a handle on design techniques that started to emerge – somewhat uncomfortably at first – in the interstices of engineering, mathematics, and the fledgling field of computer science. Initially fostered by governmentsponsored research into Computer-Aided Design for aircraft and car manufacturing, the methods he helped develop have since been encoded in countless commercial software systems for 3D modelling and simulation, helping structure the intellectual work – and the professional identity – of architects, engineers, and other practitioners of design.

In recent decades, the interrelations between architecture and computation have fostered new design concepts and design methods, which challenge existing design and building processes. Specifically, the increased use of parametric methods and scripting allow for the development of modelling and fabrication techniques, which in turn challenge the role of drawing as one of the main tools for conceptualising and realising architecture. In 1975 Chuck Eastman proposed the conceptual basis for a more complete and effective role for the use of the computer in architecture with his ‘Building Description System’. During the 1980s, software developer Robert Aish contributed to the development of RUCAPS – one of the earliest applications based on the concept of ‘building modelling’. Later developments of building modelling envisaged further modes of collaboration between architecture, engineering, and construction in the (AEC) industry.

Reinhold Martin has been writing about industrial corporate architectures and the ways in which they function as technologies of organisation. Looking at the military industrial complex of the postwar period, he connects the discourses of cybernetics, system theory, and architecture. His studies offer a historical and theoretical understanding of architecture as a material complex with its own internal logic that integrates formats of vision, hearing, cognition, and communication into a semi-coordinated ensemble. In his publications on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture he deals with structures that characterise the design, the perception, and the communication of architecture, but are often beyond visibility and control. Rather than limit his scope to individual media, he takes up architecture as ‘apparatus of intermediation’.