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?

A number of years ago, my practice Sergison Bates was invited to take part in a competition for a housing project in north London. At some point in the competitive interview, I stated that every project we undertake is unique in the set of interests it investigates, and could be understood as a form of research. I still believe that this is true, although I would be cautious about making the same comment again in such circumstances. We did not win the competition and found out later that a number of members of the members of the jury took issue with my statement. They misconstrued it, thinking that what we had in mind was some form of speculative enterprise with implicit risks and an uncertain outcome, which they would be funding. I now understand the difficulty the client had. Naturally, they wanted to be assured that we had the experience and competence to deliver a building that would serve their needs and be fit for purpose.

When we set up in practice – at about the same time as arq was launched – Stephen Bates and I had learnt some things about building from working for a number of established architects in practice. When we formally founded our own practice, we accepted a future of uncertainty, although this was countered by great optimism on our part. Looking back, it is clear that a series of events that were wholly out of our control have shaped the practice we now have. Many of the projects we worked on in the early years took on issues for the first time, and this partly explains why it feels that we undertook more research then than we do now. I do, however, believe that we are constantly building upon a set of shared interests, and while the knowledge we have acquired through building is cumulative, our restless curiosity to explore new themes and ideas remains unchanged.

Nothing is more urgent in China today than a critique of the everyday; and a social analysis of the conditions and prospects of ordinary individuals vis-à-vis – or despite – the achievements of the nation and the state. Jia Zhangke's film, Still Life (2006), reveals this urgency vividly, describing the destruction of local settlements and the dislocation of ordinary people amidst the great engineering feat of dams and bridges over the Yangtze River. A husband and a wife, having lost contact with each other for years because of hectic careers and radical socio-spatial dislocation, finally meet and agree to divorce. With sounds of music flowing down distantly, they dance for a minute and bid farewell, with one watching and the other walking away, disappearing into the distance against a vast landscape of debris and magnificent structures building-up behind them. This scene was followed immediately by another depicting a tourist cruise on the river with a loudspeaker reciting a Li Bai poem from the eighth century: poetic words about a scenic spot that would soon be flooded for the building of the Three Gorges Dam, to power an industrial China on the rise.

Architecture in these times is an architecture at risk. I will argue here that the recent trajectory of the field has been a harbinger of the political populism that generated the Trump administration in the US, Brexit in the UK, the Swiss People's Party, Marine Le Pen's Front National, Germany's Alternative für Deutschland, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and other such inverse majority movements. What might be called an emerging architectural populism has led to a situation where our careful art is at risk of becoming its inverse: an architecture without architects. In response, I will argue that this is our moment – this is when we reclaim our field in the only way we can – this is when we create architecture.

The concepts of succession and duration are used to identify different temporal aspects of architecture. Typically architecture that is based on duration seeks to persist unchanged within time whilst that based on succession engages with change, transience and rhythm. The organisation of succession and duration, according to different temporal structures, is used to inform a series of design studies. Structures relating to the weather, programmed and unconsidered use, clock time, mechanical time, circadian rhythms, entropy and space-time are examined in a discussion on the architectural chronotope which ‘artistically connects temporal and spatial relationships’.

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.

This paper discusses the ongoing process of internationalisation of scientific research, and its peculiar implications for the field of architecture and planning. I first consider this field's traditional ability of translating and code-switching, as well as the recent experience of adjusting its research practices to academic assessment systems. I then explore some views about the global spread of modern science, from the ideal of a scientific community to the recognition of a political economy of internationalised science, which defines central and peripheral positions, and the kind of knowledge we produce, how we do it and what for. Finally, I propose that in architecture and planning, unlike in most other scientific fields, the nodes of international research networks tend to have different empirical objects, i.e., their own geographical regions. Peripheral research aiming at international relevance can hardly avoid complying with agendas and theoretical frameworks derived from very different socio-spatial environments, thus focusing on problems of minor importance for its own context. Yet architecture, as a weak-science with a tradition of code-switching, still holds the possibility of international collaboration on other terms, stressing differences rather than similarities, and the thorough debate of concepts, methods and theories.

Western fascination with Japan and Japanese design is long established. The popularity of the recent exhibition The Japanese House: Architecture and Life After 1945 at London's Barbican illustrates that this fascination remains. This ‘blockbuster’ review of postwar domestic Japanese Architecture, supported by The Japan Foundation and previously hosted at MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome, responds to an enormous challenge: to try to account for the range and diversity of architectural approaches to domestic design within the broader contexts of traditional Japanese architecture and national life after 1945.

The seven decades covered in the exhibition span postwar reconstruction, rapid economic expansion, bubble-era boom and bust, and deflationary stagnation, brought up to the present day. Material is organised ‘genealogically’ rather than chronologically, drawing together certain threads and traditions. It makes connections across time periods to suggest how the design of the Japanese house has dealt with sociological changes over this period, from the fracturing of the nuclear family and an increase in single-person households to an ageing population.

The Japanese architects Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito work with the formation of mental processes, which include spatial perceptions, but also haptic experiences. In this regard, they both connect to the Japanese architectural tradition. Therefore, it is interesting to compare their work, especially since visually the architecture of these two architects differs. However, through staged, unexpected and changeable experiences of materiality and spatial organisation – interacting in dynamic flow with the surroundings – similar mental processes are evoked when conceiving and perceiving their architecture that are an integral part of the ongoing processes to transform their architecture into ‘abstractions’. The point of departure for being involved in these similar, processual stage-settings is the creation of uncompleted experiences of wonder; a void, which is recognised from the traditional Japanese expressions for beauty – shibui and yugen – and described by Soetsu Yanagi as a hidden, subjective beauty. This in turn leads to a new subjectivity in connection with traditional Japanese conceptions of space, where space is a subjective perception and a changeable process in the mind of the beholder, and not an outside object. The references to the architectural tradition include the villa and the garden of Katsura and the architect Kazuo Shinohara, who opposed and criticised Western Modernism with the basis in his own Japanese tradition.

arq's first editor returns to the origins of the journal and reflects on the period of his editorship from 1994-2003. He also reflects on the opening ‘leader’ in the first issue of arq, which is reprinted here. The journal's founding principles remain just as urgent today, he concludes.

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.

In China, although the ‘everyday’ should be studied as one of the most fundamental architectural issues, it is frequently neglected by Chinese architects. A consciousness for the ‘everyday’ is marginalised by the prevailing ‘non-everyday’ backed by a top-down way of reasoning. Under this circumstance, it is constructive to reconsider the ‘everyday’ in order to open up new potentials for the design practice and discourse in architecture.

From phenomenal observation to value recognition, from design strategy to concrete methodology, the everyday world brings direct inspiration to Atelier Archmixing's architectural practice. Through participant observation of the urban and rural built environment, together with various design experiences from different projects, the practice defines the neutral spatial phenomenon of constant accumulation, change and adjustment as ‘Spatial Redundancy’; they respond with design strategies that flexibly apply various concepts, technologies and approaches without prejudice, describing their consequences as ‘Unrecognisable System’. Both concepts aim at opening up new possibilities for architecture drawn from the everyday world and rooted in China's rapid urbanisation.

What has been the trajectory of architectural research in the UK (as reflected in arq: Architectural Research Quarterly) as compared to the United States (as reflected in the Journal of Architectural Education, or JAE) over the past two decades? To answer this question several quantitative methods were used to construct a frame analysis of the various grammars associated with each journal. First we quantify the grammars employed by arq according to the editors’ own categories. Second, we provide a word frequency analysis of arq's article titles and abstracts. Third, we assess the similarities and differences of the content in arq and JAE using the grammars reconstructed in the latter. Fourth, we use these data to reconstruct the trajectory of architectural research in arq. As a final analysis we place arq within the context of the historic emergence of journals recognised by the Avery Index of Architectural Periodicals from 1837 to the present. Our findings reveal numerous conflicts and similarities of content as a representation of the field as a whole and we conclude that these data provide at least three salient patterns worth considering as a foundation for the next two decades: (1) accelerated alienation of research from practice; (2) movement away from literary grammars toward ecological ones; and (3) the explosion of new publication venues and specialised grammars.

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.

Analyses of Platonic dialogues nearly always acknowledge the location of a given conversation. Modern scholarship, however, rarely ventures beyond supplying a passing reference to the setting of a dialogue. This is not surprising given that Plato – and anyone who wished to emulate him – was chiefly concerned with providing philosophical discourses, not architectural treatises. However, this analysis argues that in several dialectical encounters and conversations architecture is much more than a generic, mute background. By deliberately situating Socrates and his companions in and around significant buildings in the Athenian Agora, Plato and his imitators offer us important clues to how the Greeks perceived and understood their civic realm. Ultimately, this investigation shows, for the first time, how speech and its attendant gestures were instrumental to the urban order of the ancient city.