The Authorship of Processes

The role of authorship has long served as one of the fundamental coordinates of architectural practice. To be an author implied agency, intentionality, and control: the capacity to translate a project into being through design. Yet within the contemporary design panorama, this position has progressively shifted and been displaced by processes that are collective, iterative, or materially self-determining. Authorship no longer appears merely as the mark of a signature or an identifiable subject; it seems instead the dynamic field where the act of making and the emergence of meaning unfold together. In this light, the question of authorship becomes less a matter of ownership and more one of involvement in a process. It concerns the complex negotiations between subjects and tools, materials and data, social actors and environments through which architecture is continuously articulated. As Bruno Latour argues, “action is not a property of humans but of associations” (Latour 2005, 53); agency, and thus authorship, is distributed across the heterogeneous networks that bring a project into being.

To define authorship by processes is to understand architectural creation as an open system of exchanges, where decisions, intentions, and interpretations circulate within the project. This expanded framework challenges the linearity of design as an act of conception followed by execution, proposing instead a recursive model – one in which thinking and making, theory and representation, research and design constantly redefine each other. The processual author does not precede the work but is constituted through it; authorship becomes a temporary configuration within an ongoing ecology of transformation. Such an approach displaces the heroic figure of the architect in favor of distributed, participatory, or algorithmic forms of agency, where knowledge is generated through feedback, adaptation, and dialogue.

The contributions gathered in this section share this perspective, situating the act of design within broader processes – technological, environmental, social, and epistemological. Across diverse contexts, they investigate how authorship is reconfigured when mediated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), collective research, material intelligence, infrastructural systems, pedagogical collaboration, or aesthetic experimentation. Their approaches diverge in scale and method, yet they converge in the understanding that to design today is to participate in processes that exceed individual intention. This resonates with Donna Haraway’s notion of sympoiesis – “making-with” rather than self-making – where creative knowledge emerges through networks of shared becoming (Haraway 2016).

Some explore the dissolution of authorship through human–machine collaboration, others through the collective agency of materials, communities, or narratives. Together, they map a landscape in which architectural knowledge emerges through iterative processes rather than predetermined outcomes. Between technological speculation and material sensitivity, these contributions trace a spectrum of new authorial conditions.

At one end of this spectrum, AI provides a powerful lens for questioning authorship as a shared condition between human and algorithm. Eidetic Buildings, by Giorgio Castellano, engages AI as a quasi-subject capable of reconfiguring memory and form, transforming the latent data of architectural archives into new eidetic realities. Here, the architect becomes a mediator between collective memory and generative autonomy, navigating a space where authorship is distributed between human intention and machine imagination. A similar negotiation unfolds in Exploring the Architecture for Urban Air Mobility, by Ottavio Pedretti, where AI-driven speculation serves as a design methodology for unprecedented infrastructural typologies. The study demonstrates how authorship shifts from direct form-making to curatorial selection, as the designer interprets and filters algorithmic outputs within a speculative discourse on future mobility. Both works reveal the double bind of technological authorship: while AI amplifies creative potential, it simultaneously destabilizes the boundaries of authorship, inviting ethical and aesthetic reconsiderations.

In a parallel, materially grounded register, Transcalar Materials as Narrative Agents, by Fitnat Cimsit Kos et al., repositions matter itself as a co-author. Through a series of iterative experiments, the research presents materials not as passive recipients of design but as active participants that negotiate across biological, technological, and architectural scales. This process-based epistemology extends authorship to the nonhuman domain, where the designer’s role is to attune rather than impose – to orchestrate dialogues between living systems and computational processes. The resonance of this material intelligence can be traced further in Point Cloud Departures and Inquiring Sensate Scapes, respectively by Guro Sollid and Maja Zander Fisker, both of which explore the aesthetic and perceptual implications of data, landscape, and mediation. In these works, authorship becomes an act of reception – an ethical and imaginative engagement with landscapes and their material traces. Through tools such as Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), point cloud modeling, and 1:1 material experiments, they reframe architectural practice as a form of correspondence with the world’s granular and more-than-human agencies.

Other contributions turn toward social and narrative processes as sites of shared authorship. Authorship on the Margins, by Nicolò Chierichetti, examines infrastructural voids as opportunities for collaborative regeneration, revealing how design evolves through negotiations between institutional, technical, and local actors. The designer emerges as a mediator who constructs frameworks rather than forms, translating complex systems of interest into adaptable guidelines. Similarly, The Productive Infrastructure for Off-Grid Communities, by Maddalena Laddaga, situates authorship within collective energy autonomy. By conceiving architecture as an open and modifiable infrastructure, it proposes a model where inhabitants become co-authors of their environment – producers rather than consumers of resources. In both cases, authorship manifests as a form of governance and responsibility distributed across communities, technologies, and time.

The educational and performative dimensions of authorship appear in “Making-with”: Transdisciplinary Experiments in Authorship and Performance as Architectural Production in the 21st Century, respectively by Colm mac Aoidh and Alessandro Pasero. The first articulates a pedagogy of collaboration, where literary and architectural practices intertwine through iterative workshops that transform the notion of originality into a synergic exercise of collective rewriting. The second investigates performance as a contemporary mode of architectural production, where authorship unfolds through the choreography of bodies, audiences, and events. In both, the author is dissolved into a network of participants and mediations; design becomes an act of coordination, translation, and re-enactment rather than solitary creation.

Processual authorship also finds narrative form in Story of a Doctoral (Design) Research: An Iterative Process, by Sarah Javed Shah, where the research itself becomes the site of authorship. Structured as a cyclical dialogue between theory, drawing, and fieldwork, this contribution demonstrates how knowledge is produced through iteration – each phase reinforming the next in a reflexive continuum. Authorship here is neither fixed nor concluded but perpetually reformulated through practice. This recursive structure echoes the methodological openness shared by many works in the section, where research and design co-produce one another through feedback loops.

Across these diverse investigations, authorship appears less as a position of control than as a condition of engagement. Whether through AI’s latent mechanisms, material responsiveness, infrastructural negotiation, or collaborative pedagogy, each contribution reveals a shift from product to process, from authority to relation. Architecture is no longer conceived as a static object authored by an individual but as an evolving constellation of interactions – between minds and machines, materials and ecologies, institutions and publics. The architect becomes a catalyst within these dynamics, shaping trajectories rather than final forms.

Together, the ten contributions assembled here outline a contemporary landscape of architectural authorship defined not by signature but by process. They suggest a fruitful tendency in design that resides in the ability to navigate uncertainty, choreograph complexity, and allow meaning to emerge through practice. Authorship, in this sense, is neither lost nor dissolved – it is redistributed, expanded, and made porous, reflecting the very processes through which architecture continues to think, imagine, and become.