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Aleatory Architectures

Aleatory architectures explore new approaches and concepts at the intersection of granular materials research and architecture/structural engineering. It explicitly includes stochastic (re-) configuration of individual structural elements and suggests that building materials and components can have their own agency - that they can be designed to adapt and to find their own responses to structural or spatial contexts. In this Guest Editorial we introduce some of the key ideas and ask: Can there be design by disorder? What are the possibilities of material agency? Can we develop a vocabulary of concepts to interpret various orderings of chance? Several papers in this special issue then investigate these questions in more detail from a range of different scientific and architectural perspectives.