Special Issue on Stories of Collective Authorship in Architecture

Introduction:

A building is never the work of a single mind. Architectural production unfolds through the coordinated activity of many actors—designers, technicians, and administrators as well as things, technologies, and environments. The list goes on. Yet architectural culture has long narrated the built environment through the figure of the singular author: the master architect whose name becomes synonymous with a building. Recent scholarship has increasingly challenged this model, showing that architecture is more accurately understood as the outcome of distributed forms of authorship embedded in institutional, technical, and ecological networks.

This special issue invites contributions that examine architecture through the lens of collective authorship. Rather than asking who designed a building, the issue asks how architectural ideas emerge through constellations of actors, tools, and institutions. Such approaches foreground invisible or marginalized contributors—clients, consultants, engineers, builders, inhabitants—whose roles are often obscured by professional narratives of individual creativity. They also invite reconsideration of architectural historiography itself: if architectural production is collective, how should architectural history tell its stories?

Recent research has demonstrated that many decisive architectural innovations emerged within large organizations rather than from solitary designers. The development of computational methods in architecture, for example, often occurred through technicians and programmers working within corporate firms, leaving traces in documents, software, and engineering systems rather than in conventional narratives of design authorship. At the same time, architectural production increasingly unfolds through transnational partnerships, institutional collaborations, and hybrid design teams that operate across disciplinary and national boundaries.

Historians and theorists have begun to expand the range of actors included in architectural narratives. In addition to architects and clients, scholars now examine inhabitants, communities, ideas, technologies, materials, infrastructures, and ecological processes as participants in the making of the built environment. Drawing on work in science and technology studies and environmental humanities—such as Bruno Latour’s analyses of distributed agency, Lorraine Daston's “biographies of objects,” and Donna Haraway's concept of sympoiesis—these approaches situate architecture within broader assemblages of human and non-human actors.

The aim of this special issue is to gather historical, theoretical, and methodological contributions that rethink architectural authorship as a collective and relational phenomenon—and to reflect on the storytelling methods capable of rendering the drama of collective production visible and legible to wider audiences.

Special Issue Themes:

1. Invisible Labor and Distributed Agency in Architectural Production

Architectural projects are frequently attributed to individual architects or firms, yet their realization depends on extensive networks of collaborators whose contributions remain difficult to see. Technicians, engineers, draftspeople, programmers, project managers, consultants, and construction specialists all shape the design process in ways that traditional narratives of authorship rarely acknowledge.

This theme invites papers that recover these hidden or marginalized forms of labor and examine how architectural knowledge circulates within collective environments. Contributions might investigate collaborative design processes within architectural offices, the technical subcultures of engineering and computation, or the ways architectural media translate collective production into simplified narratives of individual creativity. Methodological reflections are equally welcome, including project microhistories, archival reconstruction, oral histories, and ethnographic studies of contemporary practice.

2. Rethinking Architectural Narrative: Beyond the Biography of the Architect

Biography has long served as a central narrative form in architectural history. From the monograph to the retrospective exhibition, the discipline has frequently organized accounts of the built environment around the lives and intentions of individual designers. This approach has also reinforced the idea that architecture originates in singular creative figures.

This theme invites contributions that experiment with alternative narrative forms capable of representing collective authorship. While biography remains important, authors are encouraged to explore other storytelling approaches such as collective biographies, object histories, project microhistories, archival narratives, documentary essays, and speculative historiographies. Scholarship on the “biography of objects” in history of science (Lorraine Daston) offers one precedent for expanding narrative frameworks beyond individual lives.

3. Bureaucracy, Institutions, and the Organizational Forms of Design

Modern architecture is often produced within complex institutional structures: large corporate firms, state design institutes, public agencies, and international consortia. These organizations function through hierarchies, documentation systems, and procedural workflows that shape architectural decisions in ways not always visible in finished buildings.

This theme seeks contributions that examine the relationship between architecture and the organizational infrastructures through which it is produced. Papers might analyze the design cultures of large architectural firms, the role of documentation and computation in shaping projects, or the institutional frameworks that enable global architectural production.

4. Non-Human Agency and the Expanded Ecology of Design

Recent scholarship in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and environmental humanities emphasizes that agency in design is not limited to human actors. Materials, infrastructures, computational systems, and environmental processes all participate in shaping architectural outcomes.

Drawing on perspectives such as Donna Haraway's concept of sympoiesis—“making-with”—this theme invites contributions examining how non-human actors participate in architectural authorship. Papers may explore the agency of materials, algorithms, environmental forces, or infrastructural systems in shaping architectural form.

Important deadlines:

The deadline for submission is November 20th, 2026. Selected authors will be notified by the Editorial Office of Perspectives in Architecture and Urbanism by December 10th, 2026.

Selected authors will be invited to present a preliminary draft of their paper (approximately 2,000 to 2,500 words) at an upcoming international seminar hosted by the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) of Tongji University in Shanghai (April to May 2027, in-person and online).

Full papers must be submitted by July 31st, 2027 following the editorial guidelines of the journal (https://www.keaipublishing.com/en/journals/perspectives-in-architecture-and-urbanism/guide-for-authors/).

Selected manuscripts will undergo a double-blind review process and will receive additional feedback from the Guest Editor. Accepted papers will be published online in regular issues of the journal as soon as the review and editing processes are completed. Published texts will be later collected into a virtual special issue, accessible on the journal’s website.

Submission instructions:

Manuscript submission information:

Invited contributors should submit materials to the Editorial Office at paujournal@outlook.com, using the subject line:

CFP Collective Authorship AUTHOR'S SURNAME abstract

Submissions should contain:

- Title

- Author name(s)

- Author affiliation(s)

- Contact email address(es)

- Short author biography or biographies, maximum 100 words each

- Six keywords

- Abstract of no more than 500 words

- Essential reference list, optional

- Up to two key images, optional

Formatting and submission requirement

Text

• must follow the APA Manual of Style (7th edition)
• spelling should adhere to American convention
• save as Microsoft Word or RTF format

Images

• captions and credits must be included with the submission.

Guest editors:

Matthew Allen, Washington University in St. Louis, matthew.a@wustl.edu