  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.
