Our present condition urges those critically and creatively engaged with it, to address the transformative potentials that are brought about by a highly intertwined triad of changes. As the posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti notes, these three changes can no longer be addressed in isolation or in the context of singular disciplines. At an environmental level, we are entangled within deteriorating ecological systems, global changes in climate that affect areas and populations in vastly divergent ways, and massive species extinction that disrupts a variety of symbiotic relationships. At a social level, we are entangled in increasing structural injustices brought about by economic and political systems going increasingly haywire. Finally, at a technological level, we are entangled in new techno-logical developments mostly related to developments in cybernetic-informational systems redefining the human and life in general, (design) intelligence, and related systems of bio- and necro-political governance and control, that accelerate in their longstanding dehumanizing and disindividuating logics and effects.1 Given its urgent multi-layered social, psychological, and environmental dimensions, this latter technological condition in particular cannot be answered through technology alone. It requires a compound view that ought to be not just multi-, cross-, or inter-disciplinary, but fundamentally trans-disciplinary, in order to address issues in a transversal manner.

While there have been significant discussions about the relevance of cybernetics within architectural and urban studies, the focus has mainly been on computing and digital practices. Since its emergence in the post-war period, cybernetics – in both its first and second-order versions – has introduced to architectural discourse systematic design methods and practices, while also tackling issues of reflexivity and complex problems. In this introduction, we examine the relation between cybernetics and architecture by focusing on a problem they both share. To this end, we approach cybernetics as the study of the production, consumption and flow of information, an account that has little to do with digital logics, unless one wants to pursue that special case. Therefore, cyberneticisation can set the foundations for a relational account that examines how signs are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within systems. This third-order cybernetics extends beyond the original scope of living organisms and their environments in order to include ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media and so on. In this sense, cyberneticisation is radically environmental, positing the primacy of relations over fixed terms, binary oppositions and linear logics, making it high time for architectural and urban studies to take into consideration its ground-breaking potentials. By introducing five short points on the relation between architecture and cybernetics, we aim to assist in this endeavour.