Mass production was the core technical logic of industrial modernity: for the last hundred years, architects and designers have tried to industrialize construction and standardize building materials and processes in the pursuit of economies of scale. But this epochal march of modernity is now over. Today's technologies already allow us to use irregular, or variable building materials, as found, or as made, and assemble them in as many nonstandard, intelligent, adaptive ways as needed: the microfactories of our imminent future will be automated artisan shops.

The computational project, long under the sway of powerful antimodern ideologies, is now being recast by the urgency of the climate crisis, which has vindicated its technical logic; by the global pandemic, which has tragically proven its viability; by today's social crisis, which questions its ideological premises; and by newly empowered, and apparently incontrollable applications of Artificial Intelligence. The design professionsand society at largeurgently need a honest debate on the past, present, and future of computation in architecture.