Reviving material agency against reductionist translations in architecture

Purpose – This article explores how architectural laboratories can function as sites of hybrid practice, reuniting architects with material agency. It critiques the reductionist translation of matter into abstract codes and standardized resources, proposing laboratories as spaces where epistemic extraction (knowledge production) and ontological experimentation (redefining material-human relations) converge to challenge extraction-based paradigms in architecture. Design/methodology/approach – Through critical historical analysis and contemporary case studies, from Frederick Kiesler's mid-20th-century Design Correlation Laboratory to François Roche's New Territories practice, this article traces how laboratories have alternately perpetuated and disrupted architecture's abstracted relationship with matter. The research synthesizes new materialist theory (Jane Bennett's vibrant matter), planetary design pedagogy (Diana Agrest's nature-culture entanglement) and laboratory studies (Bruno Latour) in order to theorize hybrid laboratory practices that resist reductionist material epistemologies. Findings – This article identifies a crucial distinction between extractive laboratories (which isolate material properties for universal application) and laboratories of entanglement (which activate situated, collaborative material relations). It demonstrates that architectural laboratories can operate as hybrid practices by acknowledging distributed agency across human and nonhuman actors, embracing speculative methodologies that value material unpredictability, developing representational innovations that make material agencies visible and generating project-specific codes more than applying universal standards. Historical and contemporary examples reveal how laboratories enable architects to design with. Originality/value – Design and laboratory studies into a coherent framework for architectural practice; historically, it offers an alternative genealogy of architectural laboratories focused on material collaboration; practically, it articulates “laboratories of entanglement” as a specific model for hybrid practice that transgresses theory/practice, human/nonhuman and extraction/collaboration binaries. The concept of laboratories as sites of both epistemic extraction and ontological experimentation provides a novel lens for understanding how architectural knowledge production can resist reductionism while remaining materially grounded.