Digitalization and interdisciplinary design process in 21st century architecture offices: Transforming practices and future perspectives

This study analyzes the impact of digitalization and interdisciplinary design approaches on production processes in architectural offices in the 21st century, exploring the implications of this transformation on institutional structure, actor representation and collaboration models, particularly in relation to theory and practice. Architectural offices are considered dynamic spaces where digital technologies, beyond being mere technical tools are also positioned as structural components that transform production culture, while interdisciplinarity is inherently organized within operational practices. The research is based on the content analysis of 45 articles published between 2005 and 2025 and on the comparative evaluation of BIG, MVRDV and Herzog & de Meuron from Europe and Tabanlıoğlu, GAD, and Erginoğlu & Çalışlar from Türkiye. In the content analysis, themes were systematically coded through frequency and co-occurrence relationships, resulting in a conceptual structure concentrated around participatory design, interdisciplinary teamwork and the ecology framework. This structure made visible how production tools such as BIM integration, digital twins, AI-based workflows and parametric modeling are positioned across both computational and organizational dimensions. The findings reveal that in European offices, digital tools are integrated into institutionalized computational cycles from the early stages of design, whereas in the Türkiye examples, these tools diversify more flexibly in relation to local context, multi- actor negotiation and project-based strategies. The study demonstrates that the digitalizing production culture reshapes design processes from linear sequences into data-driven, multilayered and iterative structures. This framework suggests that, for the future of architectural practice, data-driven participation models and the integration of computational–interdisciplinary processes into the early stages of design are becoming increasingly central design approaches.

Keywords: Architecture Offices, digitalization, interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary design processes.