Interactive Architecture - Overview

Overview

The convergence of embedded computation and kinetics in architectural form with the intention to involve human and environmental responses creates an architecture that could be termed interactive or responsive, but can also be cybernetic. As Usman Haque puts it, such systems must utilize a definition of interaction as circular, or they are merely “reacting” and not “interacting”.

An interactive system is a “multiple-loop” system in which one enters into a “conversation”: a continual and constructive information exchange. As people interact with architecture, they should not be thought of as “users” but instead as “participants”. Marcos Novak uses the term transactive intelligence, to define architectural intelligence that not only interacts, but that transacts and transforms both the user and itself. If architecture is to continue to respond to the affordances of technological innovation that surround it as a profession, then we may no longer ask “What is that building?”, or “How was it made?”, but rather, “What does that building do?”