Interactive Architecture - Theory

Theory

Interactive Architecture begins with an overview of the theoretical work of a number of people working in cybernetics in the early 1960s who laid much of the groundwork in interactive architecture. These ideas were picked up at the time by a few architects who solidly translated them into the arena of architecture; although the computational means were not quite evolved to the extent that proliferation of these ideas could really take a strong foothold.

The computational world did begin to evolve quite rapidly however, tangentially skirting the field of architecture in a much more pragmatic and market-driven fashion. Cultural and corporate interests played major roles in influencing interactive architecture through the development of numerous market-driven products and systems that directly involved users in the real world. In the 1990s, interactive architecture began to take a foothold as ideas began to be both technologically and economically feasible. It was also at this time that the long history of kinetics in architecture began to be reexamined under the premise that performance could be optimized if it could use computational information and processing to control physical adaption in new ways to respond to contemporary culture.

More recent developments have begun to signal a shift from a mechanical paradigm of adaptation to a biological paradigm. The prevalence of the organic paradigm is beginning to alter the conceptual model that is applied in order to comprehend the environment and, consequently, design in the environment. Organic theory emerges from nature, and possesses evolutionary patterns that produce forms of growth and strategies of behavior, optimizing each particular pattern to the contextual situation. Consequently, the organic paradigm of kinetic adaptation has driven a profound set of developments in materials, autonomous robotics, biomimetics and evolutionary systems whereby the adaptation becomes much more holistic, and operates on a very small scale.

Finally an account of the development of the use of responsive systems and their history in respect to recent architectural theory can be found in Tristan d'Estree Sterk's recent opening keynote address (ACADIA 2009) entitled "Thoughts for Gen X— Speculating about the Rise of Continuous Measurement in Architecture"