Edited by Behnaz Farahi and Neil Leach
242 pages, paperback, $54
Published by Birkhauser Verlag
birkhauser.com

Interactive Design: Towards a Responsive Environment is a comprehensive overview covering the field of interactive architecture—buildings and structures that adapt and change in real time in response to their users’ actions and behaviors. The book looks at interactive architecture’s history and practice, the immense theoretical field of the subject—much was written and said before the technology enabling it was practicable—as well as speculating on what the future holds and what the ethical issues might be when you’re building a space that is effectively constantly observing its human users.

It’s a meaty subject and a meaty book, but it’s made digestible by its division into four sections, each composed of theoretical articles and illustrative projects. A preceding introductory essay, “A Brief History of Interactive Architecture,” is an ideal starting point for the novice, situating interactive architecture’s origins in cybernetics—the study of communication and control in animals and machines that emerged in the years after WWII—and later in the work of conceptual avant-gardists such as British architectural group Archigram, whose hypothetical projects included Walking City, a modular city on legs that could move to different locations.

Via its thoughtful segmentation into historical chronology; emerging models from wearables to architectural spaces; new interactive materials, such as shape-changing or programmable; and a final part positing a multidisciplinary approach as the way forward and what the challenges might be, Interactive Design: Towards a Responsive Environment offers an ideal primer for a broad audience, from curious beginners and students to seasoned professionals. —Yolanda Zappaterra ca