Computational technologies have had an ambivalent relationship with architecture. The post war architectural avant-garde saw in the changing information environment new possibilities for the design of physical spaces. Works like the House of the Future (Smithsons 1956), Cybernetic Factory (Beer, 1963), Walking City (Archigram, 1964), IBM Pavilion at the New York Expo (Saarinen and Eameses, 1964), US Pavilion at the Montreal Expo (Fuller and Eameses, 1967) optimistically looked to technology to provide solutions for environments that responded to pressing social needs. Whether it was health, security, economic productivity, education or self-enlightenment, emerging communication technologies including computing suggested flexible and mutable environments that could directly respond to inhabitant needs. Cedric Price’s 1978 Generator project may be a culmination in this trajectory as the post 1968 architectural avant-garde took a more critical position on the role of technology in the design of the built environment. This may have to do with the failure of Cybernetics and its successor Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver benign sentient systems, their ultimate collusion in the machinations of the cold war and the sinister implication of pervasive technologies as depicted in Orwell’s impending 1984. In response, architects began to question their complicity in perpetuating these power structures and the controls on personal liberty they imposed on the built environment. Surveillance and other such invisible technologies became targets of critical inquiry.

In the current reunion of architecture and digital technologies the specter of surveillance systems continues to have relevancy. If we frame the notion of architectural responsiveness solely in the positive light of “smart” systems, whether for sustainable environmental controls or user conveniences we would be turning the clock backwards. The ultimate goal of such systems is optimization which traps us in a perpetual cycle of creating evermore sophisticated and multipurpose technologies with momentary consumer satisfaction. At the same time if responsiveness is understood as “intelligent” systems our goal may ultimately be narcissistic. The trap here is to model response on ourselves, ceding too little to the emerging possibilities offered by networked technologies. If responsiveness is understood as an evolving relationship between humans and technologies it makes sense that the mantra of pervasive technologies fulfill itself in the places we spend most of our time and that the design of space and data happen concurrently. This would suggest a more participatory and critical position from technology, where its role becomes a means to reflect rather than solve our problems.

The history of technical development is ripe with examples of new and improved processes replacing established ones. Telegraphs replaced letters, telephones replaced telegraphs, and VoIP is in the process of replacing the land-line telephone. Of course such replacements are never direct one to one operations and many facets of an established technology are lost forever with the transition to a new one. Nonetheless, the mantra of technical change stipulates that new technologies are preferable to old. This does not hold for architecture understood beyond its instrumentation as shelter. The question of 'optimality' is not a given, the context of technical instrumentation is unclear. The unquestioned logic of the most advanced form of technology as the best technology no longer holds where architecture integrates responsive into itself. But if the best is not the best, then how could architecture embrace the digital? And which kinds of media technologies mix best with which types/topologies of architecture?